Tuesday, July 24, 2007

Counters, metrics and milestones

You are on a treadmill, running, working out, and the display counters help, sometimes you target the next closest mile to motivate yourself, and then having reached that, use the calories counter to target the next milestone and then finally round up the overall minutes counter to be the target and eke out more from your body; if you are perverse, this will not be the end, and when you just hit one of the milestones, this or the other counter will be tauntingly close to the next marker you can so reach, if you only push yourself a little more....

That is the deal with the counters in academia, we have many (publications, awards, grants, salary, bonuses/raises, students graduated, committees, whatever). Each counter ticks and teases, presents a target, and you have to learn not to be perverse.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Very nice post, liked it a lot!

I particularly relate to the first paragraph coz I have pushed myself in the exact same manner in the few times I've done the eliptical or treadmill! Will be a while before I better relate to the second para unfortunately ;-). Strangely though, I am not sure whether I am looking forward to it! Which is why I don't know whether to agree with the last part of your post "...and you have to learn not to be perverse."

10:14 AM  

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