Check In Week 1

Fighting the Borg. Or how to stay focused by working offline

I only vaguely realised the Borg was a Star Trek reference when the phrase ‘It’s like fighting the Borg!’ popped into my head as I was thinking about social media consumption and addiction. I googled it just now, right after I promised myself I was going to get started writing this blog post. Technically I could even say it is part of work, right? Googling for my blog is doing research! I also know it is one of the habits I was much, much stricter about when I was finishing my PhD: I was uncompromising. I didn’t work online at [...]

November 13th, 2023|

Writing in Small Chunks: Tips from a Party with Academics

When academics party, they party hard, this is common knowledge. It is of course, also the reason I said yes to an invitation to attend a party with academics. I hadn’t expected to be confronted with my own writing tips during this evening, although this is exactly what happened! In short: we danced, drank wine, and only talked about work a little tiny bit. Which in the case of talking about writing is a delight. The party was organized by a professor friend with two teenage daughters who had pleaded with their dad: it would have to be a dancing [...]

September 13th, 2023|

Feel like you’re underperforming? It’s not you! (It’s the system)

Sometimes I feel like a broken record when I am talking about writing a PhD: no matter what you may be struggling with, I am likely to reply: “It’s not you!” Most PhDs at some point or another think there must be something wrong with them (this once included myself), or with what they are doing, that otherwise they wouldn’t be struggling as much. Academia is a challenging environment to perform and feel well in, most of the time. It can be a relief to realise that it is not some character flaw on your part that is causing you [...]

February 28th, 2020|

What to Do When Writing Is Hard

This blog post came about after I had to produce a piece of writing on a subject new to me. I thought I would get it done easily in a couple of days. Ehm, not so. It took me a week-and-a half before I was satisfied. And there were quite a few moments while I was writing where I thought back at my PhD, because hey I remembered this feeling! The beginning where you sit down and think: oh, this is going to be so interesting. Then when that wears off the realisation that writing an authoritative piece on a [...]

December 19th, 2019|

Should I quit my PhD? Hitting a wall and answering the big questions

Have you read Joan Bolker’s “Writing your dissertation in 15 minutes a day”? I was reminded of a passage in that book when I was talking to a PhD researcher about whether or not to continue and finish the project, or alternatively drop the whole thing and embark on something entirely different. The passage in Bolker’s book goes as follows: “There’s another kind of hitting the wall that sometimes happens to thesis writers: you feel an impossible barrier between you and the finish line, the bottom falls out of your hopefulness and ambition, and your spirits border on despair and [...]

November 17th, 2019|

Five tips to feel more in control of your PhD

PhDs are slow and slippery projects, it is not at all uncommon for them to feel completely out of control, at some or many stages of the process. Feeling in control of what you are doing may be right up there at the top of your lists of wishes and wants! Feeling a lack of control is the twin sister of feeling helpless, and the two of them are not the cheeriest of company. A few tips to help dodging them: 1. PhDs are uncertain creatures The first thing to note is that feeling a lack of control is normal, [...]

September 22nd, 2019|