The ‘Out The Door’ rant

I’ve been writing a chapter draft over the Easter holidays, which prompted me to think about finishing.

I don’t know about you, but I love the editing stage because it means my article or chapter is nearly done and I will shortly have another achievement to list on my CV. I know that sounds boringly pragmatic and instrumental, but there it is. While I have a deep love of scholarship and a healthy interest in ideas, my urge to write is driven by an interest in career maintenance – pure and simple.

In his superb book “Writing for social scientists” (which should be renamed “Writing for everyone”), Howard Becker talks about the importance of being the kind of writer who can get stuff “Out The Door”. He suggests writers need to think more like companies who make gadgets like phones and computers. Electronic consumer goods companies have similar problems to writers, but they have shipping schedules they must stick to if they want to stay in business.

The engineers will want to delay shipping until the product matchs the vision in their heads, but the marketing people will be happy with ‘good enough’. Even if the new gadget is rough around the edges, the marketing people will still make the engineers get it Out The Door. According to Becker the logic of the marketing people is simple: if it sells, there will be money for to build the next version. The next version will be be better, but, meanwhile, this one will do (some companies are great at doing this and still turning a massive profit).

Your success as a ‘company’ who can get that writing Out The Door will be affected by your temperament as a researcher. If you are the kind of researcher who has a curiosity problem, as I talked about a couple of weeks ago, your ability to get it Out The Door can be hampered by a tendency to get bored. I have a friend who struggled mightily with her Masters degree because she hated working over what she called ‘cold cases’ – her chapter drafts. Once the ideas were on paper she claimed her curiosity had been satisfied and she was ready to move on. This is where your marketing department needs to call you in for a performance review: that attitude is not going to shift enough product to keep the company afloat.

Sometimes however, boredom is not the dark side of a creative turn of mind, but a lack of commitment to seeing the idea through. Just like the idea of having a baby is different from the reality of wiping its bottom 6 times a day, thinking about ideas is a lot less work than writing about them. The problem with intellectual labour is, although it can be hard, the effects of the struggle are not visible. My very favourite scene in the sitcom “Big Bang Theory” is where two of the characters, Sheldon and Raj, are collaborating on a physics problem. The scene consists of jump cuts of the two scientists, staring at equations on a whiteboard, while the theme to the movie ‘Rocky’ plays. The scene perfectly captures the inner experience of intellectual struggle vs the outer appearance of … well, pretty much nothing.

For all our labouring in the footnote salt mines, there will be no callouses on our hands, so it can be hard to see your commitment problem for what it really is: work avoidance. If you realise your will is flagging, your inner marketing department has to call in pizza for the engineering department and get them doing overtime. Promise yourself a reward for completion – chocolate, TV, a walk in the park -  whatever it takes to keep Mr or Ms Bottom in chair town long enough to get it Out The Door.

If you couple a lack of commitment with a tendency to excessive self critique you will be in real trouble. I have seen some of the brightest people fail to get a PhD because they measure their efforts against the best The Literature has to offer. Unfortunately the best work is often written by academics with years and years of experience of their craft; no matter how hard you try, you will never catch up with them. These people are the most likely to fall victim to the seductive whispering of the inner engineering department: “Just one more week and it will be perfect – we promise”. This is when your marketing department needs to step in, take the project out of your hands and ship the bastard anyway.

For some lucky people doing a PhD is an intellectual luxury, but for most of us plebs it isn’t. Many of you will soon be out there with a newly minted PhD looking for work; some of you will be there already. We can rail against the quality and quantity metrics which dominate academia as much as we like, but they are a fact of life for now. In my opinion it’s only going to become increasingly competitive. As Becker points out: people will judge you on what you have done – not the ideas you have in your head. Finished theses, chapters and journal articles are the only tangible proof of your invisible labours in the footnote mines.

So remember: your inner engineering department does not always have your best interests at heart. You may not like your inner marketing department, but when they do their job properly you won’t go broke. Repeat after me: “Perfect is the enemy of Done”. Speaking of which – I’m off to finish editing that chapter now. The marketing people are nagging at me to “ship it already”

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Easter Break

It’s Easter holiday time in Australia this week, so The Thesis Whisperer is having a brief break until next Thursday.

As usual I will be spending some of the holiday catching up on my writing…  It’s good to set a goal, so I am committing to finishing my chapter on creative thinking for the next edition of “Doctorates Downunder: Keys to successful doctoral study in Australia and New Zealand”.

