I suppose so. There’s a small chance I could be a bit anaemic. I’m a vegetarian, and the onset of the tiredness thing miiiight have occurred at around the same time as I drastically reduced my consumption of (fortified-with-iron) breakfast cereal. I should go and give blood! Haven’t done so for a couple of years, and they check your iron levels when you do that.
Emily
Karma: 943
Yeah, that’s my assessment of the most likely reason, too—I just need a bit more sleep than some people do. I wish I didn’t, though! I think the tiredness levels probably aren’t bothersome enough to be worth mentioning to a doctor—I’m not really prevented from doing anything by it.
My main problem with sleep is that I can’t ever seem to get quite enough of it, the last couple of years. By this I don’t mean that I’m too busy and don’t have time to sleep: in fact I sleep quite a lot, averaging probably more than 8 hours per night. I mean that the more I sleep, the more I seem to want to sleep. As an undergrad I got along pretty happily on what I think was a much lower average at the time, and I’m sure many people sleep a lot less than I do currently. But now I can’t manage with less at all, and am often extremely dozy by mid-afternoon as it is.
I don’t think it’s that my sleep quality is bad: I fall asleep quickly (usually within 10 minutes or so of turning the light out) and don’t often wake up during the night. I don’t usually remember dreams or have a sense that my sleep was disturbed. In the mornings I have a bit of a struggle to wake up, but it’s not that bad really, and if I’m aware that there’s a fixed time I need to be up by that morning, then I can get up straight away. I just… feel tired when I do so. And during the day. And really, really tired at night.
Maybe the undergrad years were a bit of an illusion and I made up for lost sleep during terms by sleeping excessively during the holidays, or something. But I can’t shake the feeling that I should be able to get by on at least a bit less sleep than I do, and certainly shouldn’t need more sleep than I get, despite feeling tired quite a lot.
(Minor English language note: “stand up” can’t be used as a direct synonym for “get out of bed”. Try “get up” instead. Hope you don’t mind my pointing this out! Thought it might be helpful.)
I should add that I live with another person, who does his share of the chores, so this time would probably increase if I wanted the same level of clean/tidy while living alone. I’m not sure how time per person scales with changes in the number of people though… probably not linearly, but it must depend on all sorts of things like how exactly you share out the chores, what the overhead sort of times are like for doing a task once regardless of how much task there is, and how size of living space changes with respect to number of people living in it. Also, if you add actively non-useful people like babies, I expect all hell breaks loose.
On the akrasia level, I find that the harder the task seems, the more frequent “reward” hits I need for working on it. For me, these hits mainly consist of getting to cross an item off my to-do list. So if I’m really struggling with a paragraph, my to-do list can contain such fine-grained items as “Think about the structure of [paragraph x]”, and “Write a sentence explaining how RelevantAuthor (2012) is relevant here”. Even a poor effort at doing these things gets the item crossed off (though if it still needs re-doing or more work, it will of course get put on again).
I do this sort of thing by starting as broadly as possible. Assuming you already have the majority of the information you need (ie, the research phase is more or less over), you should be able to sit for 15 minutes or so and make an albeit disorganised list of broad themes that you want to include in the paper. Concentrate during this phase on making the list, not evaluating what you put on it (some things will turn out to be irrelevant, some will be duplicates or link closely with each other or spark new interesting ideas—but make an effort to ignore all this at this point).
Once you’ve got your list, you can spend some time ordering it (so that closely linked items follow each other), discarding items that turn out not to fit in, and so on. Try and stay broad at this point (though you can jot down elsewhere more detailed points that you might want to make, if they occur to you; and it’s fine to add new items that get sparked). This process should help you figure out what your “narrative arc” might be, what conclusion you’re working towards, and so on. If something seems important but confusing, it might mean you need to do more research for that section.
