Viva-related Things: I’m off to LJMU tomorrow to deliver a Viva Survivor session, and in the next hour I’ll be recording my fourth interview for the Viva Survivors Podcast. Things are on track at the moment for me having the basic Viva Survivors Podcast site up and running by the end of the month, with the first few podcasts going up then, and a regular posting of links, podcasts and other material should follow.

Collaboration: I really enjoyed seeing the efforts/results for some Collaboration Challenges that I ran during the GRADschool last week, and am wondering if this was perhaps the first dry run of a new NonZeroSum iteration… Maybe! I am delivering Creating Effective Collaboration twice in the next week and a half, and it’s very likely that I will get the first run of the four team version that I developed.

New Ideas: Following the GRADschool I’m feeling a bit supercharged. Perhaps the long weekend after it helped as well. I’ve got a book of ideas, and I should be developing them. I should be doing something with them. And I have a growing sense that there are possibilities and ideas just out of reach, I just need to take a few more steps. I need to juggle concepts – or perhaps throw all of my ideas in the air and see what I can catch… I’ll think on this some more, and more than that, take some actions…

Viva Survivors Podcast: I recorded my second interview for this project on Friday! Very exciting, and I’ll be recording number three today. After this week I’ll start to edit the interviews, and towards the end of the month I will be launching a separate website to host them. If anyone wants to contribute their viva and PhD story to the podcast please get in touch! And if you’re a PGR and have any questions that you want me to ask people or cover in the series, drop me a line.

Out of our Minds: My first piece of holiday reading was the updated version of this book by Sir Ken Robinson. I used a lot of Post-It notes as I went through. The thing that rang most clearly and eloquently from it all was the statement that education is an investment: rather than constantly try to save money, we need to frankly take onboard the investment being made both in the person and in society. Education starts with children but needs to go on through an entire life, and it needs to be done in a way that it resonates with people: people need to be allowed to find their passion, and then enabled to take it further. Lots of food for thought.

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman: I have been meaning to learn more about Feynman recently, having been completely captivated by the Feynman Series of videos (and also the Sagan Series). This book did not disappoint, and made me want to learn even more about the man. It also gave me a real hankering to start looking at things from a different perspective.

Manchester GRADschool: Once I’m all caught up on email, admin and the like, I’ll be turning my attention to the GRADschool that I’m facilitating on next week. I’m also leading on (and have designed) some collaboration exercises, and so I’m interested to see how they go and what people make of them.

I’ve had lots of little ideas sparked during my holiday time, so I’ll be exploring those over the coming weeks. I’ll write any stray thoughts I have on here.

Viva Survivors Podcast: Things are moving on with this project, which in a way came to me as a spin out of the workshops that I do. I am going to look into setting up a mailing list (I understand that it is not that hard to do through some automated process) so that people can get information about when it is going to be released and how it is progressing. I have one interview recorded, it’s probable that I will get another two squeezed in during the next week, and I have one lined up for early May. Still a lot more people that I want to talk to – if you would be interested in talking to me about your viva, and to sharing your story with the world, please let me know!

GRADschools: I got the confirmation I was waiting for last week, and I now have lots of GRADschools in my diary for over the summer months! Within the next month I have just two, and I’m looking forward to the Manchester GRADschool, which I’m also preparing some new collaboration resources for. I might be getting interviewed for a mini-podcast tomorrow, so that participants can get an advance indication of what that session will be about. I’m working on it this morning too, so had best wrap this up.

Getting back to GTD: I think I’m getting my groove back with Getting Things Done; I had started to fall back into old habits, letting things pile up in places, not reviewing my in-tray properly. I’m experimenting today with writing down everything I get done so I can see what happens and when, to check that I am spending time well. This is just an experiment, and is not really a part of GTD as I understand it, but I think it might be interesting to know exactly how I am spending my time.

I like the one, top-left, with a look of what I take to be happy surprise on his face

And if none of them look right to represent you, what kind of face would? Which of the faces would you most like to be like? Why?

(drawn yesterday afternoon after I cleared something off the whiteboard!)

Seth Godin’s latest manifesto, Stop Stealing Dreams, has been out for about a month now. I only got around to reading it last week, and I can highly recommend that you – whoever you are – read it too. The book is all about education and in particular the future of education. It very much follows the feeling and thinking of Sir Ken Robinson’s excellent TED Talks (this one and this one).

I really liked how the book covered the broad canvas of education, all the way from nursery through to postgraduate education. There is lots of stuff there to get you thinking – but more importantly to get you talking and sharing. A week after it was released Godin announced that close to half a million people had read the book – he estimated that if the book had been on-sale maybe three to fifteen thousand people would have got it. Which, in itself, is quite a thought-provoking idea…

Stop Stealing Dreams is free to download and share in a variety of formats. Go and do it, and then join the discussion.

Writing: I have been doing a lot of writing in the last week; on Thursday, based on some scribblings I put up on my new whiteboard I felt inspired to sit down and start writing something. I don’t know quite what it is yet, or where it might be going, but I will let you know when I do. In Do The Work by Steven Pressfield he advocates outlining a creative project (whether it be a book, a play or whatever) and then just getting to work before the arch-enemy Resistance can get a foothold. I’m going to keep at it and see where it goes. I also started a new blog where I could pour out some of the ideas I’ve been having about my role-playing game hobby; it’s been fun to have somewhere to write about that, and also to connect it up with my background in maths.

