Despite my countless attempts bringing order into my life, I've only ended up with more chaos.The only solution is to maintain some amount of continuity to the work that I pursue and try to bring any project to completion, small or large. At this stage in my journey, I don't know if it matters anymore whether this is building up to something significant. I just want to get sh** done.
Life is a stochastic gradient descent
Each experience/attempt will bring some intuition into the next steps. Some steps leading closer to the overall goal (yet to be defined), while others will be completely wrong. In this process, the only way for me garner some recognition, from myself and others, is to realize a well-defined, structurally complete, deliverable. In academia, the main currency is publications (in journals or conference proceedings), so this would be the obvious first choice. Others could include tech reports, posters, code repositories, or even blog posts. I don't think the chaos will ever change, but perhaps by the end of my PhD I will have become very efficient at this "infinite loop" of background research, problem formulation, solution development, and final documentation.
Live today like it's your last
I'm adopting a new mantra: Live today like it's your last. If I were to die today, very suddenly and without warning, I want to have no doubt when I face God. I want to be able to say that I lived to the fullest that I was capable (without going insane) and that I left my mark. I want to die knowing that someone can trace my steps and pick up wherever I leave off. It may seem contradictory to what I've been saying up until now, but it requires continuous tracking of progress and good organization. It'll take some time to implement all the things I have in mind, but hopefully I won't die before then * knocks on wood *
One of the first things I will implement is making an online entry on this blog post more often. No matter how short or long, I will try to make a post at least once a week. There may be some subconscious filtering given that this entire blog will be public, but it should give a clue as to what the hell I'm thinking and feeling.
Next, something more difficult to implement, will be a log of whatever work I did that day and for which project. Habits are everything and having a record will not only provide me more direction as well as self-regulation, but will help soothe this debilitating feeling of incompetance. I can't help feeling that I'm wasting a lot of time with nothing coming from it. At least if I have this record, it will seem like I did something.
Finally, continuing on about habits, I need a habit of organizing thoughts as I go along. I have a tendency to open hundreds of tabs in the search of answers to a specific question and then I just leave them open as I never have time to look back on them. I should record all of these, first as an Evernote note or some markdown document (if I'm planning to share it anytime soon), second as a collection of notes within a Evernote notebook (if various things seem to come together as a specific problem formulation), and finally within an actual LaTeX document (with a subsequent repo) if it's a project that I'm committing a significant amount of time and effort. This way I have a collection of ideas at various stages of development.
Every endeavor has to have a publication
I've already touched on this above, but whatever I pursue, short-term or long-term, MUST result in a publication.
It could just be an abstract at some bogus conference or a full-blown journal publication, but it must be publicly recognizable.
Well then, I'm off to live another day..