Structure

One of the biggest take-aways from Paul Silvia's "How To Write A Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing" is that you HAVE to make a schedule for when you're going to do your research writing.  I actually found it helpful that he's aiming at PhD students and professors, because besides writing-up their research, they have a lot of other responsibilities like teaching, administration stuff, grading homework, etc. and research might get pushed to the side by the rest of these things.  It's akin to my situation working full-time, so his advice to JUST MAKE TIME FOR YOUR WORK - you make time every Thursday night to watch a half-hour of Donnybrook - hit home.

And, I have good news: now that I'm making time - an hour after I get off work everyday, getting up early on the weekend - I'm actually getting stuff done (see the recent blog posts!).

Another principle from the book is goal-setting: identifying project goals, as well as the daily steps to implementing them.  I haven't really been doing that.  Therefore, here goes:

My current project goal is to find a method of arranging data so that the Neural Network can find a really-tight function approximation for the data.

Daily goals:
TODAY: I need visualizations of the following:
* Particle Cloud Poses + AMCL Pose + Gazebo Pose + Mean X/MeanY/MeanTheta Pose
* Revisit the mean/stdev dataset and somehow see if you can tell if there's a function to find there.


Another method from the book is keeping track of your productivity by making a spreadsheet tracking date and words written (lines of code, etc.)  Then, using it like a fitness tracker - Are you on track for this week? Can you beat last week's goal?, etc.  Might be good to implement.