Podcast – Writing Your Thesis

Voice Over:

Welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast, brought to you by dementiaresearcher.nihr.ac.uk, a network for early career researchers.

Adam Smith:

Hello, and welcome to the Dementia Researcher podcast. I’m Adam Smith, and I’m joined today by a panel of early career researchers who are here to discuss the dreaded thesis writing.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Dun-dun-dun.

Adam Smith:

Which we all know is different from journals, which is something we talked about a few weeks ago. So, all of our three panellists have written their theses, some recently and some a while ago, so I hope we’ll have some fresh tips and some hazy memories. Marianne’s [inaudible 00:00:43] have hazy memories rather than fresh tips.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

It definitely involves a lot of tea, that’s for sure.

Adam Smith:

Okay, so by the end of the discussion today, I hope our listeners will be inspired and perhaps realize that they’re not alone in doing this and will be itching to get back to writing as opposed to finding other things to do as a distraction. I’m just thinking, I do that all the time now, not even as a theses writing, just to avoid the things you don’t really want to do. Cat memes are up there, high on the list. Shopping on Amazon when you don’t really need … Pairing socks. That was an episode from Black Books, do you remember? When he had to do his taxes and he sat out the back and paired a mountain of socks instead. Okay. Well, so I should introduce our panel who are here to join us about thesis writing. We have Doctor Marianne Coleman.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Hello.

Adam Smith:

Who’s a research othro … Go on.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Just call me an optimist, it’s easier.

Adam Smith:

I was going to say orthroptist. Would that’ve been right?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Most of the way there. So, it literally means straight eyes.

Adam Smith:

Okay.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

So orthoptist.

Adam Smith:

Orthoptist, yeah. So I was going to say it right.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, there we go.

Adam Smith:

I questioned myself. From the University of Surrey. We have Doctor Josie Jenkinson-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Hello.

Adam Smith:

Who’s a consultant psychiatrist, also from Surrey-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

As well. And we have Maxine Mackintosh, who’s a PhD student from here at UCL and the Alan Turing Institute.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah. Hello.

Adam Smith:

Well, thank you very much for joining us. Welcome to you all. Maybe we can start by asking you to introduce yourselves. Maybe if you go first, Marianne?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Okay, so my PhD thesis was actually nothing to do with dementia whatsoever. I’m here as an interloper because I’m currently doing some dementia research. So my thesis was actually working with children. So children have lazy eye, which is a condition where the brain prefers one eye over the other and so the connections between the eye and the brain don’t develop as well as they should do. And because of that, a child often needs to wear an eye patch over one eye to improve the quality of vision. And so basically, my PhD involved a lot of messing around with computers. So I was basically using computer technology to measure distorted vision in children with lazy eye because when they have the patch on, it improves the level of vision, but it doesn’t necessarily fix everything about the way in which the brain talks to that eye. And so you can end up with problems with motion perception and distorted vision, which is what my thesis was concentrated on measuring. So, that was the topic of my PhD. I finished my thesis in 2014, so it was a little while ago for me.

Adam Smith:

Five years.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Smith:

And are we allowed to call it lazy eye now? That doesn’t sound like a PC term, does it?

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, it doesn’t.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

No, it doesn’t these days.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Especially at UCL, it’s the sort of thing that wouldn’t go down well.

Adam Smith:

No. I mean, if you-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, absolutely. But in actual fact, as far as the patients are concerned, that’s the language that-

Adam Smith:

No, no, I-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Makes sense to them.

Adam Smith:

I knew what you mean when you said lazy eye-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Exactly. In terms of talking about it to other people-

Adam Smith:

It just immediately felt like ooh, that sounds …

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. But I mean, say, for instance, you had cerebral palsy or something, you wouldn’t say, oh, you’ve got a lazy leg or something like that.

Adam Smith:

No.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

But way back in the ’40s and ’50s, that was the term that they used for it.

