Post 33: On Juggling 5 Projects... Where Did the Time Go?

Well, okay, maybe it's only 3 projects, but I'm certainly keeping busy, and finding my daytime hours are disappearing faster than I can say "Unique New York" quickly 10 times in a row! (It's already the middle of October!!)

Last week the second research project that I've picked up to help cover my bills, now that I'm in the post-funding era of my degree, really started to ramp up! And it is hella fun! It's so cool to research the backgrounds of some of the people that I'll be interviewing in the next few months, and think about time zone differences and adjustments for suggesting potential 'best' interview times (unless I want to rise for a sleepy one at 4AM!), so that has been very good.

Lots of writing back and forth feedback and undertaking a pilot interview to test out our interview questions—and seeing the evolution of those has been phenomenal, too, and has inspired me to reflect in slightly different ways on the way I undertook my thesis research.

Our dash of green: pathside plants and ferns, exploring out at Goldstream Park!

On a different note: much love to my thesis writing group*!!!! I can't gush enough about how much I love their company and the productive atmosphere we have built. While there is still some scheduling irregularity with space and times that we're able to meet (we're trying to do Monday, Wednesday, Friday; everyone has different departmental meetings and odd things that break up the times), it's been phenomenal.

More Pomodoros. This time, smilies!

I've now graduated to being the Pomodoro timer on occasion. We use the online one available here. It's quite innocuous, and so isn't an unpleasant shock when we hear the timer.

And the MOST FUN thing is finding different ways to keep track of/tallying (photos coming soon) how many we've been able to get done in a day! We were in over the Thanksgiving long weekend on Sunday and Monday, and went from getting six done on Sunday, to a RECORD of 10 on Monday! That felt so good!

Phew! What a day! Got so much done!

The structure of hunkering down for 25 minutes at a time, and then having a set chat/break/question time is fantastic. Again, much love to them. Really, really enjoying spending more time with this group.

AND: we also appreciate the support of the Graduate Student Society, who keeps allowing us to schedule time in one of their two conference rooms in the Halpern Centre for Graduate Students. Having a big room suitable for convening and getting our work done is really, really great.

* I wanted briefly to identify here that I joined this thesis writing group by meeting some of the members through the Thesis Completion Group that I've written about before, here. :)