The Evolution of What I Call Work: A Google Calendar Memoir

“I never do real work anymore,” a fellow professor used to complain to me.

“People have to be ready to work,” someone once told me about startup hiring.

For better or for worse, conversations often revolve around it. What do you do for work? How did you come to do the work you do? How much do you work? Are you working on anything interesting? Oh, please don’t ask me what I do for work. Excuse me, I have to go do some work.

Work has also been a major subject of conversation as I have been recruiting. Many of the people I talk to are at a life crossroads, deciding what work identity to take on next. They ask what it was like for me--to be a PhD student, to be a professor, and then to start a company. The questions range from the philosophical (“are you glad you did it?”) to the logistical (“how often did you exercise?”).

In these conversations I often struggle, as work means such wildly different things to different people. This is all well and good when people are trying to find common ground at a cocktail party, but it can be problematic when people are using metrics taken in different contexts to make important life decisions. The nature of my work has completely transformed between when I was an undergraduate and now--and that is something important to acknowledge when people are asking questions, especially ones around “how much.”

This post, then, is an attempt to establish context about what I mean when I talk about work. In 2007, I started using Google Calendar not just for scheduling, but also for documenting what I did with my time. What this means is that I’m able to give you a rough overview of how I spent most of my days from 2007 until now. I show representative time blocks from representative weeks, chosen to give you the most accurate picture of my life without overwhelming you with data. What’s important is not so much the precise number of hours, but the evolution of the content of those hours over the years. Here we go.

Late Undergrad/PhD: Back When I Used to do "Real Work"

Fall 2007, first semester of my senior year of college.

Here I show a week from fall of my senior year of college. Before I continue, I should explain how I’ve chosen to display my week. I’ve divided up my time into three categories: work, recovery, and life upkeep. From college until fairly recently, I did not consider meetings or talks to be work: my labeling of “work” on these calendars reflects this early misconception. I chose 7am to 10pm on weekdays only not because work only happened during these periods of time, but because they are the most representative and well-documented. I like to keep late nights and weekends unstructured.

This was one of my easier semesters: I was taking three courses (computational linguistics, randomized algorithms, and an art class) and working on an honors thesis. I had just handed over leadership of the Harvard College Engineering Society, which I had help start my freshman year. I was not TAing that semester. All this gave me the freedom to spend a lot of time working on two things I was excited about: my senior thesis and projects for my studio art class. This is a representative week from late undergrad and when work was going well during my PhD: relatively little structured time and lots of time to produce output.

Mid-PhD: I Learn to Make Good Use of Recovery Time

Fall 2012, mid-PhD.

When work was not going as well, the previous schedule turned out to be completely wrong. Here is a week from fall of 2012, when I was in between the first and second major projects of my PhD thesis and was coming off a three-month sprint of an internship. I was tired and lost, so I spent my time making progress in ways outside of my main output-producing work. During this week, my periods of work are heavily broken up and interspersed with meetings. Some are research meetings: with my advisor, with existing collaborators, and with potential collaborators. Some of the meetings were outside of research: Tuesday afternoon I had a “Positivity@MIT” that I organized to combat bias on campus; Thursday evening I had a Graduate Women at MIT social. (I had started Graduate Women at MIT with a couple of fellow students in 2009.) Around this time, I also became more deliberate about working on my writing skills, often scheduling at least one evening a week to write (as I do the Wednesday of this week). I did not see most of these activities as “work” at the time, but they turned out to be valuable work, both towards recovery and towards building my career.

Learning to Find Time for "Real Work" as an Assistant Professor

Spring 2017, second semester as an Assistant Professor at CMU.

It turns out that scheduling lots of meetings during the recovery periods of my PhD prepared me for being a professor, which mostly consists of meetings and very little time for what I would call “work.” Here is a week from the spring of my first year at Carnegie Mellon. That week I had two visitors I hosted for talks, one on Monday and one on Friday. I taught Tuesday and Thursdays. That week I was working on producing a video with fellow computer scientist James Mickens about my research, so I blocked on Wednesday morning to work with him on that. (It turns out James has very high artistic standards, so I worked on the video for most of that weekend too. You know your life is not so bad when you tell people you’ve been losing sleep looking for the right clips of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” for your research talk video.) Here, I’m doing much less of the output-producing work I consider to be “real work” and spending much more time enabling others to do that kind of work, with what I hope will be higher impact.

Starting a Company: Even More Meetings

Fall 2018, a few months into starting my company.

People say that being a professor is like running a small business. This has proven to be somewhat true as I’ve been setting up my actual company. The main difference is that there is even less of what I would call actual work. Here I show a particularly meeting-intensive (but not particularly anomalous) week from this past fall. During this week, I went up to the city from Palo Alto/Menlo Park three times (Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday). Some of it was for recruiting, some of it was for meetings with potential customers, and some of it was for networking (coffees or meals with people I had been introduced to; actual networking events). That Friday, two of the remote part-time people I work with were in town, so I spent most of Friday through the weekend working with them. This week was during a period of heavy recruiting, so I had many recruiting/interview calls. The work that week consisted mostly of emails to schedule and follow up with meetings. I was also developing the ideas for our initial product, both in terms of use cases and the underlying technology. Most of my work now involves meetings that potentially enable other people to work.

Closing Thoughts

It turns out that I, too, don’t do very much of what I used to consider real work anymore, but I spend more of my time working. I thought I had maxed out on my capacity for work as an undergraduate. In some ways this was true, but as the nature of my work changed this turned out not to be true. What I remember my work life to be (for instance, similar to the first week I showed you throughout my PhD) is not always accurate. My capacity for output-producing work has probably diminished, but my capacity for meetings and total overall work has increased. My entire life is meetings now. I should spend less time in transit.

So there we have it. I’m quite voyeuristic about how other people spend their time, so I’d love to see yours.

With thanks to Kayvon Fatahalian, Aliza Aufrichtig, and Dean Hachamovitch for comments.

"We run things, things don't run we"

Yesterday was Porchfest, an annual event where local musicians perform on their porches all around Somerville, MA. My friend Stefan Anderson, who performs as the solo act The Stefan Banderson, played his cover of Miley Cyrus's "We Can't Stop," which is my favorite cover of all time. (Summer 2013 I heard him perform the cover before I heard the actual song.)

Something I like about Stefan's covers is how they highlight the absurdity of pop song lyrics. During this performance I became obsessed with the line "We run things, things don't run we." After I spent far longer thinking about this line than a serious adult should, I had the following enlightening email exchange with the friends I went to Porchfest with.

This is another post in the series where I experiment with publishing emails the way RMO does. This post is about not being able to stop. It is also about what happens when science PhDs close-read Miley lyrics.

(While we're on the topic of Porchfest I'd also like to plug my friend Christiana's band Paper Waves. Check them out--they're great!)