How about you? Do you have a chapter or piece of writing you want to get done? (in between eating all that chocolate of course!). Share it in the comments if you like.

See you next week!

Learning to fly

This guest post is by Jess Drake who is doing her PhD in soil science at the Australian National University. In this post Jess offers some advice for the next time your supervisor says “Just do it”.

At some point on our thesis journey, we get comments from our supervisors like:

“I know you will work it out”;
“Why are you bugging me with this?”, or even:
“Just keep going. You will get it.”

These comments are often at a critical point where you really need some help, and they can seem somewhat unthoughtful.

I remember the sense of dread that came over me the first time I had a supervisor say “Just do it”. I felt like a bird being pushed out of the nest, forced to fly and fend for myself. I started asking myself “Now what am I supposed to do? I can’t do this by myself! I just have no idea! Why don’t they care? And why aren’t they listening to me?” It took me awhile to realise that when a supervisor says this, they are actually being positive and helpful. In fact, that jump out of the nest could actually be a major step in your research life…

Chirping baby birds

The relationship between students and supervisors is almost like a flock of hungry baby birds chirping wildly at their parent. Students are always crying for attention. Supervisors are flat out feeding them with information. But supervisors are very busy people; juggling students, courses, research and administration. Comments like these from a very busy supervisor may simply be due to the lack of time to help a student with a fairly difficult problem. Try to ask them again, via email or at an arranged meeting or when they have more time. If you still get the same response… then…

Perhaps you have become an adolescent and you can almost fly on your own.

We often forget that our supervisors don’t spend all day doing the same thing as us. Maybe your supervisor needs more time to think about the problem? Maybe they aren’t entirely sure how they can help?

Try explaining the issue in a different way. Take them to the lab and show them. Write it down. Talk through the problem with them. Use diagrams. And – most of all – be patient. Spending some time on communicating your thoughts is helpful for your supervisor and to yourself. Once you have it right the insight can be used for your thesis, papers and presentations.

Perhaps it is time to leave the nest?

Still asking for help and not getting fed? Your supervisor may be gently letting you know that they can no longer help you with that part of your research. They have realised that you are capable, smart and possibly surpassed their technical knowledge on the subject. They want you to leave the nest and fly on your own. Now, you are the person who can answer the question.

Living alone and in a flock

Terrified, shocked and doubtful are some of the emotions we can feel when we get pushed out of the nest. All of a sudden have to fend for ourselves. But our supervisor has been carefully nurturing us and making sure we have all the tools to survive in the research wilderness. And when we don’t, there is a flock of other researchers we can ask.

So when you are faced with eviction from the nest and problems you feel like you can’t solve ask yourself: ‘how important is it for me to know this thing to finish my thesis?’ – Can I write a thesis without it? Can I alter my thesis question? Has this problem become a new question? Try writing a mini-research proposal where treat the problem like another research question. Give yourself a set amount of time (2 weeks, 1 month…) to try and answer the question. If you can’t, try another tactic.

Contact experts in the field and ask them for advice – it may seem scary, but I have only ever heard of 100% positive replies to students who were asking for help. Being part of the broader scholarly dialogue, sans supervisor, means learning to seize at any opportunity to get your work peer-reviewed. If you don’t feel up to submitting a journal article or conference paper, ask post-docs, other academics, friends and experts to review your work. This also opens up avenues of collaboration and job opportunities.

Finally, don’t be afraid to make a decision – even if it is wrong, you can still write about it in your thesis!

So don’t be afraid, worried, angry or depressed when you hear ‘Just do it’. It may be that you know more than you think, that you are ready to go it alone and it is time to be your own researcher.

(Many thanks to Helen King for her thoughts about this post)

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How a librarian can be a postgrad’s best friend

Since I haven’t posted on the Thesis Whisperer before, I’d better introduce myself by explaining that I’m a music librarian of many years’ standing who has recently completed a PhD.  This means I have useful insights into LibraryLand and into doctoral study.

By way of helping you get to know me, I thought I’d share with you my most embarrassing possession: the “First Class Librarian” mug that my mum bought me a couple of years ago.  It tells the world that I’m: “Proud to be a public serving, friendly, book stamping, softly spoken, helpful, well read librarian”. I think it’s the “book stamping” that annoys me most -  next, of course,  to the “softly spoken” epithet.  Fetch me my twinset and pearls!  Truth to tell, it wouldn’t matter if I spoke at a normal volume, given the amount of noise our undergrads make, but I digress.

