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You should be working!
3 Minute Read - You should be working! This is a voice many of us struggle with on weekends, public holidays (like those coming up in a few days), vacations and other times when we really deserve and ought to take a break. This can be a particularly loud voice for those who are able to work remotely and those who have flexible work arrangements which allow them to ‘choose’ how and when they want to work. For many, the additional phenomenon of work intensification…
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How to use Notion for student supervision
2 Minute Read - If you’ve ever supervised more than one student at a time before, you will know how challenging it can be to keep up with progress from each student and where they are in their academic journeys. In one of my YouTube videos, I walk you through how I project manage students in Notion by loading each student as an individual project. Supervision dashboard In the video, I show you my student dashboard. In this dashboard, I can easily get a view…
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Are you creating an illusion about your lack of time?
2 Minute Read - It’s that time of the year again. You’re rested, motivated, and ready to take on the world. I am sure you also have a few New Year’s resolutions jotted down next to the plans you have for taking over the world! But, I am going to urge you to take 2 minutes or so, to re-look those plans and decide whether everything you have planned is really necessary. While doing some work on the concept of leisure time, I recently came…
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Timelines for research project planning
3 Minute Read - Project planning is vital in the research context. Without a plan, you will likely fail, as the old saying suggests. This blog post is the last in a series of blog posts in which I outline the points presented in a workshop on research project planning. In this workshop, I was introduced to 5 critical points which come into play when planning a research project. The first blog post considered the vision and objectives of your project, without which you cannot…
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How to chop, divide, and then eat your research elephant
3 Minute Read - A few months ago, I attended a workshop on Project Planning in the Research Context, hosted by Dr. Rob Drennan, who works in the Wits Research Office. I then decided to work on a few blog posts, based on the workshop he designed and presented, and broke these blog posts into the five different sections he covered in his workshop. This blog post is the fourth post in this series, and if you haven’t read the others, I would suggest you…
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Why you should focus on the value of your time this year
6 Minute Read - In today’s society, we are very concerned with the value of money. The problem with this approach is that when we consider money as our most valuable resource, we forget other resources that are sometimes more valuable than what we have saved in the bank. As a mother, an academic, an economist, and a time-use researcher, I am here to remind you of your most valuable resource: your time. We generally start the year off by discussing various planning principles, goals,…
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How to plan ahead and avoid getting caught off guard by risks during the research process
3 Minute Read - If you’re new here, it might be useful to know I introduced a series of posts that deal with project planning in the research context over the last two months. This post thus forms part of a larger set of blog posts and should ideally be read in conjunction with them. This is the third post in the series. The first post dealt with pinning down the vision and objectives of your research project, while the second post provided guidelines to…
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Research project planning with the right resources
4 Minute Read - In the last blog post, I introduced a series of posts that deal with project planning in the research context. This post thus forms part of a larger set of posts and should ideally be read in conjunction with them. This is the second post of the series, and in the first post, I wrote about the vision and objectives of your research project. It is important that this conceptual step is not skipped in a research project, otherwise, you will…
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Pinning down the vision & objectives of your research project
4 Minute Read - I recently attended a project planning workshop for research. The reason why this workshop was primarily aimed at research projects is because things hardly go according to plan in a research project. A number of planning tools were presented in this workshop and I thought it might be useful to discuss some of them in a series of blog posts over the next few months. In this blog post, I will be focussing on the vision and objectives of the project.…
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How to stay motivated as a research student
5 Minute Read - Research can be lonely, especially if you are doing a coursework degree and you are a social sciences student, where group and lab work is typically not the norm. You may have been forced into group work and frustrated by having to work with people who do not seem like they are as committed as you and now you have a chance to do it yourself, but it’s not all it’s been made out to be. The benefit of doing coursework…
