Doing a PhD (or any level of study) requires good time management, and lets face it, that can be exceedingly difficult when you may be in the same position as myself, in running your own business (even basic administration tasks take time), servicing clients from that business and dealing with spikes in workload, then there is day-to-day life, taking care of yourself, others and people you just want to.
It can be really easy to fall into the trap of saying something must done by
I firstly ensured my professional commitments where matched, no one but myself sets standards, and it was important for me to keep my own, after all it is the lifeblood of being able to study in being able to finance it! This went well, but I was very tired at the end of the day, studying wasn’t the first thing on my list to do. I made a plan to make sure I was balancing my time and ensuring my mind/body had time to recover. I done this by scheduling some time for myself in something I enjoy doing, so headed out with my radio, and had a great time, I also had a romantic time (valentines day) with my wife (albeit I did take a book, but I didn’t end up reading it). The end result was that having time away from reading articles and doing lab work re-motivated me to get back into the work and was happy to do so.
I watched various videos on managing ‘burnout’ as wanted to make sure this wasn’t going to happen to me. I have enjoy many videos from Andy Stapleton, his channel is worth subscribing to as hes engaging, honest and you come way having spent a time well used. I ordered the book “59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot” as well, his copied look well thumbed !
So whilst I’ve not made all the progress I would of liked, I still feel great about doing the PhD and the first ‘block’ of 6 months comes up in April (where has the time gone!) will be a great time to reflect on how things are going as well.
Mentoring – helping others and also helping yourself
So since during and passing my MBA back in 2018, I’ve been some form of mentor and also a mentoree as well. Having friends in industry helps both ways, asking for advice from seasoned professionals on specific ideas and giving general advice, has helped people along.
The past year I’ve been helping my son with his driving, I was supporting the professional teacher who taught once per week. I augmented that with providing a study structure for both the theory exam, in how to revise and structure a learning plan and providing time to go out and drive on L plates. As a dad I really enjoyed it and seeing my son progress, he was able to pass his theory on the second attempt, and the practical examination on the first. It was very satisfying to see my son drive away in his car knowing I had helped in some way to get him on the road. It took a good amount of time management for myself to make sure I had available time to go out on the drives and write up the post-drive reviews, which helped us track progress on specific manoeuvres and how things where going generally.
I’m also helping an ambitious student, who is between finishing his A levels and going to University to study computer science. I’m giving him practical things to do which will help his knowledge, for example daily health checks for the services and servers I run (one of which actually powers this blog!) backed by the theory (running thru the OSI/TCP IP model). One of the things we are covering is the updated and excellent Python crash course, which has been updated for Python3 – its been a while since I first read this book when it based on Python 2, so I’m along for the journey as well.
I ordered a new copy of Python crash course and gave the physical copy to the aspiring student, we’ve already setup the IDE and demonstrated how powerful an IDE is. I’m going the exercises as well and committing them to git, I’m enjoying revisiting and learning subtle differences between what I was taught on my MSc and what is in the book, so its helping me as well ! I am looking forward to seeing how things progress.