The Plan: month 9

I'm taking a break from The Plan while I'm out of town, but I'll be back tomorrow and I want to be prepared to get back into the swing of things right away.

Even though I've struggled a bit along the way, I'm looking forward to being able to do a summary of the whole year at the end of the month, so I can see how much progress I've made.

1. Health



There was a big jump in how often I went to bed before midnight. Unfortunately, most of those nights were concentrated at the start of the month. I did feel a lot better when I got more sleep, so I'm going to try to do that more. It makes it a lot easier to get going on work when I start earlier, too. Supposedly, I ate real dinners most of the time, but I think my standards are a bit too low. I'm still snacking far too much, so I think this needs to be the focus of this month's Plan. I was thinking of making it a rule that I have to eat 5 servings of fruit and vegetables a day, but now I'm wondering if I'll just eat that on top of all the junk. I wanted it to be a positive goal, rather than saying no snacks, but maybe I'll follow a friend's suggestion and make it that I have to eat 4 servings plus another one for every snack I eat.

I kept my room tidy for half the month, but then once I let it lapse into squalor, it's easy to just let it stay that way. I cleaned it up before I left so that I wouldn't come back to a horrible mess, so now I'll try to keep it that way for the month.


2. Lab



There were a few nights when I wasn't sure I was going to get enough work done by 10pm, but I made it, even if just barely. I'm going to continue that. I still feel very slack for only doing 3.5 hours of work a day, but it will do for now. Since there are only 27 days left of December, and I want to start afresh in the new year, I'm going to award a bonus star if I do another 3.5 hours in a day and try to get to 30 that way.

* stage 1: finish optimising the assay conditions, repeat the big set of experiments, analyse
Done! Kind of... One round, at least. Now I have to figure out whether this is enough, or if I need to do another one.

* stage 2: make/find the new reagents I need, use them
It would help if I actually looked at this list during the month...

* stage 3: in vivo stuff.
I should have started last month, but it looked like someone else using a different method would get the same result, so I didn't bother. Theirs didn't work, though, so now I really have to do it.

3. Social

I only have 2 weeks left of group therapy and I'm not sure it's made much difference. I think I've taken advantage of the group setting to avoid attention being focussed on me, which is kind of a pity, although I would've hated attention, too. I guess I need to find some other way of working on that...

The book club is still going for now and it might continue even after one member leaves, via conference call, but that sounds scary.

This part doesn't seem to have an actual plan. How about, I will talk to a housemate every day, even if it's just to say hi.