I very rarely stamp books.  I do write and give papers on 19th century Scottish song-collecting and cultural nationalism.  This might be a little extreme, but I think it demonstrates that you shouldn’t underestimate your librarian!  So I’ve established that I am a highly qualified and exceptionally helpful college librarian.  How can librarians like me help you?

Here’s five ways:

Let us do the looking for you

We academic librarians love digging out information.  No, we won’t do your research for you (though I very nearly did, when an Honours student made the mistake of asking for help with a subject very close to my own thesis – I was like a Jack Russell once I got my teeth into that particular query!). We’re great at sourcing obscure materials, running inter library loans to ground, or interrogating databases.  Or, indeed, showing you how to run effective search strategies for yourself.

Give us time to do the looking

There are ways you can help your librarian to help you – it’s not rocket science, but might save you both some time. Please give us enough warning when you need books, articles or other items to be sourced.  I work with musicians – maybe no other breed is worse for giving insufficient notice when something isn’t in stock!  If the answer to: “And when do you need this trio sonata?”, is “Well, the first rehearsal is on Thursday,”  there’s not much I can do to help you on a late Tuesday afternoon … Similarly, if something’s got to be purchased, we honestly do our best, but – well, you know how long Amazon takes to deliver.  They take just the same amount of time delivering to our address as yours.

Tell us what you are really looking for

Make sure the information you give us about your reference is as precise as it can be.  Pass on all the bibliographic details you can. It can help to tell us where you found the reference or what you think you need it for.  Sometimes this gives us clues as to where to start looking.

You’re probably smart enough to realise this, but be wary of information sourced on the net.  In my library, not so long ago, I was asked for three items for a first year undergraduate essay.  One was an article in an Italian journal. Sourcing it was going to be expensive and time-consuming; had the student looked closely at the title of the article she would have realised it wasn’t going to help with her essay and might well not have arrived on time anyway.  Another reference she wanted was a book still being written!

Where had she found these references?  Wikipedia.

Look, sometimes Wikipedia is great; other times not so much.  It depends on the author of the article and the standard of their citations.  I suspect this entry was written by the author of the not-yet-written book, so it’s unlikely the information would have been impartial.

Let us help you from the beginning…

Many people don’t realise they can ask their librarian for help with maintaining a bibliography, early on in their research career. A librarian can help you get all the information in there, reasonably formatted, so that it’s less effort compiling the thesis bibliography later.  They may be able to help with a range of bibliographic software, whether EndNote, RefWorks, Zotero or something else.  They are probably the best guide to what your college or university officially offers you access to.

… don’t ask us to fix all your problems at the end!

Once you’ve got somewhere to store your references, use it!  (Sorry to shout!)  Then you won’t be like the rather subdued Honours student who came to ask for help working out just which book her quotation had originally come from.  She’d copied the quote, but not kept a note of the source.  Oops!  We did work it out between us, but on this occasion Googlebooks couldn’t help: it took much more detective work.

So that’s my top five tips for getting the most out of your college librarian. If I had the chance to re-word my mug, come to think of it, it would look something like this:-

“Proud to be a very helpful, totally committed and well-informed librarian … in my next life I’ll be either a detective or a clairvoyant!”

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Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, here I am stuck in the middle … of two supervisors who don’t agree

Having two supervisors is becoming increasingly common. If, like me, you did your PhD within a college of the University Of London, UK you will automatically get two supervisors. This is done for a range of reasons including; supervisor commitments, breadth of knowledge / experience, pastoral reasons (so you don’t end up needing my much publicised divorce post) etc.

Most universities that go down the two supervisor’s route do so because they believe it to be beneficial for the student however, it can also lead to an interesting set of issues, especially if they don’t agree.

Disagreements between supervisors can occur over a range of issues however, most commonly they relate to differences of opinion over the content of your thesis and that nature of supervision. This can lead to the student feeling they are being pulled in two opposite directions not knowing what to do or who to agree with. In this post I give you my top tips for managing dual supervisor disagreements.

Don’t take disagreements personally … You may have two supervisors because of it’s your institutions ‘way’ of doing things, or because you are undertaken interdisciplinary work which requires a breadth of expertise or maybe your supervisors are both part time.

