This was the week I became conscious of the fact that I was enjoying doing a PhD. It was also the week I realised that I can’t just chase around like a lunatic doing stuff. I need to read and write as well. It happened like this: on Monday, I settled down in a corner with my laptop, half watching my family play Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and typed whatever came into my head. From that typing, it emerged that I had a lot of open loops going. I was basically throwing everything I could think of at the PhD wall and waiting to see what stuck. Then, on Tuesday, I attended a seminar called ‘Being an Effective Doctoral Researcher’. This seminar advocated for corporate-style project management, which I admit is a potential solution. Actually, this is not the first experience I’ve had of the PhD establishment suggesting that we import corporate methods and attitudes. Currently, I’m hovering between conceding to the corporate monkey ‘productivity’ approach and something which I’m choosing to call ‘transgressively traditional’.
My main take-away from this seminar was to start thinking about a medium scale plan in the form of 12-week ‘sprints’. Or ‘terms’, as the more retro among us used to call them. Or ‘quarters’. Or even, for those of us who are still in touch with the wider environment, ‘seasons’. On Tuesday evening, I wrote and my family Zelda-ed again, and this time I had a brainwave. In the old days, when I was a homeschool educator of one primary-age student, I found organising reading programs to be a breeze. And an effective one, as it turns out, for all that it was an extremely retro approach. Later on, I tried it on myself during some periods of leisure and it worked for me too. Why shouldn’t I apply the same strategy to my PhD reading?
I immediately set about devising a reading program and testing it on the second half of this week. The results are inspiring and enlightening. For instance, I spent 18 hours reading this week and felt happy. On the other hand, a third of those readings were required parts of the MPhil course and they made me less happy. Also, if it wasn’t for them, I might not have spent 30 hours on PhD-ing this week, at least 6 hours more than I actually have.
Most of what I get out the required parts of the MPhil is the opportunity to meet some of the rest of my cohort. The history readings are too familiar to be interesting and the religious readings are interesting but not relevant to my work. I’m basically reading 5-6 long-ish texts week out of a (possibly misplaced) sense of duty – and I’m feeling a bit jealous of the heartfelt enthusiasm some of the rest of my cohort seem to be experiencing for these readings (apart from the one who actually did bail). Still, there are only five weeks of this part of the seminar left to go. We take it in turns to give presentations of these readings and this Wednesday, I was up. It was an opportunity to improve my Zoom skills and get sorted out with a microphone that works. As for presentation skills, I spent some time worrying about slides and trying to make these decidedly odd readings seem relevant to the group, but as it turns out that my main problem was over-running my time. So, I can’t pretend I am not learning things.
At any rate, either writing with Zelda in the background all week has been incredibly inspiring or I was so pleased with my week overall that, possibly stupidly, I opened a couple of new loops for myself. I’ve joined with a few other people to try to put together a ‘digital cohort’. Then I got a mad idea. Perhaps I had become envious of all the practice-based PhDs people are doing around me. I suddenly decided it would be a good idea to write a natural history of Hyrule (which is the Zelda world). There are so many cool plants there, I told myself. And fungi. It would just be sort of reverse-engineering the world-building they already did. The idea refused enthusiastic support from my other ‘digital cohort’, the one I share a house with. Before I knew what had happened, I had a brand new notebook and was being given instruction in using a game console. I am just starting to get to grips with the incredible peculiarity of this project. But actually, it is also helping me think through some nature knowledge-related things. Furthermore, and this is a very important consideration, it isn’t winter in Hyrule.