The second part of the ‘Books and Papers’ category is of course papers. That includes paper files, and any other paper stuff around the house. I thought this would be brief and breezy, but it turned into days of crushing agony. Read on. Files I tacked our household files on a Sunday afternoon. After implementing Read More…
Category: Work
Digital Declutter of My Writing Folder – Plus Some Thoughts about Marie Kondo’s Method
For the last three months, Mike has had to listen to my grumping about how much I am DYING to unpack and sort our things. You see, we are still waiting for them to arrive (which we now think should actually be soon). In the meantime I have had to exert my willpower not to Read More…
Writing Lessons from My Younger Self
I’ve recently been doing a little creative writing… In fact this was always my first love, but during my postgraduate degree days I’ve channeled that interest into academic writing, which is not as dissimilar as you might think. In revisiting the long trail of half-written fiction from my past, I’ve seen how much my writing Read More…
In Praise of Slow: A Book Review
Remember that I mentioned the slow food movement with reference to sourdough bread? It’s one of those things that I’d never heard of until recently, but once I heard it the first time suddenly it was cropping up everywhere. Hence, I read this book, which is about slow everything – the Slow movement, to be Read More…
What if Good Enough Were Good Enough?
About a month ago, a strange feeling came over me. It was a strange sort of happiness with the idea of my thesis being good enough. Now, for years I have ended many a project with the reminder to myself, ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect.’ So I have handed in many an imperfect, but still Read More…
Getting Things Done on a Thesis (Coffee Break)
Here I am, taking a coffee break in the midst of my first round of thesis proofreading. I wanted to discuss something I mentioned a long time ago, namely how I’ve been trying to implement some new strategies for organising my PhD work, based on the book Getting Things Done. I’ve discussed this book at length already Read More…
Five Things I’ve Learned from My PhD
I don’t often write about my work here, mainly since a large purpose of this blog, for me, is to give me an outlet to write about other things. But I thought I should give it a little space, at least. I did write a draft post entitled ‘How My PhD Is Going’, thinking it Read More…
Methods of Work
One trick I learned early on in my master’s degree, both from experience and from the advice of others, was to treat my degree like a nine-to-five job. That is, I would set certain working hours for the day and they would form the default framework for when I started and stopped working. I’ve sometimes Read More…
Saving Money Sanely
It’s time to admit that I’ve often had a very unhealthy relationship with money. And by ‘unhealthy relationship’ I don’t mean ‘It’s just never there for me when I need it, sigh’! Anybody who knows me knows that I’m fairly frugal, but over the years I’ve realised that my frugality sometimes goes to ridiculous extremes. Read More…
Misery Reduction in the Kitchen
I’m back after two weeks in America! Mike and I visited my family and then took a little trip ourselves to the Rocky Mountains. While we were there, I devoted some time to troubleshooting a couple of problems I’ve discovered in my meal planning. So this post is a bit more practical than some have been. Read More…