I have had a doozey of a week.
So on Saturday, as part of my new ‘Ellie will do ALL THE WALKING’ I walked up a hill with Erik. It was lovely, but we accidentally walked 11km when we should have done, like, 4. Woops….
So to celebrate (and soothe my aching hip) we ordered pizza. To order the pizza, for some reason they had to send a code to my email, so I dutifully opened by email to see…. A JOB OPENING AT HELSINKI!!!
Now, for clarification: all my research interests point towards Helsinki. Helsinki is literally the perfect place for my work. I’ve visited it recently and kind of fell in love (granted, it was in the middle of Summer). So to see this in my inbox whilst full of insecurity about my future was AMAZING.
So naturally I said ‘yes, I’m up for that’, and the first few days of the week was spent making sure I had all the documents for the application. Academic job applications are pretty intense, with 3 page CVs, 2 page cover letters, and a research proposal (depending on the position, this can be 12 pages long). So I got all of those together and sent them off.
The rest of the week was… well… less productive.
I’ve noticed that when I don’t have a dedicated workspace away from my house, my productivity tanks. Especially during periods of high stress (like this week).
To combat this, I’ve been trying a new productivity hack. It has a particular name, but I seriously cannot remember what it is right now…. The premise is simple. You can have a MASSIVE to do list, but you can only be working on THREE things at a time.
I’ve been using Asana for this. It’s an online task manager which can organise tasks into columns. So I have one which is my to-do list, one which is my doing list, and one which is my done list. It’s really helped me focus on only one or two items at a time, which is a Godsend when I have ALL OF THE JOB APPLICATIONS, thesis prep, a paper to finish and find time to remember how to code again…
But the main productive moment this week has been to send off an updated draft of my paper to my tutor Rocio. It’s part of a programme where you’re paired up with a tutor who oversees your work and makes sure it’s up to par so it can be published. I’m hoping I’m now at the stage that I just need to polish the Akkadian bits, spellcheck it, and it’ll be good to go. After all, it’s now been read by four people – that is basically an entire peer-review process!
So yeah, between applying for a dream job that will have a quick turnaround (I should find out tomorrow morning), and sending off a paper, it’s been a doozey of a week…
Ellie Bennett 