--

from: Jean Yang to: Alison Hill, Elizabeth Brown, Ali Rabi date: Sun, May 22, 2016 at 10:46 AM subject: We run things, things don't run we
Guys I looked this up and this is a real lyric of the song. I really like it. I think I'll make it my new life motto.
---

from:		Elizabeth Brown
to:		Jean Yang
cc:		Alison Hill, Ali Rabi
date:		Sun, May 22, 2016 at 11:05 AM
subject:		Re: We run things, things don't run we

Oh my god that is wonderful. It makes a great motto!

--

from:		Alison Hill
to:		Elizabeth Brown
cc:		Jean Yang, Ali Rabi
date:		Sun, May 22, 2016 at 12:55 PM

Ahh but it's more subtle that that .. see the full stanza below:

And we can’t stop
And we won’t stop
We run things, things don’t run we
Don’t take nothing from nobody

the final "we" of the third line also serves as the subject of the fourth line .. optionally .. or you could interpret the lines separately, and then the last one is not a statement but an imperative

but all this just makes me like it even more!

--

from:		Jean Yang
to:		Alison Hill
cc:		Elizabeth Brown, Ali Rabi
date:		Sun, May 22, 2016 at 3:18 PM

Yeah, one can also interpret as a fight to control the forces that control us.

I read this article about how "We Can't Stop" is actually a sad song:
http://www.businessinsider.com/why-miley-cyrus-we-cant-stop-is-actually-the-saddest-song-of-the-summer-2013-8

This particular stanza is particularly interesting as a commentary on the power you give up when you enter into a super glam life--whether it's partying or academia. You act like you run the show but you've already bought in to something much bigger and you "can't stop." "Don't take nothing from nobody" and maybe you can escape the greater forces.

SO MUCH SUBTLETLY I LOVE IT.

A Recent Exchange on Money and Time

Below is a recent exchange with my friend Rob Ochshorn, who often writes emails instead of blog posts to work out his thoughts. Here I am borrowing not only his technique, but also his thoughts, on a topic I have recently begun to think about and would like to think about more.

Seth and Aliza were included non-consensually. I continue to include them for context: this conversation happened with an audience.

---

from:		Jean Yang
to:		Aliza Aufrichtig, Robert M Ochshorn, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
date:		Sun, May 15, 2016 at 10:57 AM
subject:		Cultural shorthand for money and time

Our society has a widely used abstraction for things that cost money ($$$) but there's not similar concept for time.

I started thinking about this because I wanted a way to express things that are time-expensive (was thinking ).

Related to this, it would be nice if people could tell me how much time things cost, rather than just how much money. Thinking about this made me wonder how much our lack of shorthand for this idea is a result of our entire society not caring about time as much as money, or because the people who shape our cultural shorthand (for instance the people running Yelp) care more about money than time.

Zooming out even further, isn't it interesting that Silicon Valley has become so obsessed with helping people live forever--while perpetuating a culture that steals people's time and youth in an unprecedented all-consuming way? (Based on how you think about it, it is or isn't unprecedented. Let's discuss.) I wonder what this means...

---

from:		Robert Ochshorn
to:		Jean Yang
cc:		Aliza Aufrichtig, Seth Stephens-Davidowitz
date:		Mon, May 16, 2016 at 2:33 AM
subject:		Re: Cultural shorthand for money and time

If only the singularity-upload fantasy of an eternal life were based on a mature understanding of leisure! I’m using “leisure” to mean the non-financialized use of time. This distinguishes it from the manner of time that Silicon Valley loves to “save” you. I mean, most of these stupid startups justify their work in terms of saving you time. Some startups allow you to convert your money into somebody else’s time (InstaCart, TaskRabbit, Magic), while others use automation and interface, in the grand tradition of the dishwasher, to let you do your work/chores faster (“so you can focus on …”). 

I would dispute your claim that our society cares about money more than time. I think it’s worse than that: much tech marketing and ideology[0] is based on the myth of a temporal-financial relativity: the conversion of money into time (the inverse, time->money, being what we call a job).

Your Yelp example is interesting. It makes me think of the 50s fantasy of “fast food.” Silicon Valley has proposed a modernization of this concept (Soylent), which should make clear what the purpose of this time-saving is: that we will have more time to work! In other words: what is the point of “saving time” if not to prepare or enjoy a nice meal?

Iconographically, there’s some design precedent creeping into popular consciousness. Medium, for example, numerically estimates the time an article will take its average user to ingest (“5 min read”). I’m kicking myself for not introducing you to my friend Tristan, who just passed through Cambridge for a Berkman lecture and runs a Time Well Spent movement that sees itself as a time-respecting “Fair Trade” equivalent for tech. What I like about your “” is that it implies a depth and prestige to a potential long-form experience—it makes me feel like I will be taken out of my normal, fragmentary, hectic existence and transported into a deep, coherent, and focused place for a while. The watches culturally suggest wealth and tradition. It’s a very different feel with hourglasses ()—perhaps the difference between being in control of one’s time verses our lives slipping away from us.

There’s a media-theoretical concept that’s important here: Marshall McLuhan’s notion of the reversal. The automobile makes us faster, but when you extend the concept as far as it goes, we’re stuck sitting in traffic. Ivan Illich took this even further, making a brutal calculation[1] of a car’s speed based on all of the factors that allow us to occasionally sit in a car cruising down the open road.

So for precedent I would propose McDonald’s, the dishwasher, and the automobile. Think about the ways they play together: teenagers working at McDonald’s to buy a car while their mothers enter the workforce, aided at home by the dishwasher.

Warm greetings from Ramallah! Time definitely seems to work differently here.

Your correspondent,

R.M.O.

[0] This is slightly off-topic, but it’s too lovely to omit. From Levy’s Inside the Googleplex, a great snapshot how time and latency are discussed/traded within Google (emph mine):

After the Code Yellow, Google set a companywide OKR (the objective key result metric Google uses to set goals) to fight latency. To help meet its goals, the company created a market-based incentive program for product teams to juice up performance—a cap-and-trade model in which teams were mandated latency ceilings or maximum performance times. If a team didn’t make its benchmarks, says Hölzle, it accrued a debt that had to be paid off by barter with a team that exceeded its benchmarks. “You could trade for an engineer or machines. Whatever,” he says. The metric for this exchange was, oddly enough, human lives. The calculation goes like this: average human life expectancy is seventy years. That’s about two billion seconds. If a product has 100 million users and unnecessarily wastes four seconds of a user’s time every day, that was more than a hundred people killed in a year. So if the Gmail team wasn’t meeting its goals, it might go to the Picasa team and ask for ten lives to lift its speed budget into the black. In exchange, the Gmailers might yield a thousand servers from its allocation or all its massage tickets for the next month.