They will both bring a great deal both conceptually and methodologically to your PhD experience however, they will probably both have very different ways of doing a PhD and approaching your topic which are rooted in their own experiences of working with students and maybe even, of working with each other.

It is very unlikely that you personally will be the cause of any disagreements; they are more than likely going to relate to something outside of your supervisory arrangement. I have viewed cases where two academics who didn’t like each other were brought together to supervise a PhD, the majority of their disagreements resulted from personal and professional differences / rivalries nothing to do with the student. This is not an ideal scenario but it can happen they key is not letting it get to you.

Remember, it’s YOUR PhD … so what you write about i.e. the content should be driven by you. This is easier said in the social sciences, arts and humanities etc where the subject of your PhD is generally one you have come to yourself, but even in the hard sciences the very nature of or purpose of the PhD is for you to become an independent researcher.

Thus while your supervisors can guide you, stopping you from making horrendous mistakes, it is your work and it will be you who will have to defend it in the viva (if your institution has them). As such I recommend you draw from both supervisors, if they have differences of opinion on how you approach an issue, consider both and then either go with what you prefer or if possible take from both opinions to form your own framework. As long as you can defend the position you took the majority of supervisors would be happy.

Be inclusive & treat them equally … It’s very tempting at times to play one off against the other; I know I’ve been there! One supports an idea, the other doesn’t, don’t use their disagreements or differences as a means for gaining something, as believe me the only thing you will gain is a headache.

Try, where possible, to reach a compromise that you can all work with. Do not sideline one supervisor if they don’t agree with you, again it will come back to bite you, you never know you may need them to help you out, especially for references. Try and conduct as many meetings as possible with both supervisors together, that way everyone is included, everyone’s point of view is heard and you can work out how to move forward so you are all working in harmony – in theory. It also helps to cc both supervisors into emails in order to keep everyone singing from the same hymn sheet.

Disagreements aren’t always negative … in some cases positive developments can occur out of disagreements between supervisors. Both of mine disagreed about the nature of the ‘field’ and ‘international fieldwork’ one supported the traditional go overseas for 9 months strategy the other didn’t this went back and forth for a number of months so in the end I made short traditional visits and developed my web 2.0 skills to create a field site in cyberspace where I also conducted my research.

Had I not become engaged in social media for that very reason I wouldn’t be writing this post for you today. Maybe your supervisor’s disagreements can get your creative juices flowing and lead you to develop a useful compromise that will benefit your own personal / professional development in the long run.

If their disagreements are hampering your work … then you may need outside help. It maybe that you can bring the two supervisors together and say please sort this out but, as illustrated earlier, if it boils down to personal and or professional rivalries you may need to discuss it with your PhD tutor or Head of Department.

The key is to be sensitive in how and who you approach. You should know your department set up well enough to be able to make the decisions, if not Head of Department is a default ‘go to’ person. It’s really not your job to sort this kind of thing out, you have enough today and hopefully, if you have followed my advice from the post on maintaining a happy supervisory relationship then you should get on with them both, their disagreements should be between them. I would expect most supervisors to be professional and to be working to support you as a student so hopefully you won’t need to step in.

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Don’t type “format c:”

Lately I have been asked by various people to help them make better use of technology in their academic work – or at least write a post about it.

It seems I have developed a reputation as the ‘technology expert’ and, lately, the ‘social media expert’  in my workplace. This is not a new experience; throughout my working life I have been the ‘go to’ person when people have technology problems and new ideas. I find this curious, because this is not how I think of myself. I will admit to being an ‘early adopter’ and being fascinated by the Shineys (new gadgets). I’m always looking for new ways to use computers in my work, but I have spent my life around true geeks. I have high standards as to what ‘geek’ really means and it usually involves being able to program UNIX.

My dad studied to be a dye house chemist in the 1960s, but  became a computer programmer in the late 70′s . His first job involved looking after mainframes, so I spent my childhood playing making necklaces out of punched cards. But even though computer geekery is clearly in my blood, I have never become a proper computer nerd. Despite a brief addiction to Zork in the 80′s, I never really got into computer games, nor did I display much aptitude for computer programming – much to my father’s disappointment (I did marry a computer programmer though, which cheered the old man up a bit).

