I kept a research journal as a blog while I was writing my doctoral thesis. I was teaching Masters students who were writing a thesis themselves at the time, and I was therefore interested in being accountable, authentic, to model learning in public.
In case anyone wants to go back to those distant shores and see what it was really like for me, feel free: http://reasearchdiary.blogspot.com.au
I wouldn’t go there if I were you though, I kind of terrify myself.
I just finished the first full draft of the Writing Well and Being Well book, and that means it’s time to go through the structural edits.
This blog post documents how I did it this time.
“Deadline juice” is a term I just made up when talking to a student the other day, but it’s pretty apt. It describes the eustress response to an upcoming deadline—a healthy (yes short term appropriate stress responses are healthy!) jolt of adrenaline when your energy is up, your focus is up, your speed is up.
When I was part of the La Trobe RED team, and we were running our Accelerated Completion Programme for late-stage PhD candidates, we got people to do a thing we called a ‘writing audit’, where you counted up what was in all the sections of your PhD, and then worked out what was still missing. It could be scary, or a massive relief, but either way it gave you a sense of where you actually were.