[1] From Wikipedia:

…the concept of counterproductivity: when institutions of modern industrial society impede their purported aims. For example, Ivan Illich calculated that, in America in the 1970s, if you add the time spent to work to earn the money to buy a car, the time spent in the car (including traffic jam), the time spent in the health care industry because of a car crash, the time spent in the oil industry to fuel cars ...etc., and you divide the number of kilometres traveled per year by that, you obtain the following calculation: 10000 km per year per person divided by 1600 hours per year per American equals 6 km per hour. So the real speed of a car would be about 3.7 miles per hour.

The Angst Overhead

In high school, our crew coach often reminded us to relax our faces. Crew is a sport based on precision and pain. Though frowning is often the natural response, holding on to tension while rowing simply wastes energy.

Recently I have been wondering when this advice applies to to creative processes, especially as many believe that tension is necessary for producing great work. One of the stories in Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler features two writers, an untroubled one who produces best-sellers with ease and a tortured one pursuing an elusive truth. Each is envious of the other: the first of the second's facility of creation, and the second of the first's depth of pursuit. In the story, each writer tries to be more like the other and becomes less effective than before. This dichotomy between between productivity and depth is one many of us believe in.

There is evidence that believing creation should be difficult can slow the process of creation. In her memoir The Art of Asking, singer Amanda Palmer talks about how public perceptions of artists, as well as artists' romanticization of their own processes, can hold creation back. Amanda presents the image of the artist as solitary, locked in an attic, brooding, and probably wearing a scarf. She then describes once breaking her own rules--not going on Twitter while writing a song, because artists are solitary--and producing one of her best pieces.

Still, many of us cling to the association between creation and masochism. I've seen it in myself and among my peers in academia. We want to produce good work in the world, so we produce pain in ourselves. Perhaps subconsciously, we deny ourselves that break from our desk, that conversation with a friend, because we believe that this might somehow get in the way of the creative process. The weight of what we want to achieve overwhelms us. It is difficult not to obsess until we have brought our abstract idea into the world of the concrete. But we fail to realize that this angst, while often a product of creation, does not produce creation.

Much of my development as a researcher has involved reducing this angst. Early in my PhD, I had an internship with a researcher who, after listening to me talk about my ideas, would say, "Just go do it." I would watch in amazement as he executed on difficult tasks of uncertain outcome with little apparent angst. Similarly, I learned from my advisor the power of calmly writing things on a whiteboard to process both ideas unfamiliar to us and ideas no one has ever presented before. It is not necessary to feel the weight of the entire project with each forward step. Allowing work-angst to absorb us--or worse, believing that the angst is what makes the work good--often only wastes energy.

Computer Scientists often think in terms of "overheads," how much a process slows down the time required to achieve the desired task. Angst often incurs significant overhead with little gain. Thus, to better pursue elusive truths, I am now pursuing minimal angst overhead.

What My PhD Was Like

What it looks like to do a PhD: the view from my desk.

Recently, I have been talking to many prospective Computer Science PhD students about choosing graduate institutions and advisors. In addition to excitement, there is fear and confusion. The confusion comes not only from not knowing what to expect, but not even knowing how to think about what to expect.

One prospective student put it well when she said that she knows how she is in other work situations, but she has never done a PhD before, so she does not know what it will be like. She had been curious about things like my relationship with my advisor, my research trajectory, and whether I had hobbies. She mentioned speaking to other people at various points during the PhD, but not having the whole picture much. After this conversation I decided it would be helpful for more people to talk about their PhD experiences in entirety. Now that I am a few months out of my Computer Science PhD at MIT and am about to begin an Assistant Professor position at Carnegie Mellon University, I can talk about my PhD experience in whole. This is my version of Philip Guo's The Ph.D. Grind.

Like many other academics, I will say that graduate school was one of the best periods of my life. I grew immensely, made many friends, and learned about the research process. During my PhD, I largely got to determine my own research agenda and day-to-day schedule. I developed my tastes as a researcher. I developed my tastes as a human being. Also important to me is that I developed some of the most intellectually and emotionally fulfilling friendships of my life. I loved graduate school so much that I decided to stay in academia.

But this does not give the entire picture. "Loving graduate school" is different from loving a good meal, a thought-provoking film, a pet, or another person. A PhD is about training you to become a researcher. The further you are from being in an experimental field, the further this growth is about concrete skills and the more it is about existential questions of how you want to be. If you want to stay in academia, you must also balance the growth with ensuring you have enough to show at the end for the intellectual coming-out party that is the academic job market. This growth is painful and anxiogenic. Even if you are in a supportive environment and have great work-life balance, a PhD is not supposed to be a comfortable ride. The flip side is that, as my friend Alex describes it, during your PhD every day is "epic."

Enough philosophizing. Here, concretely, is what my PhD was like.

Summer 2008. At the end of the summer, I move into my office at MIT, where I am to be co-advised by Mike Ernst and Saman Amarasinghe. Saman pays for me to start early. I spend a couple of weeks reading papers, mostly about parallelism, and report to him every morning about what I've read. He gives me lots of advice about what life is going to be like. Mike Ernst has been in Europe this whole time. The last week of the summer, Mike Ernst calls me and tells me he is moving to the University of Washington.

2008-2009 (Year One). I'm recovering from a repetitive stress injury in my neck, so Saman advises me to take hard theory courses that involve little computer use. I take Advanced Algorithms and Machine Learning in the fall and Advanced Complexity Theory in the spring.

I get involved with and become lead author on a PLDI submission with Saman and Martin Rinard about a programming language for trading off power and accuracy. This paper is pretty good for having come into existence over the course of 1.5 months, but not objectively a great paper--and it gets rejected.

Ras Bodik, a professor at Berkeley who tried to recruit me, emails me telling me his student Armando Solar-Lezama is starting a professorship at MIT. I meet Armando and he sends me many papers to read. Soon we are meeting and working so much I no longer have time for the other project, which was a suboptimal fit anyway for various reasons. I like how much bandwidth Armando has for technical discussions, especially since he has no other students or teaching duties at the time. I am nervous that this high meeting frequency is unsustainable, so I try hard to recruit other students to Armando's group.

Armando and I submit a paper to OOPSLA but it is not good because we don't start writing it until three days before. I also submit a paper to the Haskell Workshop about my senior undergraduate thesis, but it is not good because I don't know how to write papers. My friend Jean-Baptiste who reads it asks why my blog is so good but my paper drafts are so bad.

Since I am still figuring out what I want to do, I schedule many meetings with professors and ask them how to do research. In addition to Saman's group meeting I also attend Daniel Jackson's group meeting. I go to many PhD defense and job talks. Both Martin and Saman tell me that in order to become a good researcher, I have to flounder and fail. I have never failed before. I take it as a challenge to do work risky enough to fail.

January of this year I attend my first conference, POPL. Martin pays for me to go after I email him asking how I can get to go to POPL. I meet many people, including many people at Microsoft Research. This eventually leads to my first internship.