Now you’ve got an outline that essentially consists of chapter or section headings, and some ideas for what’s going in your introduction and conclusion. Depending on the length of the paper, you might want to do another outlining step in greater detail (listing your points in each section, but still not actually filling out the writing), or you could start writing now. I tend to work on writing the sections that seem easiest first, and then join up the more difficult bits afterwards.
Inevitably, it turns out during this phase that some of the links are weak or disjointed, some of the arguments I originally intended to make are poor, and the conclusion I thought I was heading for is actually not quite where I end up going. So lots of adjustments to the outline take place and the whole thing needs a good rejig at the end. But editing is straightforward enough when you have an already extant text to work on!
That’s the sort of process that works (usually, well enough) for me: I’m sure others do it completely differently. Maybe you can pick out some stuff that seems useful in there, though.
My timelog tells me that over the last ~7 weeks I’ve spent an average of 22 mins/day doing things with the tag “chores”. That time period does include a two week holiday during which I spent a lot less time than usual on that stuff, so it’s probably an underestimate. Agree with Nornagest below about the importance of small everyday habits! (Personally I am good at some of these, terrible at others.)
Laundry (plus ironing, if you have clothes that require that—I try not to), washing up (I think this is called doing the dishes in America), mopping, hoovering (vacuuming), dusting, cleaning bathroom and kitchen surfaces, cleaning toilets, cleaning windows and mirrors. That might cover the obvious ones? Seems like most of them don’t involve much learning but do take a bit of getting round to, if you’re anything like me.
Could I suggest posting a link to the survey in Discussion as well? I hardly ever check Main any more, and I don’t think I’m the only one.
Always an annoying thing about radio-buttons on scrolling pages. I adjusted to clicking on the background in such situations a long time ago (for the most part), but it still really annoys me.
I did the survey! I don’t have sufficiently convenient access to a photocopier or scanner to be induced to do the digit ratio thing though.
I’ve noticed this too. I feel vaguely uncomfortable going in there and try to avoid walking past the homeopathy etc aisles for no reason that really makes sense. (Not a very common occurrence, but sometimes they do have that one specific thing I’m looking for!)
Note that although Strunk and White might have some reasonable advice on some topics, many of their recommendations are linguistically ignorant, just plain nonsensical, or violated all the time by excellent writers (including the authors themselves, sometimes on the same page they offer the advice). Here is a well-informed, highly negative review.
I very much agree with your advice about acting as a beta reader. It’s really helpful for both parties and gets you lots of brownie points too!
Could be a good addition! I don’t really know what the purpose of these questions is other than vague general interest… is there some hypothesis like “people who think there will be a Singularity soon are more active/healthier than people who think it will be less soon / never”??
I like the calibration check idea, and it’s a fair point about intensity. The last survey I took that included this kind of question asked about “moderate exercise (eg brisk walking)” and “intense exercise”, or some similar wording, which I thought was a reasonable split. These might all be details we don’t care about though.
For the first one, it might be better to ask how many hours / minutes rather than how many times. Otherwise somebody’s 10-minute cycle to work is counted with as much weight as somebody else’s 2 hours in the gym.
Depends where. 3-4 years is standard in the UK, for example.
I don’t even need an incentive! I love overhangs indoors and I’m way better at them than slabs/vertical stuff. But most steep stuff outdoors seems to be well beyond the grades I might attempt to lead, at least round here. One day I’ll be good enough… maybe… :)
I should give blood anyway, though. If I get round to doing that and it turns out I’m not anaemic, I suppose I’d consider investigating a bit further. Seems to me I’ve got a much better chance of checking that one thing by doing that than by going to my doctor and whining “So, sometimes I feel a bit tired...” (Like every other grad student / adult human on the planet, right?)
(It’s possible that this is a difference between the UK, where I am, and America. As far as I’m aware, it’s not a thing to go to the doctor and request various tests, here. Doctors run tests iff they think they’re warranted. I gather from things that I’ve noticed Americans say that you can ask for particular things to be done, over there? But I suppose you then have to pay for it.)