So when I get asked to share the knowledge with my colleagues – which I am always happy to do – I try to explain that it is not software proficiency which makes me ‘geeky’, but the attitude to technology I developed in my childhood. I think this attitude is best summed up by the conversation I had with my father when he sat me down in front of our family’s first PC, sometime in the early 80s. As I recall it went something like this:

Dad: “We’re going to learn ‘Basic’. Type: 10 print “hello world”
Me: “What if I hurt it?”
Dad: “What do you mean?”
Me: “What if I kill its brain?”
Dad: “You can’t kill it. It’s not alive. It doesn’t have a brain”
Me: “Then how does it, you know – do stuff – if it doesn’t have a brain?”
Dad: “The computer is stupid. It only does what you tell it to do. The only way you can hurt it is to type “format c:”
(pause)
Dad: “please don’t do that by the way”
Me: “OK.  Can I play Zork now?”

In retrospect, this conversation was almost the most important I have ever had with my father. He gave me the confidence to face new software without fear. I jump in and fiddle around, break some stuff and eventually work out how to use it – with the comforting knowledge that nothing I do (except typing “format c:”) will cause lasting damage.  Technology isn’t scary, but it isn’t that special either; computers are stupid – humans are smart. When it comes to ‘working more effectively with technology” I try to think of the problem before the tool – and be open to the idea that technology is not always the answer.

This approach works best if you take the time to really understand the nature of your problems. Let’s look three problems you definitely have and how they might be solved with technology:

The Information Problem

Researchers have to collect information from various sources: books, journal articles, interviews, experiments, artefacts and so on. Storing this information and finding it again is obviously a problem, but there’s a larger problem lurking: how to make sense of the information. Specifically, how to make connections between pieces of information and your own thoughts in order to come up with original ideas.

I’ll admit to being old school and keeping a journal, but I rarely transcribe what I write there into the computer, or even look at it again to be honest with you. I used to worry about this, but I’ve come to accept that the act of writing is important to helping me to remember and understand what I hear or read.  The information I wrestle with most is in electronic form – there’s so damn much of it and bookmarking is inadequate as a way of retrieving and using it.

One way I solve this problem is Evernote, a free online database application. You can store random webpages, pdfs, images and notes which appear as little thumbnails in the viewer; these can be arranged and viewed in different ways. Evernote is a ‘cloud app’ which means I can use it from any computer or my phone, which is handy, but it’s key advantage is that you can ‘tag’ ideas with keywords. This means you can store multiple sorts of information in ways which are meaningful to you – and start to see the connections between them.

The Reading Problem

Researchers have to read. A lot. Again the problem is twofold: managing the sheer volume references, and reading them efficiently.

Most researchers use bibliographic software to store references (if you don’t, you really should) and most universities support Endnote. People tell me Zotero is better and I see the appeal, but I like Mendeley; mostly because it works a bit like itunes (I like being able to make ‘play lists’).

Reading efficiently is an art. I’ll admit to ‘surface reading’ most of it and ‘deep reading’ only what’s interesting, but it’s still an enormous task. If you take it seriously, reading inevitably leaks into every corner of your life. I read on public transport, in waiting rooms, playgrounds, while cooking and even at parties (ok – boring ones). Making your reading material portable is solved by printing it out – but then the article is ‘off line’ and the notes can get lost. This is where an e-reader and something like “instapaper” or Calibre can be useful. Mr Thesis Whisperer recently bought me a Kindle (which I LOVE), both these programs will make the webpage into a kindle document, which I can then write notes on.

The Writing Problem

I’ve written previously about Scrivener, which I think addresses many problems of research writing better than MS Word. However the other problem with writing is that it can be arduous – I have tendinitis from my PhD and a sore back. I find it physically painful to write at times. On the advice of Paul Gruba and @sadistician I have started using the built in speech recognition capabilities in Windows to talk my first draft straight into MS Word (thank you Microsoft – you still totally rock). I then transfer the text into scrivener. This doesn’t solve the writing/pain problem entirely, but it’s a significant improvement.

So how about you? Do you use technology to solve these kinds of problems? Or do you have ‘analog’ techniques which are just as effective? I’d love to hear about them.

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An approach to time management as a metaphor for my life

This guest post is from Linda Kirkman who has taught secondary health education, lectured in education and public health, and worked in women’s health promotion and community development. Currently Linda is a PhD candidate in Health Science at La Trobe University, researching baby boomers in ‘friends with benefits relationships’. Linda sent me this post in response to a request for feedback on my ‘writing 1000 words a day’ post. I liked it so much I asked her if I could publish it.

