A Summer Goal: Efficiency

Hello again from Pennsylvania! The topic I’d like to talk about this week is how I’ve worked on improving my efficiency throughout the summer. A large part of this improvement has been in how I read the weekly papers that we discuss as a group. The changes that I’ve found to be most useful include reading the abstract multiple times to develop a sense of the paper’s structure, reading the conclusion of the paper once immediately after reading the abstract, and allowing myself to skip through parts that are heavy in details that are not necessary to read to understand the main points (I find this to be especially prevalent in the methods section). These three changes have dramatically improved how quickly I can read the paper, while still allowing me to pick up the main points and appreciate details in the paper.

Another aspect of efficiency that I’ve worked on is being stricter with myself about when to double-check something. I have worked on identifying things that I do not need to double check because I have established a familiarity with the process or if no problems have ever come up with the action at hand. This has become particularly useful when we are using ARTEMIS or ARROW, as double-checking the routine things that I am very comfortable with would take an unnecessarily long time. For example, I have gotten really comfortable leveling the tower that we use for the Kestrel to collect information about weather, so once I have seen that the leveling is correct on each of the corners I do not double-check. On the flipside, I still check that the tubing is connected properly before we sample or calibrate because it would be a waste of an hour or multiple hours if the tubing was connected improperly. All of these decisions about double-checking or not double-checking may seem small, but I think that the time saved has eventually added up to make me more efficient.

Every week Deanna has us chose a process-oriented goal, and a few times I have established efficiency as my process-oriented goal for the week. Overall, I think it has been a useful thing to think about and working on improving! Thanks for reading!