A major step forward in getting loose on the roads came for me this week as I passed my Mod 1 motorcycle test on Thursday of this week. I now have the Module 2 to look forward to in December, and only 3 weeks until my car practical. Prepping for the test took most of my time from Tuesday to Thursday, so I ended up losing a lot of desk time. I’ve had plenty to catch up on, but I was exhausted enough to zone out for an hour nap today. Ah well, getting through.

In terms of my university work, I’m still very much on top of the upcoming courseworks. After two years having to do things for money (or work as its commonly known) juggling priorities and keeping things on track is remarkably nice when everything is so clearly labelled. At least in the work I was doing, there’s no marker that tells you x is worth y%, and is due on this date. For that, I am endlessly grateful to the gamification of modern university education. It’s working quite well with my brain at the moment.

Getting through the motorbike test put me in mind of the fact that with most examination there’s a lot of luck involved. You need to get yourself to the point where you are in the position to pass, but after that it’s all in the performance on the day.

Precrastination

One of the pieces we were encouraged to read on the course was this great essay on how to get things done when you don’t feel like it by Kate Matsudaira.1 With the course on the whole I’m trying to master my precrastination, e.g., doing a coursework due in a month to avoid working on the slightly more difficult one that’s due in three weeks. It’s essentially working on something interesting or something else that needs to be done before you get to whatever else you need to do. Its playing well into my strategy for keeping on top of everything while staying interested.

For example, another thing I like to do in that space is draw up my ToDo list for the week, with handy checkboxes for everything in each course. Something else I did this week was create a script that automated downloading a project from Overleaf using Selenium, unzipping the contents to a destination folder, before adding and committing the changes to a git repo. None of that was particularly needed or necessary, but it was an interesting, and brief, side project that kept me motivated and pushed my skills in a small measurable way. I’ll publish the code and write a small blog on it soon.

Reading List

  1. Matsudaira also talks about gamifying your progress, which fits well with the work of Universities to gamify our progress as students. I would be interested to know if there are any studies on the effects of clear marking strategies for learning. It seems to me that people make better progress when they can understand the reasoning behind decisions, and well published criteria should help with that. ↩