Do I need to say it? Take breaks. Stand up, stretch your legs, stop whatever it is that you’re doing and give yourself permission to get a cup of tea. Or coffee if that’s your preference. Water is good too.

When you stand up and step away from the screen that connects you with the rest of the world, leave a note for yourself – what were you just doing? It’ll help when you sit back down.

On the way to get your drink, think. See what comes in to your mind when you relax a little. If you have colleagues who are up and about as well then say hi. Smile at them. They might smile too. You might just make someone’s day. As a work-from-home type I smile to myself anyway. I sing as I walk down the stairs to the kitchen sometimes (warning: not recommended if you work in an office).I think “What If…?” thoughts and dream dreams.

When I finally get back to my desk and my computer with my cuppa I’ve had more thoughts: more thoughts on what I was doing, more thoughts on what I could be doing, more thoughts on what I want to be doing.

Go on. Have a cuppa.

Last week was not all about FYSWs and Valentine’s Day, I also went to Manchester to deliver a workshop on Managing the Supervisor Relationship. It’s a workshop that is always slightly tricky to prepare for, as more often than not the whole workshop pivots on the motivations of the participants who come along.

The workshop is for postgraduate researchers who want to think about what they want from their supervisor. This is complemented by activities designed to get participants engaged with the idea of improving their relationship with their supervisor (without the assumption being that there are things “wrong” in the first place). On occasion there are participants who come because they are either angry or upset with their supervisor, and it’s important that they have some outlet for that – so long as the next step is to get them thinking about what they can do.

That’s the real lesson that has come out of running these sessions over the last few years: it was one that blindsided me a little even. You, as a postgraduate researcher, must be the proactive party in the relationship. You have the greater responsibility. It’s very common to think that your supervisor has all the answers, that they will tell you what to do. And if your supervisor is particularly forceful about the direction of your research, it can be easy to think that your research is their research, your PhD is just an extension of their own interests. Depending on your project there might be some truth to this, but that is by no means the whole story.

Supervisors: what they're like, what they do and what their responsibilities are

If you want things to be different, you have to initiate the change. If you want more freedom, tell your supervisor that you are going to try something. If you need a bit more feedback, ask your supervisor; perhaps they will say that they are very busy. In this case, work with them to find something that is going to meet both your needs. Be proactive.

Managing the Supervisor Relationship is a workshop that keeps evolving; I’ve just been booked to go and deliver it again and I’m really excited about the next opportunity to engage with postgraduate researchers on the topic. If you’re interested in seeing this workshop at your institution, you know what to do: get in touch!

As I sat down to write something made me go back and check my notes from the last few years of work. My suspicions were confirmed: last week I did my 25th First Year Skills Workshop at the University of Liverpool! Where did the time go?

They’ve changed a bit over the last few years, but at the core they are still the same: bringing postgraduate researchers from a wide variety of disciplines together to work at creating an innovative interdisciplinary project proposal. What’s great about the programme is the experience-based nature of it: while there are icebreakers and activities, none of the real learning is spoon-fed or lecture-driven. Participants are encouraged to reflect and think about what they are doing – both in the workshop and in their research – and think about what they need to do in order to meet the challenges of their research.

The refurbished main plenary room

The skills suite that the workshops are delivered in has recently been updated, with much more than just a lick of paint. I’m particularly intrigued by the workshop possibilities of the wheelie-chair-desks in the picture above! I’m sure that there are some interesting group activities that can be orchestrated with those.

As always, it was a great opportunity to be a part of the workshop. There are great challenges in facilitating workshops with researchers, but also some amazing privileges as well. As a facilitator and a director, I have worked with around 75 interdisciplinary teams of PGRs – that’s over 500 PhD students! It’s always amazing to hear about the different things that people do research in, from wing design through to medieval graffiti, and software agents to anti-malarial drugs.

Some of the attributes of an Effective Researcher

Here’s to 25 more amazing First Year Skills Workshops!

I’ve written a few things recently on my experiences with Getting Things Done; I made it one of my goals to read the book through January, with the aim of hopefully uncovering a few things that would help me get more productive. I have had several projects on the back burner for some time, and was thinking about how I might “make time” to take them forward. As I have read GTD I have been struck by the realisation that the problem is not the amount of time that I have to focus on projects, but how I use my time.

I’ve not quite finished GTD yet, but I am through the main part of the book and have started implementing things. The difference so far is really amazing to me. While I don’t have a full GTD system running around me, all of the little things that I have started – especially the idea of physically capturing everything that needs action – have really helped. It’s quite a profound thing:

• even without a total system up and running I trust that nothing is getting missed
• if something only takes two minutes, I just do it, get it done, get it out of the way – by 9:30 in the morning I can feel like it has been a really productive day
• the idea of stating the next action needed for a project – and the definition of a project as something that requires more than one action – has really revolutionised my flow.

