In 2019-20 I was writing 3 books with other people (publication ranged from Nov 2019 to March 2021, but this does not reflect the writing or editing period of the books.) The books took between 9 months and 3 years to finish, and all of them overlapped in a great crash.
Focus is a skill you can learn, and there are some basic steps that can get you started. If you are supervising or advising someone who struggles with focus, you will also find this advice useful.
Are you a ‘Spreader’ or are you a ‘Stacker’? In your writing time, do you prefer to spread it out by writing a little bit every day, or to set aside a ‘writing day’ and stack up all your writing blocks in one go?
I cannot believe, after all my to-do list and planning your time blog posts, I’ve never actually talked about how to break down a big project, set goals and then plan to meet them: an essential aspect of doing a PhD thesis… Partly because when we teach this in a workshop we know there is so much diversity in the ways that different people achieve the same outcome
I recently re-read Cal Newport’s Deep Work in preparation for my new book on writing and wellbeing. And soon enough I started to notice that the people he uses as exemplars of doing deep work were … all pretty similar. By my reading, there are only two women in the book who are described as doing deep thinking. And yet, perhaps, ladies* would still like to do deep work.
You don’t get knocked down and bounce back stronger. At least not immediately.
Now that we have transitioned to working from home, and worked out some of the technical issues about making things we used to do face-to-face
When I started going to the gym (see Exercising Like a Girl parts 1 and 2), one of the things that was kind of weird,
A couple of people in my wider circle have recently asked me about how to get started on a PhD proposal. This advice is mostly
Someone whose work I really appreciate is Jo Van Every (@JoVanEvery). She has written a lot of blog posts (for example Juggling 101: Elements of