Outside of work, I try to avoid using my computer due to my repetitive stress injury. Because of the injury, I am also aggressive about working 8-hour days and taking breaks on weekends. I am too lazy to make many friends so I spend my free time reading, cooking, doing yoga, and running.

Summer 2009. I intern at Microsoft Research in Redmond with Chris Hawblitzel. I had seen Chris's talk at POPL about verifying garbage collectors using Boogie and thought it was one of the coolest projects I had ever seen. I had not thought I was qualified to intern with him, but some of the people I met at POPL recommended me to him. This summer, we build Verve, an operating system verified for type and memory safety. I had never verified anything or built an operating system before. I work hard, 10-12 hours a day, because there is so much to learn and because the project is so fun. I work closely with Chris and he teaches me an incredible amount about working with low-level code. Outside of work, I hang out with the other interns. I live in Redmond but on weekends I go into the city, where I have two friends I stay with.

2009-2010 (Year Two). I continue to work with Armando, on the project that eventually becomes the Jeeves programming language. My first year we started with a vague idea that dynamic constraint-solving was useful for handling corner cases that static program synthesis could not handle well. We apply this to data imputation. We learn over the course of 1.5 years of paper submissions that people don't care much about data imputation, especially since our results are not particularly good. By the end of my second year, we start thinking that security might be a better application domain. This cumulative work is my masters thesis. We still have many things to figure out at this point so I am not that excited about my thesis. I try to ask for an extension but Armando tells me to just turn it in.

In the spring, Saman and I start what becomes an annual off-site retreat of all the research groups related to programming languages at MIT. People give research talks and we have philosophical discussions about the future of research, publishing, and education. At the first one, we realize there are many more people who have common interests than previously thought. After the first meeting, the professors meet together and decide to do more activities together from now on. From this point forward there is more cohesion and activities like weekly PL-related meetings.

At the beginning of this year, I start telling people that I wish I had more female friends, since I realize that there are many fewer women around me than before. My friend Neha Narula tells me to respond to a call for people interested in starting a graduate women's group and I meet Kay Furman, a PhD student in the Health Science Technologies program. Along with a couple of other graduate women we start Graduate Women at MIT. Such a group had never existed and our proposals are met with a fair amount of skepticism, more from students than from administrators. At this point I still don't have many friends, so I spent many evenings and weekends working on building the organization: recruiting, fundraising, inviting speakers, writing materials about why we need such a group, etc.

As part of my acquisition of more female friends I join a feminist discussion group, also invited by Neha. We get together about once a month for a dinner hosted in one of our homes. These discussions and my friendships with the women in the group shape many of my views over the next few years.

During this time, I look into acquiring more hobbies. I take some break-dancing classes at the Dance Complex but decide it's not my thing. I take up acrobatics (silks, rope, and static trapeze), for which I continue weekly classes on and off for about a year until I realize I am not serious enough about it (and travel far too much) to make continuing worthwhile.

Summer 2010. I intern with Nikhil Swamy and Juan Chen at Microsoft Research Redmond. They have a dependently typed language called Fine for verifying security properties. I ask to intern with them because I want to take my work in this direction. I spend most of my time working on a tool for stuffing proofs into bytecode and taking them back out. I learn a lot, but the proofs are too big and we never quite manage to get it to work. I also participate in many meetings and calls about the F* language, which is like Fine but supports proof erasure. I learn a lot about dependent type systems and security concerns.

I live in Seattle this summer, in a studio apartment on Capitol Hill. For traffic and productivity reasons, I take the 7am bus to work and stay at work until 7pm. There is a heated vinyasa yoga studio I go to after work most days. I love having a routine and Seattle in the summer and the energy of Capitol Hill at night, so I am very happy with my life. This summer, thanks to Chris's nomination, I also participate in the Lindau Meeting of Nobel Laureates, where Nobel laureates give talks about science, the research process, and the future of the world. I make friends with scientists from around the world and find the talks inspiring.

Chris and I have a paper on Verve that appears at PLDI. We win Best Paper Award. I am too young to realize that not all projects go this smoothly and not all papers are this good, so I am confused. Since this is the first paper I ever published, this becomes my new standard for paper goodness. It takes me years to realize that it is possible to do much less and still publish a paper.

2010-2011 (Year Three). Now I am done with classes, have no more routine, and have to return to working on my project I am not that excited about, so I am less happy than before. I have this OCaml interpreter implementation for proto-Jeeves that I have been working on. To make things scale, I implement a C backend and a garbage collector. It integrates with the Yices constraints solver. It is hard to do anything with this interpreter because it requires a lot of work to experiment with language features. I do not feel much hope about the project. I shop around for other projects. I consider doing an internship in hardware synthesis with David Bacon at IBM Research, but after talking to some people decide I should not switch to this area.

In the fall, I TA a new program analysis course taught by Arvind, Martin, and Armando. The professors are excited for me to help revamp the course. There are four course staff total and six registered students. Most of the work involves doing the problem sets to make sure they work. It takes a surprisingly amount of time to grade six assignments, since each assignment is likely to make different design decisions. I hold weekly recitation where three people attend. All three students are strong, so most of the time we talk about fun PL topics.

To take a break after going straight from turning in my masters thesis to doing a internship, I treat myself by taking a two-week vacation. I take a road trip through Romania (and also parts of Serbia and Hungary) with my friend Florian who I met at some conferences. My friend Kate, who I met through the feminist discussion group and who has moved to Europe for an Erasmus masters program, meets us in Vienna, where Florian is studying.

In February I attend my first workshop at Dagstuhl, a German castle that hosts focused computer science workshops. I have involved discussions many computer scientists working in similar areas. I find it excitiyng. Afterward I meet my friend Kate for a weekend in Brussels and we have adventures as usual.

This year, I also start to make more friends. I become good friends with my "cohort," the other students interested in programming languages and software engineering who I started with. I also become friends with many female scientists. I never had many female scientist friends before and this makes me happy because I feel much more understood.

Summer 2011. I decide to stay around MIT to focus on research. My groupmate and officemate Kuat Yessenov tells me it would be simple to implement my language as an embedded domain-specific language in Scala. Kuat makes a prototype implementation and begins to collaborate with me on the project. This changes everything. All of the sudden, the language has hope of becoming practical. A nice story about Jeeves emerges: it is a convenient and practical programming model that lets you factor out information flow policies. It seems natural and like the way to go--but formalization is not entirely straightforward and there are some interesting theoretical properties too. It is great to collaborate with Kuat, who is very smart. We submit a paper to POPL. We work hard, staying long nights in the office. I briefly become nocturnal in response to receiving feedback from my advisor in the evening and feeling compelled to make the changes before I sleep.

It rains a lot this summer and we both become sad. One day, Kuat leaves a fortune cookie fortune on my desk that says "It cannot rain every day."