I have given a lot of thought to how I manage my time and what works best. I was going to write, ‘what works’ but have to reluctantly acknowledge that I have yet to find anything that works really well.

The PhD journey is a personal one as much as an academic one, and I’m discovering that self discipline and time management are part of the things I have to learn. Every day I set goals, write lists, resolve to do better than yesterday, and every day I criticise myself for not getting done what I planned. If I have a productive time I tell everyone and celebrate it, but hate being asked ‘How’s the thesis going?’ because rarely can I honestly say, “Really well’. I’m a literalist: I take people’s interest at face value, and can’t lie.

Motivational speakers and high achieving people have inspired me to resolve to get up early every day and pack as much in as I can. What I’ve learned from that is that I need eight hours sleep and am not an early morning person. Attempts to be up early have brought short term smugness, and poorly productive fatigue for the rest of the day. I’ll never be the kind of grown-up who does everything to a conventional routine, which is probably why this cartoon by Hyperbole and a half really struck a chord with me. I’ve also realised that forcing intellectual things doesn’t produce a good outcome. An idea needs time to percolate and, when it is ready, the conclusion and writing are good. I freely acknowledge the luxury and privilege I have as a PhD student to take this time to get my ideas right – I wish major decision makers, like politicians, were able to do the same.

In my non-PhD life (if such a thing exists, it’s in my head all the time) I’m a carer and a casual university tutor and lecturer. Aside from random medical appointments and timetabled classes, my time is my own to manage. A sort of routine has evolved, with social networking and physical activity being the main markers. When I wake up I check my Twitter feed and Facebook. Twitter is my ongoing professional development. There are lots of links to read, usually about intellectual things: how to manage time effectively; great library sites; what’s new in sexuality education and research; or new software. Some I email to myself to follow up later. Facebook is much more social, and I love the buzz when a notification comes that someone has responded to one of my posts.

Next I deliver tea and the paper to the person I care for, eat breakfast, and go for a four kilometre walk, setting out between eight and nine, then shower, dress and head off to the post grad lab at uni or my study at home. Once at my computer the carefully planned lists are forgotten about, and I follow up the emails I sent myself, research new articles for my lit review, plan a lecture, have coffee, and troubleshoot the IT problems of others in the lab. By about four I’m often getting into my stride, and working more effectively, but somehow it doesn’t often produce actual writing. I hate having to leave at the end of the day, either because I’m going to be locked into the building (swipe card problems) or because I have to go home and cook dinner. The end of the day, just before sleep, I check the Twitter and Facebook feeds again.

Conversations with other PhD students have revealed that I’m not the only one who takes a while to get going, and often have a burst of things coming together later in the afternoon, even if I’ve been at my desk since morning. It’s been reassuring to talk to other students, and follow the Twitter hashtag of #phdchat, and know that I’m not alone in the struggle to take control of myself and my life in the PhD journey.

So it made sense when @thesiswhisperer tweeted a link to her post “How to write 1000 words a day (and not go bat shit crazy)“, and recommended spending less time at the desk, reminding us of the two hour rule. You will probably only have “two really good, creative writing hours in the day – two hours in which new ‘substantive’ ideas will make their way onto the page”. I misread the post as writing being the first thing you do in the day, not as being the first thing you do when “Mr or Ms Bottom makes a trip to Chair Town”. When I really tried to make writing the first thing I did in the day, and did manage some output. But my exercise routine got lost, and I found myself at my desk, still in my nightie, at 11.30 am, waiting to shower after the walk, then worrying about the heat, and stronger sun exposure of walking later, so didn’t walk at all.

As it happens, this post has been written when “Ms Bottom makes a trip to Chair Town”, but after my walk and dressing for the day. The ideas were developed while I was walking, and the podcast coming through my headphones was largely ignored. I stopped on the way to write notes on my iPhone. I had the insight that my approach to time management, with no definite answers, is a reflection on my life: with the conclusion that I’m random, full of enthusiasm, but still not entirely sure where I’m headed.

But, @thesiswhisperer, I have found today that following my usual patterns, but changing them to do the substantive writing when first sitting down, not just first of all before anything, has meant I’ve produced this response to your request for feedback. I’ll try the same technique tomorrow. Thank you for prompting me to reflect, it has been really interesting, and also got me to re-read your original post and get the suggestions right. By the way, this 1,000 words took about 70 minutes. Now, I have washing to hang out, marking to do and a PhD to attend to.

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