Three Keys
It’s that time of year when you suddenly realize that any goals, plans, or New Year’s Resolutions you have for 2019 already seem like a bad idea. I certainly have.
I’ve been sick, I’m in the midst of a significant professional transition, and I still can’t even find the notebook where in December 2018 I wrote down all the wonderful things I hoped to make happen in 2019. I only remember off the top of my head two goals: (1) eat more nutritious food daily and (2) practice my scientific discovery skills daily. The food goal has been easier to do. In fact, at least I’ve started on it! But the discovery goal has only seen me spend two dedicated hours since 2019 started practicing my ability to invent new theoretical equations.
Why are some goals and habits so much easier to follow through on? In particular for The Insightful Scientist why are some habits, like making progress on a big discovery goal, so hard to practice? I think that some of the same basic things that hold us back from finishing fitness, diet, hobby, money or other personal goals also plague our ability to act on discovery goals. So let’s talk about ways to fix our discovery habits and make 2019 a better discovery year.
3 Keys to Good Discovery Resolutions
You’ve probably heard these suggestions before, but let me remind you of three things that you should have in place to increase the chances that you’ll follow through on a goal.
In this case, I’m going to use my own attempts over the last three months to come up with a 30-day discovery skills mini-workout for myself as an example. I always remind myself of best practices to develop new habits (and make room for them in my mind and life) by reading a post from Leo Babauta’s wonderful Zen Habits site (I’ve been a fan since 2010). I’ll condense lots of Leo’s advice into a list of three keys for successful goals and habits:
- Have a well-defined goal, so you know when you’ve succeeded.
- Have a clear picture of concrete actions to take to achieve the goal, so you’ll act.
- Have a way to monitor your progress towards your goal, so you’ll adapt and stick with it.
Let me break this general advice down and translate it into my specific example to give you one idea of how you might make these keys work for you and your scientific discovery goals.
1. Define Your Goal
Original Poorly Defined Goal:
Spend 30 days of daily practice focused on improving my scientific discovery skill set.
That was the original goal statement I had in mind in January. Is it “well-defined”? No.
You can tell if your goal definition is well-defined by how long it takes you to try doing your first day on a program, once you’ve fully committed to starting it as soon as possible. For me it took me 19 days (I use a Bullet Journal to loosely track events, so that’s how I know) before I sat down and tried it. That’s a nineteen-day delay after I said, “I’ll absolutely, whole-heartedly start this tomorrow”.
As a general guideline, I have since set seven days as the maximum time from firmly committing to start now and actually starting. If it takes me longer than that, odds are good I don’t have a clear enough goal in mind, so I procrastinate.
For this example, I was looking for a discovery skill set goal, not a discovery project goal. At the end of this post, I’ll come back and briefly talk about applying this idea to a topic-specific scientific discovery research project. But for now, we’re talking about skills.
To come up with a better goal and hit the refresh button on starting my program, I did a few things. I freed up space. Literally. I did a Getting Things Done mind sweep and emptied one room in my house of major distractions (pictures, books, papers, decorative objects). Then I spent time in my de-cluttered space and asked myself the same question over and over again: what exactly do I hope to be able to do at the end of my 30-day discovery skills project that I cannot do right now?
For me, as a theoretical physicist, a key skill is to be able to generate an equation that represents a new physical idea. In fact, generating equations is a key part of scientific discovery for many scientists. So, that’s the skill I wanted to focus on first. After two weeks of concentrated thinking, I came up with a working solution: A daily practice I call “creative math”. I can hear mathematicians groaning already, but physicists are notoriously more irreverent toward math—we’ll happily build the Lego equivalent of a Bugatti so long as it mostly gets the job done.
So, let me re-define my goal now using creative math.
Final Well-Defined Goal:
Over a 30-day period engage in at least 30 creative math sessions total, lasting no less than 20 minutes and no more than 1 hour each, with a minimum of 1 practice session a day, excluding Sundays.
Now we’re clearer. I could make a simple tracker (maybe something Bullet Journal style, or using a phone app like Loop Habit Tracker or Habit Bull, or even use a simple mark on a calendar) and just check off as I succeed at completing each session. And I can (and have) put two timers on my phone, one labelled “CMath 20” the other “CMath 60” to keep me on track during sessions (kitchen timers, Time timers, and Pomodoro apps have also worked well for me).
That’s one key in place to jump start my discovery skills program. Two to go. So what do I mean by “creative math” anyway?
2. Define Concrete Actions
Original Poorly Planned Actions:
Spend at least 1 hour of butt-in-chair time practicing a discovery skill.
First, I should explain my quirky phrase “butt-in-chair time”.