2011-2012 (Year Four). Armando starts putting pressure on Kuat to return to his project so Kuat stops collaborating with me. I am now collaboratorless and still haven't published anything on this language, now called Jeeves, so I become more and more hopeless. A couple of my friends, Marek Olszewski and Michal Depa, leave school to do startups. Marek invites me to join him. I'm not ready yet, but I have significant FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out). I take a class about startups and become friends with Tiffany Kosolcharoen, then a student at Sloan. Tiffany and I spend hours together every week and she teaches me an immense amount about the startup world.

My friends begin to worry I will quit graduate school. My groupmate Rishabh Singh stops teasing me about my inferiority for the first time, looks at me seriously, and says, "Miss Yang! You cannot quit. You are an intellectual." Someone leaves a fortune cookie fortune on my desk that says "It does not take guts to quit." Sasa Misailovic, another one of my cohort, has an intervention lunch with me telling me that I like graduate school the most out of all of us, so if I quit then what does it mean for everyone else. I tell him everything is meaningless.

Our paper gets into POPL and everyone is relieved. I am relieved to confirm there is life after Verve. Armando is relieved for obvious reasons. My friends are relieved because they stop thinking I will quit graduate school.

During the spring I build a small conference management system using Jeeves, not because I want to but because Armando says it is important to build things to see what breaks. This takes a lot out of me because Jeeves doesn't really work yet and I previously knew little about building web applications. We run out of memory all the time and I have to wake up in the middle of the night to restart the server. For weeks after, my friends make fun of me by sending emails telling me my server is down. For weeks, Armando and I wake up with nightmares in the middle of the night that our server is down. During this process I also realize that in order for language-based solutions to work, we have to have a better story with interfacing with the database. I feel proud that I convince Armando this is an important direction of future work. I also concede that it is important to build things.

This spring I do some traveling. I win a Facebook Fellowship and travel to the Bay Area to give talks at Facebook, Google, and Berkeley. I attend another workshop at Dagstuhl and spend the weekend in Paris beforehand and meet my friend Kate in Barcelona after.

My social life becomes fantastic this year. I find the "party circuit" orbiting a nucleus of social Harvard and MIT graduate students. I meet many interesting and brilliant people.

Summer 2012. I intern at Facebook to gain "privacy street cred." I start in July because it's after the POPL deadline. The other interns starting at the same time are all Eastern European college boys. This becomes my friend group for the summer. I live in the city and commute to Menlo Park every day, staying on campus for 10-12 hours. I work hard, building a verifier for privacy policies using Haskell. I like the work but find it isolating because I'm the only person working on my project and it's not clear what I am allowed to talk about outside of work. I take daily walks with my friend Pieter Hooimeijer, who I knew from research and went to Facebook after his PhD. I work harder than I want to because of the potential high impact of this project: it is tied to a pre-launch project and if it launches well, this could be a really nice example of verification in production use at a large company. Armando flies out to Facebook at the end of the summer to discuss my project under NDA. I am so happy to see him.

2012-2013 (Year Five). I return to school but continue contracting for Facebook. I work on my verifier one day a week and fly out to the Bay Area every few weeks for a few days at a time to continue working on my project. I maintain two social lives, one in Cambridge and one in San Francisco. The bigger project I'm a part of gets cancelled around February, for political and not technical reasons. I feel very disappointed, especially because my verifier had been very close to being put into production. I also feel relieved, because I'm exhausted from having two jobs and two social lives. I make some small efforts to try to publish on what I built, but Armando is not excited and the team at Facebook has scattered. We file a patent.

The rest of my research is not satisfying this whole year. I work on extensions to Jeeves that Armando tells me are necessary for the work, but that I am not excited about. We work on integrity extensions to Jeeves that I don't think make sense. What I really want to do is figure out how to extend the Jeeves programming model to the database, but I can't work on this until after we finish this other stuff. I submit an uninspired paper to CAV. One of the reviews says, "I cannot believe there are four authors on this paper and so many typos." I am not excited about anything by the end of this year.

In the spring, I take a class in the Media Lab with Ethan Zuckerman about new media. Half the students are technologists and half are mid-career journalists at Harvard and MIT on various fellowships. This gets me thinking much more about media, online communication, and civic participation.

Summer 2013. I stay around school to work on the integrity story for Jeeves, which I continue to not believe in. Armando tells me it is time for me to graduate and go on the academic job market. I tell him the academic job market is a big commitment because 1) I don't know that working alone forever is the best way to achieve the things I want to achieve and 2) the work/life balance doesn't seem great. He says 1) is a result of how he chose to run his group, but if I don't want to put in the work of being a professor then I should wrap up my work as quickly as possible and move on with my life. We are both sad.

2013-2014 (Year Six). I spend a month having in-person and Skype meetings with people about other career paths, for instance working at LogicBlox or Jane Street Capital. After my mother reminds me I don't have to do computer science anymore, I consider becoming a writer or an artisan specializing in linocut block prints. Rocky, who works on my floor, tells me that usually everyone on the seventh floor can hear when I laugh, but he has not heard me laugh for six months.

During this time, I also visit Andrey Rybalchenko and Byron Cook at Microsoft Research Cambridge. I enjoy myself immensely and have many stimulating meetings and become exposed to the field of executable biology. (Later I find out this was a secret interview.) I determine that nothing else is as exciting to me and even though academia is a big commitment it seems worth it. I tell Armando I'm ready to go on the job market and he says he already told everyone I wasn't anymore and plus it's better for me to wait. I am more than fine with this, since a big issue had been that I don't want to leave yet.

After I determine that one of my main issues with my project is that nobody uses Scala for prototyping web apps, I decide to switch to Python. Armando lets me take on an MEng (masters) student to convert our implementation to Python. I find Travis Hance. He finishes the conversion in the fall and we spend all spring collaborating on building a web framework based on Jeeves. I am really excited to finally be thinking about the problem of extending the programming model to the database, especially as this is something I had wanted to do for two years. I love having Travis as a collaborator. We decide to submit to OSDI. During the weeks before OSDI, we work together for 10-12 hours a day. I introduce him to many Kendall Square restaurants. During our breaks, we create Haskell Ryan Gosling.

During this time I also decide to take my interest in writing more seriously. The previous year I had come across a former problem set partner Carl Schoonover on Business Insider's list of sexiest scientists in the world and discovered he had been achieving my science writing dreams: writing a book, speaking about science, and even starting a group called NeuWrite to promote collaborations between scientists and science writers. I had brought him to MIT to speak, which led to two things: 1) me assembling an RSVP list of Harvard and MIT graduate students interested in science writing and 2) Carl deciding I was a good person to take over the NeuWrite Boston group, as group membership was shrinking and the current leaders were moving away. One of the journalists from my new media class introduces me to science writer Amanda Gefter and we take over the group. We build a new group from the event RSVP list and Amanda's writer friends. I spend much of my free time 2014-2015 building the group, thinking about writing, and writing. I start publishing not only on my own blogs but also in more public venues. A couple of my Quora answers get published on Forbes and my pieces for The Muse get chosen to run in Forbes and Newsweek.

