Year in review: 2020 Edition

2020 was… A year that felt like a decade, but with the productivity of a boozy long weekend. In case you haven’t been on planet earth for the entire year (hello friend, teach me your secrets), it was of course the year in which a coronavirus (specifically SARS-Cov2) emerged and rapidly took over the globe.

The ensuing pandemonium was slow to build, and even slower to resolve. In fact, most countries around the world are still living with some form of social restrictions aimed at controlling transmission and preventing severe infection. We’ve since entered a recession, predicted by many to be the largest since the global financial crisis. Most importantly, many people lost their lives to the virus, and many more still have a severe and long-lasting illness.

I am fortunate enough to live in a country with very low infection rates and virtually no community transmission, and so life has returned to a post-virus normal. But (of course, there is always a but) to achieve this hefty goal, we as a community endured the longest and harshest lockdown conditions seen anywhere around the globe for almost a year. Make no mistake; it was essential and worthwhile. However, it was also eye-opening, isolating, disruptive and challenging. And as well as being a bench biologist who couldn’t get to the bench, I faced the lockdown separated by state borders from my partner, family and friends. To say it was mentally tough would be a colossal understatement, and despite this I am well aware of many who faced worse than me.

So, in acknowledging that no two experiences of 2020 were alike, I decided to stick with my traditional by-the-numbers account of the past year. You’ll find wins few and far between, more than a handful of losses, and a list of goals that looked a little different from start to finish. Finally, I look to the future and set my sights on recovery in 2021.

Wins

A snapshot of the high points

I survived 2020. I think that certainly belongs in the win column, don’t you?
I read three books, and reviewed one.
I published five blog posts totalling 6500 words, which were viewed 1557 times by 833 different visitors from more than 10 countries
I contributed my first invited article to an online publication
I published my first web-app, providing analysis tools for researchers considering applying for NHMRC funding
I worked over 2500 hours, more than 40% of which went towards submitting my first first-author postdoctoral paper for review to a top-tier journal
Five manuscripts I contributed to were officially published
I slept an average of 7 hours and 5 minutes
I overhauled my entire organisation system, from code to experiments to publications
I created and published not one but two science-communication videos as part of my first official scicomm training worskhop
I organised and hosted 17 Departmental seminars from a diverse group of researchers spanning career stages and countries – and made a successful transition to virtual when the pandemic hit!
I gave 2 invited seminars, and attended 3 virtual conferences

Losses

A not-so-snappy shot of the low points

Another year with no published first-author manuscripts, despite furiously writing for most of the year
My first-author paper was rejected from 4 different journals before even being sent out for peer review
Almost one fifth of the hours I worked were spent on emails and other administrative tasks
I didn’t write a single grant or application
I downloaded 1084 papers, and read less than 10% of them
I started 4 books that I didn’t finish
I didn’t publish blog posts in 7 out of 12 months
My coding projects are still still in a state of disarray, in desperate need of a tidy and some documentation
I only averaged 3817 steps per day
I was, perhaps, 50% productive on any given day

Lessons

The bits I wish I knew at the start of 2020, but had to learn the hard way.

Selfish isn’t a dirty word – for much of 2020 I struggled with the feeling of being a bad friend, bad partner, bad lab mate, bad family member as I weathered the storm of Victoria’s lockdown alone. I was lonely, unhealthy, unmotivated and struggling to keep my head above water and still I felt uncommitted to the many relationships in my life I let languish during this period. But in reality, I didn’t have anything to give – and I needed to be selfish, to rebuild my own mental health, to redefine my sense of self in this weird and wonderful (?) new world we were suddenly inhabiting. And it took me a long time to be ok with this idea of a self-centred approach to wellbeing. After all, you can’t pour from an empty cup.
Working from home and living at work are two entirely separate things – At the start of 2020 there was an abundance of tips about productive workspaces, setting routines, engaging in your normal ready-for-work activities, setting aside time each day to step away from work…. As someone who has had the luxury of a few work-from-home days in the past that yielded astounding levels of productivity, I was initially optimistic about the opportunities a few onths of working from home presented. It was only a few weeks into what would turn out to be a year long work-from-home order, before I realised how sorely mistaken I was. This was not the quiet, focused time I had enjoyed pre-pandemic, but clouded, overcast and gloomy time spent doom-scrolling, feeling unengaged and unenthusiastic about the prospect of another day spent alone in my home-office. It was a few months in that I came across the phrase living at work, and it struck home how insidiously this transition had happened. Despite having a separate work space, work never really left my home space in the way that I could leave the work office, and I came to realise how important the role of our choice is in this regard.
Variety is the spice of life – Ok, I know this one is a little cliché. And yet, if you’d asked me a year ago I would have adamantly told you that I am a person who is fond of organisation, planning and routines. From breakfast meals to shampoo brands to pens to friends – I am a creature of habit. I know what I like, and I surround myself with it. I structure my time. I plan and organise weeks, months, years in advance and I work toward goals with almost singular focus. And yet, this year almost every single one of those things was thrown completely out the window. It was impossible to plan a week in advance (or even a day sometimes). I found myself missing those spontaneous interruptions to my calendar or walks for coffee with random colleagues during the day. I missed the variety of faces on the tram each morning, and instead sought out variety in walking routes to new cafes for lunch as a poor surrogate. Most vividly I missed the usual spontaneity of a week in bench research science. Normally, each day is subtly different – a different experiment, or technique, this meeting versus that meeting, a new piece of code to work on or a new manuscript to write. Instead of this variety, life became a blur of zoom meetings, trudging forward on a single manuscript, and trying desperately to halt my doom-scrolling as we awaited daily case numbers and press conferences. I will never again take for granted the motivation a varied work day brings to my passion for science.