I use this to specify what I mean by having actually tried on intellectual tasks. For fitness goals, defining “try” and “effort” is easier: do so many reps, walk or run so far, lift a certain amount of weight, etc. But how do we define a good level of try for intellectual tasks? I define butt-in-chair time as the hours or minutes spent actively hand writing or typing up material directly relevant to producing the task outcome. If you do more work standing up (whiteboard, or machine shop bench anyone?) then you might think of another phrase (Hand-on-board time? Powered-up-tool time?).
These sessions don’t have to be continuous, but the minutes have to add up to the target total. If I just sit there thinking, having an internal conversation, checking email, WhatsApp or whatever, that time doesn’t count. But if I’m writing in a notebook at a coffee shop (like right now), at my desk, on the tram, seated at a bus stop, on an airplane…you get the idea. All of that time counts. The total estimate won’t be perfect, but it does make me more honest about “Did I actually try? Or did I just pretend to try?”
From the newly defined goal, I’ve set the activity for this butt-in-chair time as “creative math.” The goal of the session is to generate an equation that represents a physical situation. Over the course of the 30 days I should be able to see improvement (or lack thereof) in my ability to invent these equations.
First, I needed to devise a layout for this creative math. I knew the final session “outputs” (the physical artifacts demonstrating that I had actually completed a session) needed to be pen-and-paper pages (these are easiest to buy everywhere and use everywhere; so no excuses for not completing a session).
Also, not doing it in a digital format (i.e., in an app or using software) helped with another aspect: I wanted to practice using internal conceptual resources, not pulling from external sources. So, no textbooks, guides, internet searches, or even my own research notes, allowed during the session. If I could learn to be competent without those tools, I could become more masterful with those tools.
This just left the overall format for my pen-and-paper pages. At the time I was learning about Mike Rohde’s “sketchnotes” system as part of my on-going research. So, I adapted his sketchnote task to my idea. A sketchnote is traditionally a one-page sheet of handwritten and drawn notes, taken down during a talk or lecture, and designed to capture just the essential points, using descriptive doodles and hand drawn fonts.
I adapted this to come up with a creative math template using a one-page style with a central box, which emphasizes that I am looking for an equation, and a doodle and fancy typeface statement outlining the physical situation I want to describe with my equation. Then I spend 20 minutes to 1 hour filling up the front side of the sheet of paper with keywords, questions, and phrases affecting the physical situation, which I then immediately put into a math form. Toward the end of my session I combine all the math forms I’ve got into one final equation which counts as my “answer”.
My only other rule is that I avoid using common notation for any of my math. I do that to avoid (1) biasing myself toward what I think the final answer “should” look like (this also slows me down and makes me more mindful of what I’m doing) and (2) cheating by using equations I already know from memory.
Before I close out this section, let me pull it all together and write down a new and improved concrete actions statement:
Final Well-Planned Actions:
Spend at least 20 minutes a day minimum, 1 hour maximum, of focused butt-in-chair time producing one page of creative math, at least six days a week. A completed creative math page includes a statement of the specific physical situation being modeled, a doodle of that situation, and a final guess at one equation that describes an aspect of the situation.
Do you see how I keep moving from a generic desire to a specific intent of when and how to act and what specifically to do? That mental transition is what you’re after before you start your own scientific discovery program.
Now we just need one more piece to have a solid plan we can start and finish: we need some way to monitor our progress.
3. Monitor Your Progress
Original Poor Tracking Idea:
Make daily practice pen-and-paper handwritten sheets and put them in a binder to get a portfolio of practice pieces.
Following on the sketchnoting theme and sticking to pen-and-paper, I initially planned to monitor my progress in a very visual and physically tangible way: I was going to make a pile of “stuff”. The bigger the pile, the more practice I had under my belt! That pile was going to be handwritten pages representing multiple attempts. Like art students who have hundreds of practice sketches tucked into a portfolio, I would have creative math pages tucked into a binder.
This was a pretty solid first thought, but it did not get at the heart of my discovery practice goal. Monitoring pages evaluates my level of consistency and the accumulation of practice hours. Good information, but not the most important thing.
The most important thing to monitor is: are the invented equations I’m coming up with getting better over time?
To answer this, I had to come up with a simple but more sophisticated way to think about the equations I was creating.
First, I broke the equations into two elements: ingredients and connections. Ingredients are math variables like mass, density, temperature, etc. Connections are math operations like subtraction, powers, derivatives, etc. I then developed a new template to go on the back side of a creative math page. On it I list and count the number of ingredients and connections in my answer. Then I look up the actual answer (in papers, sites, textbooks, etc.) and list and count its ingredients and connections. Then I check to see how much I got right! The goal is to get all ingredients listed with connections in the proper order. Only pieces I get right count in my percent correct.
