Heh, I wake up early because the sun streams right through my curtains into my eyes first thing in the morning!

Made some progress on the questionnaire re-write today. Slower than I hoped it would be but the changes I've made so far are better for the analysis I want to do. And now I'm taking a short break with a bowl of strawberries and ice cream :-)

Made a reasonable start on the revisions to my questionnaire yesterday, so need to keep going with that today.

Goals for the day:
1.) Identify whether I can reduce the number of questions to measure certain constructs
2.) Decide whether to delete one whole section
3.) Look at whether another section includes all the constructs I need to measure, and whether can delete any questions
4.) Add questions linking two sections
5.) Look at repetitions in final section
6.) Look at questions used in new area of literature

Heh :-) Old in terms of electronic access! It's a mere youngster compared to me too!

======= Date Modified 17 Apr 2011 13:47:47 =======
Had a bit of a nightmare on Friday. After I posted my goals on here I thought I'd just quickly check Facebook before starting work, and got hit by a Trojan virus from what looked like a perfectly innocent link a friend had put up. Panic time! Luckily my partner's a computer forensics expert and managed to rescue everything for me and clean out my hard drive, but it took all of Friday and quite a bit of Saturday for him to do it. Which now means I'm way behind on all my work. Boo!

Oh well. Today I'm going to make a start on the work I should have done on Friday. I won't get it all done, but if I can make a decent in-road into it I'll be in a better position tomorrow.

Star-shaped, hope whatever your situation is has improved, or become easier. Real life does keep popping up even when we have deadlines - fingers crossed for you.

I can't comment on your subject I'm afraid as I didn't study that, but I did my undergraduate degree at York and am now doing a PhD at Loughborough, so I can comment on the places.

York is an amazingly beautiful historic city which is a joy to visit or live in. Friendly vibe, lots of nice pubs, interesting things to see. The university campus is out of the city centre but I used to regularly walk into the city from there, it's really not far. The campus is 1960s concrete but set around a nice lake, and the campus is divided into colleges so it feels a lot more friendly and small than some campus universities.

Loughborough is very sport oriented - if you love sport you'd have a fantastic time at Loughborough, and there are amazing sporting facilities. If you don't love sport, the place isn't as interesting. It's a small town dominated by the university so there's lots of 'student night' type activities (i.e. lots of drinking). But it's very close to the cities of Leicester and Nottingham, where there's lots more going on, so you don't have to feel stuck in a little student bubble all the time.

Hope that's of some help!

Sorry Chuff, I looked for it but no luck. With it being so old, maybe you'll need to do an inter-library loan? Good luck with finding it, anyway.

Good luck star-shaped, I hope that means you manage to focus and get lots done!

Yesterday I made some progress on redeveloping my questionnaire, but of course did the easy changes and left the hard bits for later! Today I need to address some issues about the questions I've designed for measuring constructs in the theories I'm using. If I can answer those questions and type up some more changes I'll be very happy and feel like I've earned a trip to the pub this evening!

My first goal today was to go swimming, and I've done that. Broke my personal best (70 lengths, 1750 metres, in 45 minutes) so feel pumped and ready for action now!

Second (and main) goal for today is to go through all my notes on changes to make to my questionnaire, and to create a new version incorporating all of these. Involves making some tough decisions but I have to get on with this, I've let it slide for the last couple of weeks.

I agree with what most other people have said - it really is very unlikely to be as bad as a snapshot of many of the threads on this forum might suggest! People tend not to post about the good or average times. I've been doing my PhD for 18 months now and it's all been fine, there have been times when I've been working quite long hours (12 hours a day, six or seven days a week) but those have been few, and there's also been times when it's been a lot more relaxed and I'v etaken days off during the week to do fun things with friends. To be honest, so far it has been less stressful than working in my old job! Different though - much more reliant on my own actions. And the stress of writing up might still be bad, fingers crossed not though!

It sounds like you're getting good vibes about the offer you've received. It is a daunting thing to sign up to, and it's understandable to be nervous, but it doesn't sound like there are any major warning flags that you're heading for a bad time. If you think you'll be interested in the topic and want to commit to a PhD, do it - I love mine, and I'm so grateful to have had the opportunity to dedicate 3 (or however many) years of my life to this.

That sounds like the sensible approach. Difficult to do though!

I lay around in bed reading a novel instead of getting up early this morning. Oh well, at my desk now, even if I'm not showered or dressed yet!

Goals for today:
1.) Download and catalogue photos taken on recent site visit
2.) Respond to email from industry person
3.) Edit my questionnaire from comments from first pilot testing
4.) Phone up about sleeper train times for summer holiday! (Not work related but hey...)

Heh, you're not 'finishing early' though, you've achieved the day's work, that's all! Take the time to recover some energy and enjoy some sunshine or whatever, and tomorrow you'll be fresh to be productive all over again.

My supervisor just came to find me to ask about something from our meeting earlier, and then to make sure I'm planning to take a week off when we have all the bank holidays in a couple of weeks! The other one was saying the same sort of thing to me at Christmas, insisting I take a couple of weeks off. I can't decide if they're both just really nice supervisors, or if I'm unknowingly giving off 'burnt out' vibes. I'm not feeling burnt out, honest! But I'm going to take the week off anyway!

Yes, I think one of the most important things I've learnt on this PhD journey is to be able to stand back from my work and see what it is that's actually a barrier to progressing, and then finding solutions to that.

Anyway, supervision meeting was fine, we talked about the possible difference that this new area of literature might make and agreed that it's not significant enough to really hold me up. So it's all systems go again, and I'm back on track.

Tasks for the rest of the day:
1.) Finish making notes on journal articles I was reading earlier
2.) Write up notes from supervision meeting
3.) Draw up to-do list and schedule for work
4.) Work on poster design for competition (a nice thing to end the day on!)

Morning everyone.

Feeling a bit disheartened today - I have a supervision meeting at 11 but haven't achieved either of the two major tasks I said I'd achieve by today. I know my supervisors will be perfectly nice about it, but they have this way of being nice that just makes me feel completely guilty!

I need to identify why I've struggled to get this work done. I know one bit is because I'm waiting for an academic at another university to send me some information that might or might not change the focus of part of my work, but the other bit is just sheer laziness on my part. Oh dear! But usually when I get into one of these lazy states, when I dig down I realise it's because I don't know how to take the next step, or lack the confidence to take the next step. So I need to identify what the barrier actually is...

So, tasks for today (before supervision meeting at 11):
1.) Think about supervision agenda and prepare for discussion
2.) Read article previously sent by other academic to be able to discuss direction issues with supervisors
3.) Tidy up and print out questionnaire and methods documents as they stand at present

I'm not getting very far with the work today. It should be really straightforward, but I just can't make myself do it. Oh well, keep plodding on....

Good luck star-shaped, I'm sure you'll manage it!

I have to write a document before meeting my supervisors tomorrow. Not a difficult document - notes/comments on all the decisions I've made so far while designing my data collection, which means it's all stuff I have noted in my many notebooks and I just need to go through and pull the stuff out. But it's going to take ages to do. Gah.