I was recently thinking about my daily routine at Berkeley, because I always feel like I am never getting enough work done. I wonder how much of my schedule is common among other graduate students (or among people in other, vastly unrelated careers). Let’s compare! Here’s my typical weekday:

5:45am: Wake up, shower, make and eat breakfast, which is usually three scrambled pastured eggs, two cups of berries, and a head of raw broccoli. Pack up a big-ass salad to bring with me to work.

6:45am: Leave for work. I usually drive — it takes ten minutes at this time — though at least one day of the week I’ll take the bus.

7:00am: Arrive at Soda Hall. Angrily turn off the lights in the open areas outside of my office after finding out that the people there last night left them on after leaving. Put my salad in the refrigerator. Unlock the door to my shared office, turn on laptop, pull out research and classwork notes. Check calendar and review my plan for the day.

7:15am to 9:15am: Try to make some headway on research. Check latest commits on github for John Canny‘s BID Data Project. Pull out my math notes and double-check related code segment from last night’s work to make sure it’s working the way it should be. Make some modifications and run some tests. Find out that only one of my approaches gets even a reasonable result, but it still pales in comparison to the benchmark I’ve set. Pound my fist on the table in frustration, but fortunately no one else notices because I’m still the only one on this floor.

9:30am: Realize that a lecture for my Computer Vision class is about to start. Fortunately, this is Berkeley, where lectures strangely start ten minutes after their listed time, but I need to get there early to secure a front row seat so I can see the sign language interpreters easily. (I can always ask people to move if I have to, and they probably will, but it’s best if I avoid the hassle.)

9:40am to 11:00am: Jitendra Malik lectures about computer vision and edge detectors. I concentrate as hard as I can while rapidly switching my attention between Jitendra, his slides, and my interpreters. Make mental notes of which concepts will be useful for my homework due the following week.

11:00am: Class is finished. Attempt to walk around in the huge crowd of entering/leaving students. Decide that since I don’t have anyone to eat lunch with, I’ll grab something from nearby Euclid street to take to my office.

11:15am to 11:45am: Eat lunch by myself in my office, wishing that there was someone else there. Browse Wikipedia-related pages for Computer Vision concepts from lecture today. Get tripped up by some of the math and vow that I will allocate time this weekend to re-review the concepts.

noon to 2:00pm: Try to get back to research regarding the BID Data Project. Write some more code and run some tests. Get some good but not great results, and wish that I could be better, knowing that John Canny would have been able to do the same work I do in a third of the time. Skim and re-read various research papers that might be useful for my work.

2:00pm to 3:00pm: Take a break from research to have a meeting with another Berkeley professor who I hope to work with. Discuss some research topics and what would be good but not impossible problems to focus on. Tell him that I will do this and that before our next meeting, and conclude on a good note.

3:15pm to 4:30pm: Arrive back in my office. Get my big-ass salad from the refrigerator and drizzle it with some Extra Virgin Olive Oil (I keep a bottle of it on my desk). My office-mate is here, so I strike up a quick chat. We talk for a while and then get back to work. My mood has improved, but I suddenly feel tired so end up napping by mistake for about fifteen minutes. Snap out of it later and try to get a research result done. End up falling short by only concluding that a certain approach will simply not work out.

4:30pm to 5:00pm: Decide to take a break from research frustration to make some progress on my Computer Vision homework. Get stuck on one of the easier physics-related questions and panic. Check the class Piazza website, and breathe a sigh of relief upon realizing that another classmate already asked the question (and got a detailed response from the professor). Click the “thanks” button on Piazza, update my LaTeX file for the homework, and read some more of the class notes.

5:00pm to 5:30pm: Take a break to check the news. Check Google Calendar just in case I didn’t forget to go somewhere today. Check email for the first time today. Most are from random mailing lists. In particular, there are 17 emails regarding current or forthcoming academic talks by visiting or current researchers, but they would have been a waste of time for me to attend anyway due to lack of related background information, and the short notice means it can be hard to get interpreting services. Some of those talks also provide lunches, but I hate going to lunches without having someone already with me, since it’s too hard to break into the social situation. Delete most of the email, respond to a few messages, and soon my inbox is quite clean. (The advantage of being at the bottom of the academic and social totem poles is that I don’t get much email, so I don’t suffer from the Email Event Horizon.)

5:45pm to 6:30pm: Try to break out of “email mood” to get some more progress done on homework. Rack my brain for a while and think about what these questions are really asking me to do. Check Piazza and Wikipedia again. Make some brief solution sketches for the remaining problems.

6:40pm to 7:00pm: Hit a good stopping point, so drive back home. (Still not in the greatest mood, but it’s better than it was before my 2:00pm meeting.) At this point most cars have disappeared from Hearst parking lot, which makes it easier for me to exit. Cringe as my car exits the poorly-paved roadway to the garage, but enjoy the rest of the ride back home as the roads aren’t as congested as I anticipated.

7:15pm: Think about whether I want to go to Berkeley’s Recreational Sports Facility to do some barbell lifting. It’s either going to be a “day A” session (5 sets of 5 for the squat, 5 sets of 5 for the bench) or a “day B” session (3 sets of 5 for the squat, 5 sets of 5 for the overhead press, and 1 set of 5 for the deadlift). I didn’t go yesterday, which means I have to go either now or tomorrow night. After a brief mental war, conclude that I’m too exhausted to do some lifting and mark down “RSF Session” on my calendar for tomorrow night.

7:30pm to 8:00pm: Cook and eat dinner, usually some salad (spring mix, spinach, arugula, carrots, peppers, etc.), more berries (strawberries or blueberries) a half-pound of meat (usually wild Alaskan salmon), and a protein shake. Browse random Internet sites while I eat in my room or out on my apartment’s table.

8:30pm to bedtime: Attempt to get some more work done, but end up getting making no progress, so pretend to be productive by refreshing email every five minutes and furiously responding to messages. Vow that I will be more productive tomorrow, and set my alarm clock an hour before I really should be waking up.