Take things one at a time

"It is more effective to take things one at a time, rather than take life one day at a time. Don't you have any ambition?"

It seemed like my lunch with BB yesterday had some good effects on me. It brought me back to perspective on my research a lot better than used to be. Just like today, I finished my draft for the material lecture for beginning of the term the week after next, and then I wasted a bit of time surfing the web randomly and playing games, etc, but as I took out JR, my former student dissertation and have a read again, I begin to see what I am supposed to do. I re-read the email JR replied to me last week about my question to him regarding some points about his dissertation. I look at his reply two or three times and I get an idea about the main idea he is getting at and immediately I started to locate areas in his dissertation I can consolidate to put together and make it into a academic article.

Therefore, most of my afternoon I was looking at the German DAX Index, the data that JR used for his dissertation. I am seeing new perspective coming from his dissertation. I think this is the second time since the beginning of the year, I had some productive time spent on doing research. This also reminded me I am going to have a meeting with LL on Monday, so I must get something prepared too. Perhaps tomorrow I will prepare a spreadsheet demonstrating how my model, as showed in my published paper, worked.

Things seem to take shape slowly on the research front. Sticking to the principle that I sometimes told myself to do, i.e., taking things one at a time, it seemed not to let me down or disappoint me and it works well on the few things on research that are going on at the moment for me. More importantly, I am enjoying it as I DO see the purpose of doing them. I am feeling upbeat about it because I strongly sense that things are going up for me on research :D