How Shut Up and Write (surprisingly) helped me find a way to sustainably fit running into my life long term through the Minimum Viable Run project
How Shut Up and Write (surprisingly) helped me find a way to sustainably fit running into my life long term through the Minimum Viable Run project
It’s January! New diary time. New year. New notebook time.
We often joke about the new notebook, and how the perfect notebook will fix you. And maybe it will, at least when it comes to taking notes.
Back in the office? Getting interrupted all the time and feeling frustrated? What if you are actually having micro-meetings. A productivity in-person tip
This is a post about what running my first ever 10K race taught me about writing intensively. Read on for stress dreams, medals, snacks, advice, and a chaotic spin cycle class.
We often tell people that they will experience set backs and accidents with their writing—so this is a post about just how hard it is to fall over and to get up and to fully recover. Not so we stop giving the advice, it’s good advice! but it can sound a bit glib, a bit pat. Writing to you from the middle of the process might help those of you in the middle of the process to feel seen and understood.
We often say about PhDs: ‘it’s a marathon, not a sprint’. But now I’m learning to run, and I’m not sure marathon is the exact metaphor.
I’ve signed up for my first ever 10k race this July and I’m a bit nervous. So I’ve been doing the thing researchers do when they are worried about something—we research the crap out of it.
I’ve never done anything in my life that gets as much credit as running. Even when I was just starting out, people were so impressed by me going for a run. I was given a huge amount of encouragement, even for short runs, slow runs, runs with lots of walking. As I passed various milestones (whether that was being able to run for 10 minutes without stopping, or my first 5k park run) I felt all the support along the way.
A tip I learned from learning to run is ‘active recovery’.
In fact, there is a whole thing in running called a … ‘recovery run’! This horrified me when I first found out about it. Any run felt like a huge effort, surely any kind of running was the opposite of recovering from running!
And it’s true, you should be sleeping, and resting, and taking days off from running, to recover from running.
But it’s also a good idea to sometimes run, slowly, easily, not for too long, to help you recover from running.
And this made me think about what active recovery strategies we might use to help us in our writing.
I had a lot to say about focus and why so many panic think pieces recently have got it all wrong, and the EduResearch Matters blog were kind enough to publish my counterargument, that Your focus isn’t broken, it just needs time.
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This clear and accessible guide to decoding academic feedback will help you interpret what your lecturer or research supervisor is really trying to tell you about your writing – and show you how to fix it.
