Work harder!

I support the principle of hospitals being fully functional 7 days a week:  

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9146044/Hospitals-should-operate-seven-days-a-week-NHS-top-doctor.html

However, it will be interesting to see what (if any) financial compensation is offered to staff for this, given that it is not what the majority of NHS staff thought they were signing up to when they were considering their career options at age 17.  I imagine, as usual, clinical staff will roll over and have their bellies tickled without putting up much in the way of negotiation.

I have no doubt that the various tiers of NHS management staff will not be asked to work on weekends.  It will also be interesting to review the working patterns of those in the establishment who are advocating such a change to working patterns - will they be coming in to their offices on weekends too?  

Climbing back up the curve

I am busy. VERY busy.  A combination of assignments to write, a career to develop, clinical and managerial duties to fulfil, deadlines to meet, and various fantastic events in my personal life have all coalesced into one big "to-do" list.  Normally I work well under pressure (in fact sometimes that is the only way I can work), but I am concerned that at the moment I am drifting:

The Yerkes-Dodson curve

The graph above summarises my predicament very accurately.  If given a single project, I can leave it until the last possible minute and then work really intensely to produce something which is not only satisfactory but often of very high quality.  This seems to be because I need the "arousal" induced by an impending deadline in order to perform at my best.  This is clearly a result of self-conditioning over the last 20 years.  

The problem arises when I am confronted with many such deadlines (or one deadline for a very complex project) at the same time - my arousal level increases but I can't continue to increase my performance.  What then happens is I end up procrastinating and not actually getting any work done.  

How do I climb back up the curve?

I have several (4 to be precise) assignments, all due in ASAP.  3 of them are already very late.  The only way I can manage is to be confronted by a series of micro-deadlines, each of which massively increases my stress/arousal and gives me just enough of a performance boost to get each project done.  I therefore propose a series of micro-deadlines this week, beginning tonight:

Essay 1 to be completed before I sleep tonight (Monday).

Essay 2 to be started on Tuesday night (late as I have a full day of more interesting things planned tomorrow which is likely to involve at least half a bottle of wine) and completed by Thursday night. 

Essay 3 to be started on Friday morning and then put on hold on Friday evening, with a view to resuming on Sunday night to complete it (I will not let it get in the way of existing weekend plans to see family/friends).

Essay 4 (the BIG and final one) to be commenced on 4.4.11 and completed by 10.4.11 at the latest.

Then I'll be able to enjoy my 2 week holiday, and buy an iPad 2 when I get back as my reward.

August already?

This year is flying by.  Fortunately it's been action-packed, with loads of cool holidays, a near-death mystery illness and an upcoming promotion (with some more travelling in between hopefully).  I still have an immense amount of work/assignments/reading to do in my 'personal' time, but most of it is self-inflicted with a view to improving my chances of getting a decent job at the end of my training.

No more major holidays, so better knuckle down for a few weeks and try and sort my career/life out.  Can't help looking lovingly at the PS3 in the next room though - not good news for someone with an addictive personality....

http://www.neoseeker.com/news/6555-gaming-can-kill-you/

As always, I'll attempt to post slightly more regularly from now on if I have anything interesting to say. Unless I die after a prolonged binge on the PS3.

A New Year. The same person.

Despite it being a new year and a 'fresh start' with the usual bunch of resolutions, some things never change.  One of those things is my tendency to leave all assignments until the last possible minute.  I don't just mean the day before.  I mean taking revision notes to the door of the exam hall with me, and staying up all night every time I have an essay to hand in.  This is not healthly behaviour, but the problem is that it works consistently with good results, so like Pavlov's dog I am conditioned to this.  I am able to minimise the time spent on assignments because I "know" that by simply doing nothing until the final week before any given deadline I can pick up a piece of work and cane it until it's done.  The difficulty is balancing this with my perfectionist tendencies - I somehow end up trying to perfect a piece of work that I have only allocated 10-20% of the available time to concentrate on.  This working pattern also gets much harder as I get older as I can't routinely stay up all night on willpower alone.  Coffee somehow makes me sleepy rather than alert and caffeine supplements like Pro-Plus (do they still make that these days?) don't touch me.  Oh, and of course I now have a demanding job to go to in the morning which is slightly different to being at university when you could realistically miss 50% of all the lectures and still pass provided you knew how to revise effectively.

Anyway, now is not the time to change the working habit of a lifetime.  Despite starting this project almost a year ago (or at least beginning to think about it), I remember adding a note to my calendar at that time for the day before the deadline (which is this week): "stay up all night to finish project".  I was never really going to work consistently on this project.  Instead, I had lots of fun last year, worked really hard when necessary, and left this project until the last possible minute.  And if I pass, I'll do everything exactly the same next time.

Still got it

Nice to know I can still pull an all-nighter out of the bag when I need to.  I've been awake for about 40 hours now, having stayed up all night to finish an essay.  I handed it in this morning, then completed a full day at work, then got home and worked on my research project.  And then I caned the computer at chess on the hardest difficulty level:

GAMES
(caution - don't click this link unless you want to waste the next hour of your life)

I think I've managed to push on through the sleep barrier now so will probably be up for a few more hours. Better get on with some more work.  One project down, two more to go....