Summer 2014. PLDI is in Edinburgh at the beginning of June and my friend is getting married in Croatia at the end of June. Since Armando is paying for the trans-Atlantic flights, I scheme to remain in Europe for the month. I set up another visit to Microsoft Research Cambridge and a visit to the Max Planck Institute in Kaiserslautern, Germany. I get good feedback on my work during both visits. I then spend a long weekend in Berlin visiting my friend Kate and a week wandering around various parts of Croatia for vacation purposes. I see Oslo for a day on the way back. I find the entire trip relaxing but find it difficult to return to normal life after.

Our OSDI submission gets rejected, so I spend the rest of the summer cleaning up the paper and doing more work to submit to PLDI. I feel an incredible amount of angst about my uncertain future as I prepare for the job market. I spend one day a week doing extreme exercise, cycling 50+ miles or running 11+ miles, to obliterate all thoughts. For various reasons I also spend a lot of weekends in New York and make more friends with people working on data and journalism.

2014-2015 (Year Seven). I spend most of the fall preparing a submission about the Jeeves-based web framework to PLDI. I also work on my job applications. I go on the job market, interview, etc. I get some offers, accept a position at Carnegie Mellon University, and defer a year to collect myself before beginning and also to explore my interest in applying programming languages and biological modeling.

To keep myself from thinking about my uncertain future all the time, I start a cybersecurity accelerator, Cybersecurity Factory, with my friend Frank Wang, with the goal of helping research-minded people start companies. After Frank and I ran out of research things to talk about the natural next step was to develop a project of mutual interest and we're both interested pushing academic research into the world.

I don't have much of a social life this year. For a couple of my interviews I stay with friends beforehand and they listen to my talks. My friends Alison and Tobi make sure to force me out of my house for non-work reasons every once in a while. Every few weeks my friend Angela comes over and cooks me dinner. I remain grateful for my friends.

Summer 2015. I spend the first part of the summer working on writing up the Jeeves-based web framework work, which has continued to be rejected from every conference. I get the framework to be much faster and work with my collaborators on a cleaner semantics. We submit to POPL and then I work on my thesis. The introduction and related work take much longer than expected, maybe about a month.

During this time I spend maybe about a third of my time working on the accelerator and doing public communication about cybersecurity. We accepted two teams for our Cybersecurity Factory pilot program and we work closely with them to make sure they are getting the support they need. I spend a good amount of time on the phone with media people getting press for our program. I write an op-ed for the MIT Tech Review.

Somewhere in there I take a 36-hour trip to Singapore to give a talk at a data privacy workshop Saman is organizing. Saman gets the people to fly me business class so I can sleep in transit. It is my first time flying business class. I am confused about what to do with such frequent deliveries of hot towels to my seat.

I don't have much of a social life during this time either. Several people text me "you have to eat sometime" after I repeatedly decline meal invitations.

2015-2016. I defend! I take two weeks off and then start a postdoc at Harvard Medical School. I slowly ease myself back into having hobbies and seeing friends. Our POPL submission gets rejected and I finally spend a lot of time thinking about how to sell the work (rather than how to do the work). I learn that despite pressures to make the work better until the last minute, I need to fight to spend a long time on the writing, especially if the proposed idea is outside of the mainstream. A nice story emerges about a new and practical web programming model that allows programmers to factor out information flow policies across the multiple runtimes of the application and database. Our paper finally gets accepted at PLDI. I feel relieved to publish the final part of my thesis. And here we are now.

For those wondering what to take away, it is important to note that every PhD experience is unique influenced by factors such as the advisor relationship, institutional requirements, the funding situation (both professional and personal), and the academic and social environments. I am privileged to have had a relatively supportive environment and few additional pressures. My experience is most likely to generalize for other computer science PhD students at top schools, where the funding situation tends to be good and advisors tend to give students a fair amount of freedom.

You may also be interested in other posts I've written about my PhD:

• On Quora: Do Ph.D. students get time to pursue their hobbies?
• Reasons to Pursue a Ph.D.
• The Life of an Academic, Explained
• How Science Really Works

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Addenda:

• You may be interested in reading the comment thread for this post on Hacker News.
• My friend and former groupmate Nadia pointed out that during 2014-2015, I claim to have no social life "but we went to so many cool parties." It's true. Over the course of the year I did go to some cool parties.
• My friend Michael, who I once dated, said I should mention the existence of romantic relationships during the PhD to provide a more complete picture of my life. Chris Martens also says in her blog post about her PhD that she is frustrated when people don't discuss the interplay between romantic partnerships and work. Over the course of my PhD I was in a few committed romantic relationships, mostly with other academics, mostly in other fields. Some of the time I was in relationships coincided with periods of extreme work. This was difficult to balance, but other academics tend to understand. I was never in a relationship where someone else was routinely doing any portion of the domestic labor. I was also single for a significant portion of my PhD.
• Berkeley PhD student Stephen Tu has begun compiling a list of PhD reflection here.

On Wearing Clothes

The author, wearing some clothes.

A few years ago, we organized a professional wardrobe event (video here) as part of one of our Graduate Women at MIT fall conference events. We received a fair amount of criticism from people who felt that fashion was "frivolous" and such an event would tarnish the reputation of the group.

I see where this criticism is coming from, but fashion is far from frivolous--especially for women. Many people have told me that people should not care so much about clothes and only care about what's inside. Most of these people also believe that "not caring about clothes" is communicated by wearing a fairly specific uniform, for instance free t-shirts, non-form-fitting jeans, and very functional shoes. Such uniforms are often not available to women (see "fake geek girl"). In Why So Slow?, on why  psychologist Virginia Valian writes that while men often have a professional uniform available to help them blend in, women tend to be "marked" and stand out no matter what they wear. Especially since clothing serves as a powerful social signal, it's important for women to take charge of what they wear and communicate how they want to be seen. (Many others have written about this. Here's a nice piece.)

In short, it requires a lot of thought to be a woman wearing clothes. Especially since my post on dressing for academic interviews got a lot of interest and discussion, I thought it would be interesting to talk about the positions I've developed about wearing clothes, as a woman in a male-dominated field and in general.

Been building a uniform a button-down shirts and dark pants.

Embrace the uniform at work. Virginia Valian says there is no "uniform" for women, but this does not mean there cannot be a uniform. Adopting a uniform is a bit of a prisoner's dilemma for women: for any individual woman, putting in the effort to dress well and stand out provides benefits but keeps women as a whole in the clothing rat race. But if this fashion editor can wear the same outfit every day, then we should be able to embrace at least the personal uniform. (Friends have pointed out that there is a de facto "uniform" for PhD women in science: ballet flats, jeans, t-shirt, cardigan.) Life has become much easier for me once I picked five outfits to wear to work each week. Life will become even easier once I figure out the Ultimate Outfit to wear every day forever.