This brings me back to why I use unusual notation. I did two practice sessions in January, full of enthusiasm, and in my Bullet Journal started a collection called “Creative Math Ideas”, so I would have a stockpile of physical situations to use each day during practice.
It turns out my enthusiasm was a case of running before I could walk. They were all good questions, but many of the topics I initially picked did not have easy-to-find answers (the papers were too niche, or science didn’t have a clear answer yet).
To get around this I realized I needed to start out with simpler examples where I had already seen an answer, so I knew one existed. But I didn’t want to cheat and use memory. After all, at some point, even the simplest problems were all scientific discoveries. Two hundred years ago, the vast majority of science known today hadn’t been discovered yet.
So even simple problems are good practice for discovering so long as you actually try to discover them for yourself.
By using non-standard notation and relying on personal experience rather than textbook knowledge, you can treat these problems as creative math candidates.
Final Good Tracking Idea:
Estimate at the end of every creative math session how good my invented equation is, by writing down the percentage of ingredients and connections I got right, checked against a known correct math equation for that physical situation.
And that’s the final piece in place for a solid 30-day program to improve one of my scientific discovery skills. I started it eight days ago and so far so good!
Trying the 3 Keys with a Discovery Research Project Instead of a Discovery Skills Project
You may like this idea of a discovery skills mini “boot camp” that you could do as a yearly goal or refresher. But what if you wanted to adapt it to a project rather than a skill set?
I’ve dropped some hints along the way as to how this might change. The three keys must still be met. But for the first key your goal would be a physical output rather than an ability improvement. For the second key you would tailor your butt-in-chair time to whatever output you need. If it’s code it would be coding sessions, a physical prototype then building and modifying parts or refining a schematic, and so on.
Unlike in my example, which had different problems each session, in each session you would now work on the same problem with one new variation. If you’re doing equations then session 1 would have version 1 of that equation, session 2 would have version 2 of that same equation, and so on. You might come up with variations by emphasizing an aspect that’s a strong physical limitation or by emphasizing a failed aspect of the previous version.
Finally, for the third key you would monitor progress by evaluating at the end of every session how well that version fits the solution criteria you need. Is it cheap enough? The right size, shape, or speed? Does it explain the unexplained part? Does it create the graph features you want to match?
If you spend a little time in the beginning thinking it through, you can come up with a 30-day kickstart to get you putting in meaningful time trying to discover what matters to you.
Final Thoughts
That’s my creative math practice in a nutshell and how I used three keys of good goal and habit setting to come up with it. This creative math practice is how I got back on track with my New Year’s Resolution to practice my scientific discovery skills and become a better discoverer daily. I’m running my 30-day creative math practice program right now and it’s already helped me notice some new avenues to explore in my physics research.
So let’s recap the ideas and examples I’ve talked about in this post:
- I covered an example of how to define a 30-day practice program to improve your skills at inventing equations describing physical situations off the top of your head.
- I discussed the three keys to creating a good practice program: (1) define a clear and specific program goal; (2) define concrete steps to take on a regular schedule; and (3) define a way to monitor your progress toward your goal.
- I pointed out ways you might adapt my example scientific discovery skills program into a discovery research program by using the “butt-in-chair time” idea to produce new ideas on a regular schedule.
If you’ve got your own practice techniques I’d love to hear about them. Or if you try out the program I’ve shared here I’d like to know how the experience goes. And if it helps inspire you to a breakthrough let me know! You can share your thoughts by posting a comment below.
Interesting Stuff Related to This Post
- Blog Post – Leo Babauta, “Set Powerful Deadlines,” April 26, 2016, https://zenhabits.net/deadlines/.
- Web Article – Andrew Krok, “Life-size Lego Bugatti actually works, has over 1 million pieces: It gets its power from 2,304 Lego electric motors”, Roadshow Reviews by CNET, August 30, 2018, https://www.cnet.com/roadshow/news/lego-bugatti-chiron-life-size/.
- Blog Post – Mike Rohde, “Ideas not Art – Students learn how to use sketchnotes to improve their notetaking in lectures”, December 31, 2018, https://sketchnotearmy.com/blog/2018/12/31/ideas-not-art-students-learn-how-to-use-sketchnotes-to-improve-their-note-taking-in-lectures-1.
- YouTube Video – Dr. Ellie Mackin Roberts, “Research #BulletJournaling”, December 7, 2016, http://www.elliemackin.net/blog/category/bullet-journal.
How to cite this post:
Bernadette K. Cogswell, “Three Keys to Creating a Discovery Skills Practice Program”, The Insightful Scientist Blog, March 8, 2019, https://insightfulscientist.com/blog/2019/three-keys.
[Page Feature Photo: Keys in an equipment room in China. Photo by Chunlea Ju on Unsplash.]