The week start today. Over the last few days, I was thinking about my productivity at work. The paper this year compared to my colleague are substantially fewer. I started worrying about the results this year. Basically, 2/3 of this year are gone. I have just about 4 months to go. I will do my best by the end of the year. Hopefully, if I do my best, I could submit 4 papers this year at least. That is the minimum I have to do this year.
Then today I spent a day reviewing one of the revised paper in the physics journal. On the last round of reviews, I recommended the editor publish the work. There were two referees for that paper. The author responded nicely and provided supplemental information for that paper. I raised two questions, I could understand after the author replied to my questions. I am happy about it. I gave a very short report for that paper. To be honest, I am not sure this is OK for me to give them such a short report. But I felt I didn’t have many things to say on that paper. Hopefully, the whole process as a referee could help the physics community. If I did a good job, I would get more papers to review. I am happy to read the manuscript to review.
So then, now I have to work on the next paper to finish. I can imagine a few papers I can finish this year. At best, I should work every day to do this. Because of COVID-19, Sydney is lockdown and it seems there is no way restrictions ease soon. So I don’t have much experimental data to get. So I have to finish as much as based on the data I have.
The share market today is not bad. My portfolio has advanced so I feel great. It is going to reach the next milestone soon. So I want to have a more stable portfolio since the balance changed a lot. Making a great portfolio takes a long time, I don’t think I can do it like few years, I should spend more than 5 years to know which shares or financial assets I have to bet on. I am learning slowly. Especially, I am a tiny investor just using my monthly salary to add small funds to my portfolio. So the chance to invest is only once a month, so I can only change slowly.
Talking about physics again. I am lucky enough to have many collaborators. So there are many projects I have been working with them. I always feel I need to contribute to them or help them doing something. To do that, my core skills should be doing experiments and also writing papers, so I have to develop these two skills at the highest level, I have to be recognized as a specialist. For now, I can only do writing and summarizinging what I have done for these experiments. So fortunately I have both chances so I will do it as much as I can. It will take a long time to accumulate both money and knowledge.