From my "boy" phase.

It's fine to look feminine. I see many women in STEM go through the "man" (or, more generously, "androgynous") phase. I've gone through it myself. You cut your hair. You start wearing baggy pants and t-shirts and dressing like a boy. While there's nothing wrong with this, it's also important to realize it is not necessary to do this. I started thinking about why I did this after a friend pointed out my "boy" phase coincided with a period of time in college when I was struggling with not being listened to and hypothesized my gender had something to do with it. With time, I learned that changing my communication patterns, refusing to be ignored, and establishing myself in other ways went a lot further than dressing like a man. (I wrote this fairly controversial piece on changing one's communication patterns for a male-dominated work environment.) Though I still like to dress somewhat androgynously to avoid standing out too much (and was advised to do this especially for first impressions), I'm much more comfortable looking not-like-a-man these days.

A surprisingly functional feminine not-for-work outfit.

Embrace functionality. Much of women's clothing is optimized for being looked at, rather than moving in. While it is certainly possible to wear this kind of clothing as a woman on the go, having shoes you are worried about falling off of and clothes you are worried will become not-clothes without sufficient supervision places a certain amount of cognitive load. Since I'm all about men and women having comparable amounts of cognitive load, here are the ways I've come up with for achieving more parity:

• Take flats seriously. Many women are taught that heels are the norm and flats are just in-between shoes. I've spent a fair amount of time finding flats that are unapologetically the only shoes I will be wearing. I really like oxfords (I have this pair, this pair, and this pair) and John Fluevog's designs. (I'm wearing a pair of Fluevogs in the photo above. Women have stopped me in the street to ask about them, making references to their quests for functional shoes that look good.)  That said, I also have several pairs of heels I can run in. (I really like the brand Born for this purpose.)
• Embrace pockets. Years ago, a close friend was dating a French billionaire male chauvinist who told her “All ladies must carry a purse.” Easily impressed by money and power, neither of us left the house without a purse for at least a year. One day I woke up and realized it was a lot of work to always have to think about what purse went with my outfit and also to then carry the purse, so I started carrying things in my pockets whenever I could. After carrying my ID, a credit card, and a couple of bills in my front pants pocket for a while, I got a thin wallet insert (by Steward/Stand) for holding my essentials. (For pants, Outlier is really good about pockets. Many standard designer brands, such as 7 for All Mankind, are as well. Also, my dress above has pockets! Check out my friend Elizabeth's Pocketist blog for more pockets.) Sometimes if I don't have pockets I will put my things in my boot or, less reliably, in this garter pocket I acquired for the purpose of holding my things. I highly recommend not being a lady and not carrying a purse.
• Find outwear that actually serve its function. I spent years ogling the raincoats and winter coats of my male friends for how they looked good and actually worked before I found my own versions of coats that don't make me choose between form and function. I've mostly been finding functional items by non-technical brands, but I also have friends who have had success finding fashionable pieces by technical brands. I've spent a lot of time drooling over coats by Nau, designed for this niche, but I haven't yet talked myself into spending money on one.

Look ma, no purse!

Pay attention to range of motion. One time I was at a friend's for dinner when I noticed my friend Caroline behaving differently than normal. She seemed more relaxed--perhaps more confident. Towards the end of the dinner, Caroline explained that she had been trying to adopt more dominant body language. Studies have shown that dominant displays such as spreading one's legs communicate--and help establish--power. Caroline said that she had success with this new body language: at an interview, she had taken care to sit with her legs open and the interviewers kept commenting on how "confident" and "competent" she seemed. Since then, I have also become more conscious of my body language. In doing so, I have noticed how traditionally feminine clothing such as dresses and heels require women to sit and move in certain way. While the movements these clothing items encourage is often associated with femininity and feminine attractiveness, they are not associated with non-sexual forms of power. (It's a whole other long conversation why it's important to have forms of power outside of sexual power.) For these reasons it is important when choosing clothes to consider whether they will permit corporeal assertions of power.

In conclusion, solving the clothing problem is an important step towards gender equality. I once heard that gender equality is when women are allowed to be mediocre--that is, women don't have to be clear standouts to justify why they deserve to be doing something. For clothing, gender equality comes when women aren't "marked," when they can blend in whether they've spent time thinking about their clothes or not. Though we're further from this point than some might think, community thoughtfulness and good discussion can go a long way. Until then, it's important not to dismiss conversations about clothing, as they serve an important function in moving things forward.

What to Wear for Academic Interviews, or How to Dress Like a Man Without Looking Like a Man

Wearing the Computer Science "uniform."

I first became aware of the problem when I took a female faculty interview candidate out to lunch a few years ago.

"Deciding what to wear to interviews is a real challenge," she had told me. "My advisor knows what the male faculty candidates should wear, but for me he had no clue."

Indeed, professional dress is a difficult problem for women, especially those in male-dominated fields. As psychologist Virginia Valian writes in Why So Slow?, men have a professional "uniform," but women are always "marked." While men's clothing is intended to help men blend in, women's clothing is intended to help women stand out.

Stands out in CS.

Unfortunately, standing out does not often help women in science careers. I have heard otherwise well-meaning male faculty members at MIT say the following about female candidates:

"She just doesn't... look like one of us."

"How can you take someone seriously when they are wearing heels?"

And so I came to understand that in order not to have my clothes jeopardize my chances of being taken seriously during my own interviews, I needed to forget how I was taught to "look professional" and instead solve a difficult constraint satisfaction problem. I needed to somehow achieve man-level blending in without looking like I was blatantly cross-dressing (which, I've been told, would also make me stand out). This was a particularly difficult problem for me because I am fairly particular about what is "my style" and my style is not particularly mainstream.

What an MIT professor typically looks like.

Towards solving this problem, I solicited some advice from my professors, who all happened to be male. The advice consisted of confusing heuristics for blending in with men:

"People should remember you, not your clothes."

"Never, under any circumstances, wear a skirt."

"Wear exactly what a man would, but the female version."

What I found more helpful was asking women who had been on the job market (thanks, Claire Le Goues, Raluca Ada Popa, and Franzi Roesner) what they wore. (To my relief, none of them told me to dress like a man--and in fact described outfits that sounded relatively feminine.) Claire taught me about the general idea of coordinated separates. Claire taught me that it's okay to repeat pants. Claire gave tips about modesty (nothing too form-fitting; avoid displaying skin). Claire alleviated many of my concerns by telling me it was all right to wear the "exact same outfit" for every interview. (Thanks, Claire, for being a more senior female academic in Computer Science and also my friend.)

At an event with AtlanticLIVE.

Keynoting a conference in Vegas.