Viva Survivors Podcast: I recorded my first interview on Saturday afternoon, which was a lot of fun and really interesting. I had shared an office with the person who I interviewed, and it was great to hear a bit about his experience as a researcher during his PhD and what he did to prepare for his viva. This week I’m hoping to line up the next few interviews and also to get some more people involved and onboard. Perhaps I should expand the lone project page for VSP and give it a whole tree of pages…? What do you think?

GRADschools (again!): these are in my mind again on two fronts. Firstly, I’m hoping to hear more – possibly today – about more GRADschools over the summer, where I might get another opportunity or two to direct. I’m quite eager for that because it would be great to try out the ideas that I had had for facilitating without Powerpoint (plus I have a whiteboard for practice and everything!). Second, I’m working on some collaboration exercises for a GRADschool that I’m facilitating on at the start of May. With Easter coming up, and other commitments likely in April, I need to get these things locked down this week.

Being creative: kind of sums up where I am at right now. I had an interesting and creative weekend trying new things (in the kitchen, blogging, writing, maths) and making headway with plans for more. I wrote a few months back about overcoming creative inertia, which is a bit like the Resistance that I mentioned earlier. Now my mind is turning to think about maintaining creative momentum – once you’ve started, how do you keep going through to completing something?

Enough thinking! Time for action! What are you thinking about this (incidentally, beautifully sunny) Monday morning?

In case you didn’t see on Twitter, I got a whiteboard yesterday!

Such an "OUCH!" moment

More doodles soon!

The average PhD – whatever that means – takes between three and four years. There’s lots to be done, but plenty of time. Isn’t there? I’ve been wondering for some time exactly how much time people spend on their PhD – or, I suppose, being more careful with my words, how much time they spend on the research for their thesis.

Making an assumption that people by-and-large like their weekends free, there are 261 weekdays in a year. We lose another 21 days for holiday allowances, and at least 10 days for bank holidays. I think that is possibly conservative, but it takes us down to 230 days. Less than 2/3rds of a year.

Do you work 9-5? An hour for lunch? Twenty minutes to half an hour for a tea or coffee break. Take out 30 minutes to an hour for email, Facebook, Twitter and anything else. Any tutorials to run? Assignments to mark? Any exercise classes or sports activities? Any days of the week when you have to leave early, or arrive late? How much time is spent going to seminars that aren’t directly connected with your research?

How much time do you spend in a typical day on your research and thesis? Is there a lot of time to get things done?

I don’t have big answers to these: I’m just thinking. And making assumptions, so please dissuade me if I am being too harsh with things that take away from time (or if I am forgetting obvious things that take sand out of the hourglass).

And, regardless of all of these: how can people use the time as well as possible during a PhD? How should they direct their activities so that they are as productive as they possibly can be?

GRADschool: I was really psyching myself up for my first time Directing a GRADschool, when I got a text on Friday morning to tell me that it had been cancelled! It was a surprise, but after I had got over the shock I was able to take away some good things. I had spent a fair amount of time on the programme and preparing, but now I have that in my back pocket for next time and for future workshops. And plus I have really got it in mind to use drawing/doodling to support workshops. So much so that I am off to see if I can get a whiteboard for my home office this morning. There will be other GRADschools, and I’m sure that I will direct one soon!

Viva Survivors Podcast: Last Tuesday I was very excited – and I still am – about a new podcast that I will start recording soon! The idea of collecting the stories of PhD graduates, and in particular focusing on their vivas has been in my mind for about a year. The idea of doing a podcast merged with that somewhere along the way – and to be honest I just sat on the idea for some time and did nothing with it. Because… Well, what if no-one listened? What if no-one cared? In the end, that just felt more and more stupid as a reason NOT to try something – especially given the kinds of things that I would advise other people to do! So: the Viva Survivors Podcast. Coming soon! I have a few people who have signed up, and I’m doing my first interview in the next week.

Crowdfunding: This has been in my mind quite a lot lately. I supported my first Kickstarter project last year, and since then the site has become almost a daily stomping ground for me. There are always two or three projects that I am checking on, and I’ve supported three successful projects so far. The “business model” really speaks to me. Having something that other people really get on board with, a message, an idea, a product. What’s great about all of the projects on there is that the people who have created the project are passionate. The people who support them are passionate as well. I’m still turning over in my mind what I have on the backburner – or the front burner, why not – that could be put forward as a crowdfunded project. This could be a summer time project…

Role-playing games: OK, this one is a bit personal, so I won’t go on about it too much – tomorrow night I will be the GM/facilitator for the first time! We will be playing a game called In A Wicked Age, which is all about archetypal characters and collaborative storytelling, and has a great set of game mechanics. I have to remember to write something about the mechanics of role-playing games sooner or later, as I think there is something really interesting about modelling actions and interactions in games.

That’s all for Monday Thoughts!