After tweeting about my reading and my blog posts, I was invited by Pascal Venier to a workshop on GTD at the University of Salford, which was yesterday. The workshop was great, and has really helped me already in getting my system more concrete. For a long time I have had this idea that I needed one piece of software, or one paper-based medium that would cover everything – and this just isn’t true. I struggled with capturing notes in multiple journals, notes on my phone, two email inboxes and so on: my problem was not that I couldn’t find a good piece of software to do everything, but that I didn’t realise that I needed a system that would do it, and that I could make that system for myself.

So it is fine for me to capture short notes on my phone – so long as I output them to paper later. It is OK for me to capture work ideas in my journal – so long as I put them on coloured cards and into the card file alphabetically. This is part of my system, and having that system in place (or the building blocks at least) is having a great effect on me.

My next step will be to minimise the physical inboxes around me: two shelves, a corner of my desk, the top of the printer and the boxes in the corner of the office – these will all become one in-tray and there will be order!

There are plenty of stories of authors being interviewed and being asked “Where do you get your ideas from?” It often seems like there is an assumption that that person has a special line to Idea Central, or possibly they keep a muse somewhere who whispers in their ear at night. I think that there is also an assumption on the part of the questioner that ideas are really hard to come by, which I think is also wrong: ideas are everywhere, we have them all the time. The two problems are that we very rarely record them (and where we get them from) and we very rarely feel able to act on them.

For myself, at the moment, I am finding ideas from two sources: the first is in words. At the Collaborative Researcher I was struck several times by the choice of words of the staff and participants, and something about those words resonates with me. One word jumps to another – you twist the spelling, imply something else, and then the next thing I know I have a growing tickle, the fundamental particles that make up the atom of an idea just sliding into place.

The other source for ideas at the moment is dreams: I’m writing down any first impressions I have when I wake up, and also the last thing I think before I go to sleep. These are chiefly for possible stories (on my OU course), but who knows what they will lead to.

And therein lies the point: creative ideas are seldom actionable right away if they are the springboard for something truly new. They need time to breathe, run free, meet some other ideas, perhaps swap DNA and reproduce. Recording them helps that process along. Giving oneself time to read over and do something with them helps even more.

It was great to be asked back to facilitate for the second pilot of Vitae’s Collaborative Researcher programme. The first one last year was very enjoyable – both in terms of the delivery and what I got from it as well – and so I had been looking forward to this one for some time. It was a good way to start off the new year of delivering workshops.

One of the great things that struck me and the other facilitators was just how switched on all of the participants were – postgraduate researchers and research staff alike – to the idea of collaboration. There was no-one on the course who thought “this course sounds alright”; they were there because either they are collaborating or they want to collaborate, and they were earnestly looking for tools that they could take away to help them with that.

The activities were quite diverse, ranging from discussions, producing proposals, reviewing others’ work and also pulling out the really useful tips, tools and techniques for best practice advice. I was asked with only a little notice to say something about social media/web presence, but really what I said evolved more into thinking about:

• what the tools out there do (what are they and what are their functions?)
• what someone needs to do with them in order to collaborate well
• what someone needs to think about when it comes to their presence

I said it on the course: “I don’t think of my web presence as being distinct from me.” And I don’t. In the same way that a car is often thought of conceptually as an extension of the driver, I feel the same way about my twitter-stream, my various blogs and so on.

What I forgot to say (but did tweet!) was that there does need to be some engagement with these kinds of tools and communication channels by researchers. While it is true that these technologies are always changing, they are not going away. Indeed, there is no getting away from – and really why would you want to? They can be channelled to such amazing benefit, particularly in the case of collaboration.

My one flipchart used in my mini-talk

I came away from the course very grateful for the chance to work with so many great people, and also challenged in thinking about my own collaborations. What can I do better? What do I have to offer collaborations? And what do I need in order to get my (planned) collaborations moving?

January has been a quiet month in some ways, but a good one. It’s also been a really productive time I think. The time in my home office has given me some focus for the things that I want to accomplish over the next year (more on that some other time!), but it’s now time to get out there and get back to some of the the things that I really enjoy: helping researchers improve their skills.

I’m on the second Vitae pilot of the Collaborative Researcher next week, which is sure to be good. I’ve had a look over the programme again, as it was last March when we did the first pilot. It’s really good, powerful stuff: I’m really interested to see what the participants make of it this time around.