Synthesizing advice from my female colleagues, the advice to dress "the way a man would," and my own fashion inclinations, I put together the following main interviewing outfit: gray blazer (Theory, acquired for under $50 at a thrift store and tailored for under $100), patterned button-down (Brooks Brothers, on sale for under $100--the pattern was also my "flair" item), black theory dress pants ($100ish from the Theory outlet, then tailored for $30ish), and black oxfords. (I had two pairs of oxfords, a beautiful pair by Donna Piu that I never broke in and a pair from Camper that I ended up wearing.) I particularly like oxfords because of how masculine they are. When I sent my groupmate Nadia a photo, she told me I looked like Doctor Who. I liked this outfit so much I continued wearing it for all speaking engagements, to the point when my mother offered to buy me a second shirt. (No shame in wearing the same outfit every day, Mom!)

Outfit is versatile; good also for cutting cake.

Following Claire's advice, for the second day of two-day interviews I wore a different button-down shirt with a sweater. Starting around this time, I have begun acquiring a collection of button-down shirts and pullover sweaters. I particularly like the men's section of Uniqlo; the men's section of J. Crew is pretty good too. I like buying men's clothes because it allows me to have clothes that fit me like the clothes of my male colleagues fit them. (In fact, I am pretty sure a male professor was wearing the exact same shirt as me at a retreat I went on.) I also have a couple of shirts and a cardigan from Everlane. (It's definitely not necessary to go as far as to buy exclusively men's clothing, but I found this to better suit my preferences.)

My other professional outfit.

In figuring out what to wear for interviews, I also acquired a more out-there outfit that I also wear for professional situations, but was never brave enough to wear for an interview. The outfit centers around a pair of black Rebecca Taylor pants that are what I consider to be a sartorial parody of men's suit pants (photo here). (I acquired them from Nordstrom Rack online for ~$100 and had them tailored for something under $100). I wear them with a loose-fitting silk button-down (I have one from Everlane and one from a thrift store from the 80s) and pointy John Fluevog flats. (The pants need to be paired with something more feminine than oxfords. John Fluevog is, by the way, a great shoe designer if you want interesting, functional shoes with an edge. Unfortunately, the shoes are usually a bit too aggressively stylish for a job interview.)

Looking professorly with my former professor.

Here's a summary of the main advice points:

• What you wear matters.
• Male mentors don't always give the most helpful fashion advice.
• It's possible to wear clothes you like that are also professional, even if you are a woman.

Of course, there are more ideal worlds in which things are less gendered and/or people accept people who have different fashion orientations. (And one would hope that the dismissals of these women's appearance doesn't completely invalidate their professional achievements.) Until then, it remains a fun game for women in male-dominated fields to navigate the narrow space of fashion choices available to us. Would love to hear what other women do.

My Minimal Travel Core

Traveling is an important part of being an academic. It's an incredible privilege to be able to go all over the world to places like Fredrick, Maryland*, where I am right now. Travel is also a difficult part of the job. Having to fly around and be immediately brilliant everywhere you land can be exhausting. In graduate school, I liked to think about conference and related travel as "practice" for the "real" job, when I would have to do the same thing at much higher frequency. In the eight-ish hours I spent after leaving my home before arriving at my hotel, I had some time to think about what I've learned.

During travel practice, I've come to see work-travel as a constraint optimization problem. Having a good work-travel experience is all about finding the minimal set of things I need to be happy away from home and satisfying those constraints given the other constraints imposed by having to fly and be away from home.  Finding a good minimal core may involve training yourself to have fewer constraints in general. (For instance, travel has become easier ever since I stopped using shampoo or face wash. But these are stories for another time.)

What I've learned is that for me, having a good time while traveling is all about ensuring that my body has as similar conditions as possible to when I'm home in terms of food, hydration, and activity. For sleeping, I also try to replicate my home sleep environment as much as possible. After much iteration, I have developed the following minimal core for traveling:

1. Food. Ever since I realized how much eating at the right times improves my life, I  avoid going anywhere without carrying backup food. I usually have more than three meals a day, so I try to bring along 1-2 bars (my current favorite is Kind bars) and fruit. Trail Mix is also nice.
2. Moisturizer. I used to take it as a given that flying is bad for your skin. Ever since I found the right moisturizers I realized this is not the case. My current system is to moisturize my face before short flights (I like Skoah's face kream) and to apply a light mask for longer flights (I like Skoah's hydradrew mask). What do you know, moisturizer combats plane-induced dryness the same way it combats any other kind of dryness. Moisturizing the body is also helpful.
3. Exercise clothes. I've realized that I have a lot more trouble getting to sleep and staying asleep when I haven't been sufficiently active physically. I switched to minimal running shoes (I run with New Balance Minimuses) partly because they are easier to pack.
4. Yoga mat. I purchased the super light, foldable Manduka travel mat when I was living in San Francisco one summer, needed a yoga mat, and was too cheap to buy the non-travel version. I've found this to be one of the best purchases I've ever made. I pretty much take it on every trip, including those that are only 1-2 nights. Even if I don't do a full yoga session, I usually spend some time stretching every day and this is nice for that. Stretching is especially useful if I've spent the day sitting on planes or in meetings.
5. Lacrosse ball. My former massage therapist introduced me to the usefulness of lacrosse balls in working out knots. Especially if you wreck your body daily using computers, I highly recommend you try it--it's great. (For non-travel I've started using the Soma system, which I also recommend.)
6. Eye cover and ear plugs. I always find these helpful, but if you are sensitive to noise but live in a quiet place you might find these useful for travel too. The eye cover is less important if you are staying in a hotel. (Light matters! My former roommate acquired blackout curtains after he observed the improvement in my sleeping-in abilities after my acquisition of good curtains.)
7. Backup alarm clock. I've stopped traveling with this little guy as much, but I tend to get nervous that my phone will die and/or my poor knowledge of electronics will cause me to set my hotel clock wrong, so I feel better if I have a small battery-powered backup clock. This is the one I have.

Here are some other things I've learned over the years:

• It helps to trick myself into drinking enough water. If I take long flights I'll buy a huge bottle of expensive airport water (and sometimes multiple bottles) to guilt myself into drinking it all. 
  
• Temperature matters a lot while sleeping. I observed that temperature is the biggest external factor to negatively affect my sleep. It's not that hard to get the temperature right in a hotel room and can make a huge difference.
• Hunger and fatigue are only feelings. Sure, hunger and fatigue are supposed to be useful signals, but they are less useful when we are yanking ourselves from one place on earth and zooming ourselves to places very far away. I've found it really helps to force myself to eat and/or exercise a sufficient amount before sleeping.

After reading this post, you may come to the same conclusion that my frequent travel companion Kate did after we had already taken several trips together: "Jean, you are secretly high maintenance, but you take care of yourself." I firmly believe that with the right amount of thought and iteration, even the pickiest of people can be as happy and functional while traveling as they are at home. Would love to hear about your minimal cores to explore this hypothesis!

* I told some of you I was going to Fredricksburg, Virginia. Was off by a few dozen miles, sorry.