I choose: All.

Ten days after my anxious last post, and I’m still feeling good. In fact, I think I’m feeling even better.

I feel this great because I’m still in the positive feedback cycle of awesomeness! I was even forced out of it for a few days – as I was skilled enough to re-sprain my ankle – and happily climbed back in my hamster wheel once my physiotherapist-determined healing time had passed.

Things I have learned in the last ten days:

-Don’t clean the shower from within the shower. You will re-injure your injuries.

-Working hard on weekends feels amazing; is worth it

-Working hard all the time feels even better

-The recumbent bike feels like a cop out work out.

Well, those are the hamster-wheel-related things I’ve learned. The middle two points refer to a major success that came together just this past weekend. Nearly two weeks ago now, I had a really motivating Skype date with my supervisor, after which I recovered from here. We decided during that meeting that I would create a shortish (~6 pages) thesis outline containing all the meat – i.e. my data results and discussion points for each of my chapters. At the time, I said something along the lines of ‘will have it done in a matter of days’, which wasn’t what happened exactly. One week passed and I had only started working on the Intro Chapter by that point, so I decided to determine a deadline.

Now, I give myself deadlines all the time but then I let time fly by and deal with feeling guilty after. This time, I decided to experiment by telling my supervisor that I was going to send her my outline by Sunday. Now that lit a fire under my butt. And it worked really well.

Today I feel great. I achieved this (albeit, second attempt) deadline and worked hard at it. I hadn’t worked quite so hard on a weekend for a while and it actually felt really good, when usually the thought of doing so leads to feeling overwhelmed. What’s better is that a sizeable chunk of the time I spent sitting in my wee office was devoted to my data/graphs – I actually furthered my analysis of some data. I wasn’t just passively writing it up. Scientific [good] times had by all!

Anyway, the purpose of this tale is to say: I tried something new, a little more ridged, and it worked. Well! Now I sit here and wait for her read through and response…and by sit here I mean continue to work hard so that I can continue this positive feedback cycle. I’ll let myself do some fun tasks for today as a reward, though. Teaching Dossier here I come!