Goals

As with much about 2020, my goals unfortunately went promptly out the window around June. Even still, I finally submitted the first of three first-author postdoctoral research papers, and successfully created a growing community of Happy Hacker scientists who are learning to code. I started semi-regular yoga and implemented a new morning routine focused on engaging mindfully with the day ahead. While my writing here lagged severely, those posts I managed to write and publish are some of those I am most proud of. None of these things went according to plan, and it certainly wasn’t a glamorous insta-worthy road to ticking boxes. And yet, here we are, moving forward ever so slightly. So where to from here?

Papers are paramount. Déjà vu aside, with drafts still floating around in various states of disarray the first half of 2021 demands some serious focus on wrapping up the next two manuscripts. Using structured writing time of at least twenty hours a week, my goal is to have submitted the remaining two manuscripts before starting my next postdoctoral position mid-year. While last year writing sessions were often sidetracked by more ‘pressing’ needs, this year I will plan each session in advance, using calendar entries for accountability and a master task list for assigning goals and tracking progress.
Revamp the reading routine. Last year I hinted at a timely review of how I consume scientific literature. I’ve often pushed reading to the end of my to-do list and settled for skimming daily email alerts or saving an article or two from Twitter with some handwavy expectation of actually reading them. Instead, I want to not only find time for an engaged reading practice but also give myself space to really think about what I am reading, parlaying this into more (and better!) scientific insights. I will implement two reading sessions per week, drawing pre-selected articles from my ever-growing pile of exciting new material. This will be tracked using a database, which simultaneously enables detailed cross-connection between individual resources and developing insights and ideas within overarching project themes.
Commit to coding cleanup. One of the few positives to come from a year of working from home, coupled with a freshly-submitted manuscript combing computational analyses of wet-lab experiments, was a rapid expansion and solidification of my amateur coding skills. I am often pleasantly surprised when I realise just how far these skills have developed, and it makes me even more excited to pass them on during Hacky Hours each week. And yet, two packages I first wrote more than four years ago still languish, lacking love and in desperate need of refactoring. This is the year I commit to cleaning up these packages. I will spend an hour each week tackling small chucks, which will be tracked using GitHub issues and measured in milestones.
Invest in intentional. Sometimes a week can pass by and I barely realise due to a blur of endless triaging. These type of weeks tend to feel like an old-school cartoon where my wheels are spinning yet the car is going nowhere fast. My goal is to understand (and correct) my balance between the urgent but unimportant tasks that often fill my day (hellloooo email, I’m looking at you…), and the essential but non-urgent tasks that will be of most tangible benefit long term. Beyond task management, I will start each morning by writing down three intentions for the day, using these to anchor how my time is spent and as a record for reflection. I will also frame these intentions within the time management matrix, to ensure I am investing in long term progress by hitting small milestones each and every day.

2020 was without a doubt challenging and confronting and, just between you and I, 2021 was not looking to be off to a great start. After handing over my role in Melbourne and leaping out of my comfort zone, I landed in limbo – awaiting a revised start date for my international Fellowship, unemployed and uncertain of my direction for the first time in over a decade. And yet, here I am daring the universe by setting goals for the year ahead. From here, 2021 is about regrouping, recovering and recalibrating, readying for reentry to the world post-COVID. And I couldn’t be happier to have you along for the ride.

Image credits: @brookelark via unsplash

Year in review: 2020 Edition