Be kind to your future self

Before I go to bed, whilst I am winding down, I like to potter around the house laying out my clothes and preparing my lunch for the next day. I’ll even fill the kettle and put my coffee and sugar ready in my mug so I can enjoy my morning brew with minimal effort. (As is probably obvious, I am not what you’d call a morning person.)

I mentally refer to this behaviour as being kind to my future self. This can apply equally to all areas of life: saving money for a rainy day, or exercising and eating healthily to help stave off illness in later life. Also, it has its place in the PhD, in record keeping in particular.

The literature review is a notorious part of the PhD process. It is a challenge in that it must cover the all the relevant literature on your topic, and has to be critical yet succinct. Over the course of a PhD we must wade through a multitude of papers, and only some will end up being vaguely related to our topic. (Based on discovering only one paper every working day over four years, that’s around a thousand papers!* I daren’t calculate the impact of a citation alert email that delivers around 50 abstracts of the latest literature every week.)

So, papers are easy to come by. But finding that paper is difficult. Trying to dig back through the literature is a nightmare, requiring a good memory of the paper, the Goldilocks combination of keywords – not too broad, not to narrow, but just right – and an alignment of the planets. Regardless of how tangentially related a paper is, if there is potential for a future connection, it now gets saved. Software such as Mendeley makes saving and searching a large volume of papers simple, so there is no excuse.

Similarly, keeping a log of your work is at the core of a PhD. A lab book holds the sum of our efforts: the settings, the ideas, the results, the failures. For something so essential, though, keeping a good record of work can be difficult. It’s easy to be caught out by ignoring what seemed like a pointless detail only for it to become an essential parameter later on.

With my new lab book, I have a new goal: write everything down. This means not only what I  am doing, but also a line explaining the motivation if it isn’t obvious. Also, those stray thoughts need to be tamed and committed to paper, otherwise they’ll be forgotten. The added advantage is that this also provides a nice way to look at what has been achieved at the end of the week.

This consideration is an investment, where a moment’s worth of effort now will save a lot of time and panic later on. When I cannot be bothered, (tomorrow, I think, I’ll write it up tomorrow,) I think of how my decision will affect my future self.  I imagine futilely searching the literature, or trying to remember long-faded details of an old experiment. I spent Friday afternoon looking for a paper that I know I read somewhere, and ruing the thoughtlessness of my past self.

_{* Based on working five days a week, every week. When I first wrote this, I forgot that we get holidays… I’m sure that says something so I’ll leave it like this.}

Originally posted here.

Image from Morguefile.