News
Search news stories
Enter a keyword to search news.
Defeating writing distractions
PhD students have quite a bit more flexibility in their working day. Sometimes, too much flexibility. What makes it worse is that there are so many sources of distraction around me. I easily use it as an excuse to delay writing my thesis chapters. There’s making sure I am on top of current events and can spend an hour just reading the morning news. Then there’s finding out what people are saying about the news so I can possibly spend another hour on Twitter. Then there is reading journal articles in my field, answering emails, grabbing a coffee with other PhD students, checking and rearranging my calendar, and so on and so forth. By the end of it all, I would have wasted several hours and not have really written a single word.
A rant about stealing Santa
If you’re not aware, ‘Stealing Santa’ is a version of kris kringle gifting, where you buy a present (it could be for a particular person or not), and then people have the option of stealing / swapping another person’s present for their own. I was first introduced to the concept by The Office (US version), where a thoughtfully gifted teapot almost doesn’t end up in the right hands and everyone else fights over an iPod.
![RSS News Feed](/global/images/rss.gif" "RSS News Feed"){kind=small}