Needing accountability

I've been pretty disappointed in myself with regards to productivity lately. I've got a lot of cool stuff going on, but when it comes to sitting down and reading or writing I have a lot of trouble. Part of it is that it is just generally difficult to balance reading/writing with labwork and running a lab (which is a different lab from the one I'm actually doing labwork in!) and doing other parts of my job like keeping up with IACUC protocols and research permits. Another part of it is that I'm used to doing this kind of stuff at home - I wrote my entire dissertation in my bedroom. But I really don't want to bring stuff home to do in the evenings, and I have tried it and failed anyway. My office isn't really a comfy place to sit and think, or maybe I'm just not used to it yet. And finally, my main problem is that I'm a lazy procrastinator.

Some of the academic bloggers I read (like Lisa) use their blogs as a way to motivate themselves by reporting what they work on and how much work they do. I think we're all trying to find ways to do that; I recently signed up for Twitter on Trillwing's recommendation. StyleyGeek has also proposed InaDWriMo, the academic's answer to NaNoWriMo, and I plan to participate.

So, today I am setting up a section in the sidebar that will track my writing progress. [I thought about tracking my labwork over there too (for this), but really it's not hard to motivate myself to do labwork. Especially since I ran my first microsatellite plate for this project last week and, despite numerous problems at the extraction and PCR stages, it WORKED! Pretty pretty data. Very exciting.] Anyway, feel free to ignore it, or join in, or to throw some moral support my way. I've got to figure out SOME way to get my shit together.