It will also be great as the people who designed and developed the course material are going to be there too. They weren’t able to be there last time, so it will be fun working alongside some new people as well as people I see regularly.

Then the week after that I’m delivering my first Viva Survivor course of the year, followed by a Supervisor Relationship workshop for Manchester and a First Year Skills Workshop at the University of Liverpool. By that time it’s probable I will have some more news about other projects that are moving forwards. This year I’m committing myself to trying lots of new things, and also to make more headway with things that I have meant to do for a long time but always made excuses about. Writing regularly is key to many of the things that I want to do, and I have been surprised how even in as little as a week I have started to build a habit of writing. Words beget words!

There is lots more to come! I’m always looking for interesting opportunities, and if you have something that you think I might be interested please, as always, get in touch!

I remember some time ago having a chat with a friend of mine, the subject of which was why I was having trouble reading “Getting Things Done” – at the time it was almost impenetrable to me. It seemed, I don’t know, easy, common sense-ish, and at the same time a bit obvious. My friend’s response was that it was written for someone of a different Myers-Briggs type to me (and maybe that’s true).

However, since starting to read the book in earnest this week I’m finding lots of really great and powerful advice in there. I’m about halfway through, and two of the biggest stand out things for me have been:

• to put even one sheet of paper in a separate folder if it is unrelated to anything else; previously a folder would seem a waste for just one thing, you put projects and documents in folders, not one thing. And that kind of thinking leads you to just stack all of these one sheets up until you don’t know what is going on!
• defining what the next physical action is for a project or piece of work; even if you don’t know when or how you’re going to get to it, what is the next thing to do? I think this is a great piece of advice – especially in the more speculative/creative/entrepreneurial line of things if you’re a bit, “Ooooh, what if…?” like I can be. What is the next thing you’re going to do? Not the whole plan, not every step, what’s the next step you’re going to take?

I also really like the idea of do it (if it will take two minutes or less), delegate it (if you can, and to the right person), or defer it (to the appropriate time and place). I’ve read about half the book so far, and don’t have time to set up in-trays and the like just yet (although I have a block of time being chiseled out). Even now the mental tools are doing wonders for me. It’s 10:30 in the morning and I feel like I’ve got loads done so far!

Is Getting Tnings Done simply “advanced common sense” (which is how the book describes it at one point)? Perhaps, but so far I can see it as a rigourous toolkit, lots of five star techniques for getting your productivity through the roof. And I’m eager to see what else the book has in store.

I have been following Seth Godin’s little blog for some time now, ever since I first came across the Domino Project books (which are worth checking out). At least once a day he posts something small and bite-sized, and more often than not it gives me pause for thought.

Today was about actively finding problems, rather than thinking that you shouldn’t do that because “what if you don’t have the resources to meet the challenge?” (paraphrasing)

It’s a good point; as he puts it in his closing line:

“Just because you don’t know what to do about it doesn’t make it less of a problem.“

I think this is a good thing to be mindful of no matter what we’re doing. Not at the expense of progress in other areas or happiness in our personal lives maybe, but actually if we

• find out problems in our working environment, then we can start moving towards making our working environment better;
• look for problems in our relationships, we can work to make those relationships stronger;
• search for problems in our sphere of work or research, then maybe we can find opportunities that we can tackle.

Finding out what problems we have around us can not only lead to better things in our current situation, but can also lead us to bigger and better things. And if you find a problem you don’t know what to do about it now, then you are still aware of the situation, which gives you more information to work with.

I mentioned recently that I had moved into my own separate workspace at home. This has been great to have a little private retreat to do work in, a space of my own. It has also meant that I have been organising and reorganising my things every two weeks since I moved.

Two weeks seems to be the time limit for me to be happy with where things are and then discover some notes that I bundled up as I was packing things up from the other workspace. This morning it is a stack of about two dozen post-it notes. All different colours and sizes, mostly to do with work but some related to other creative projects. Some of them have been acted on, some are in progress and some are completely untamed: big, daredevil “wouldn’t it be good if…?” ideas and inspirations.

Discovering the notes is not a bad thing: some of them are actionable, some of them kickstart projects, and some of them get recycled. What happens is that the perturbation of paper upsets the storage ecosystem. Finding somewhere to put them means that something else moves. The NonZeroSum resources have to go in a different place. I take the Collaborative Researcher folder and put it somewhere else. A cascade of shuffling and reshuffling until once again there is order.

And that’s before the mental reshuffling when a particularly provocative post-it smiles at me… I like the simple idea I’ve seen in Getting Things Done: if it can be done and completed in the next two minutes then do it, otherwise delegate or discard. I’m getting there, I hope! I’d better make a note to read more of that. Where are my post-its?