Adam Smith:

My parents might’ve said I had lazy-eyetis at that age, but I don’t think that’s actually a medical term.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. So the technical term for it is amblyopia, but if you say that to a child or a parent-

Adam Smith:

Amblyopia.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

They’ll be like, “Huh, what?”

Adam Smith:

I like that word, amblyopia.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It’s a good one.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. So it basically means blunt vision.

Adam Smith:

And it also sounds a little bit like a desert island somewhere I’d like to visit. I’ve just come back from Amblyopia. Josie, maybe you could introduce yourself now.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Hi. So I’m Josie Jenkinson, I’m a consultant psychiatrist for older people. And my PhD was in health services research, and I looked at the costs of care and outcomes for a group of older people with long-term conditions who were subject to a series of service changes at South London and Maudsley. So I followed them over three years, while several long-term care units closed down and community services were brought in in their place and found out what happened to them. So I submitted in December 2018, had my viva April this year and got minor amendments and I’m just about to resubmit next week, so this is a very topical discussion for me.

Adam Smith:

And your PhD topic sounds a lot like a Channel 4 documentary. It’s got documentary written all over it, hasn’t it? Channel 5, following a service closing. In fact, hasn’t there just been one like that? I’m sure I caught the-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

[inaudible 00:05:27].

Adam Smith:

Tail end of a program.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah. And actually, it was a really interesting experience because it was quite a sensitive time and you can imagine that the staff working in the services were really stressed out, and so actually collecting data and going to visit these units and talking to staff was not straightforward because of the changes that were going on were not universally well-received.

Adam Smith:

That sounds like a whole separate podcast all about itself-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

About delivering-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

For sure.

Adam Smith:

Gathering your data in challenging environments.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

In a hostile environment, yeah.

Adam Smith:

That sounds like a … Yeah. I think-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I think you’ve just signed yourself up, Josie.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Afraid so, yeah.

Adam Smith:

That does sound like a-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It sounds like it.

Adam Smith:

Good topic for the future. Thank you very much, Josie. And Maxine.

Maxine Mackintosh:

So I am in the midst of writing up. I’m hoping to hand in the next few weeks, but the perception of time always is a bit off. So my PhD looks at taking medical records and looking back 20 years in any medical record, specifically primary care medical data, and seeing if we can find any signs, symptoms, procedures, surgeries, anything that’s in your EMR, that can give us an early sign of dementia. So it’s kind of a large-scale fishing exercise across medical data. And I’ve got access to 300,000 dementia patients’ data, so it’s a pretty hefty dataset, and you get all these weird and wonderful signals that come up. So for example, people who regularly attend their cervical smear exam are way less likely to get dementia. So, you get these odd things that come out of your EMR. So I’m doing that at UCL and I’ve also got this visiting PhD studentship, which is at the Alan Turing Institute which is the UK’s institute for AI and data science. And the whole PhD is this kind of mix of informatics and epidemiology and AI and data science methods.

I’ve also added a couple of odd, interesting, somewhat related side projects to the PhD. So one of them looks at if you do policy evaluation on all the various dementia policies are being implemented and you do it in a data driven way rather than the traditional way that you evaluate policies, do you get the same outcomes? And the result is actually, no, you can’t really determine whether these policies were effective or not because there have been quite so many, they’ve been quite so cumulative and duplicative. And then the other side project that I am doing for the PhD is the … In the EMR data, a lot of it is can you find dementia early? The key idea is can you phenotype what prodromal dementia looks like? And so part of that is if you look at your electronic health records, is that too late in the process? So the last project in the PhD is interviewing CIOs, CTOs, CDOs of big consumer data companies, so banks, telco companies, shopping companies, and asking them are they doing anything to do with health and ageing with their data? And the truth of the matter is they’re all doing it, but in secret.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Mm.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, of course. We’ve seen that before.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I bet they are.

Adam Smith:

Particularly with Google and Amazon and the way they collect data through their-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

There’s a lot of money in it, isn’t there?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah. Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Oh, well, that’s fascinating. And I can completely see how you can get sucked into taking side-lines down that, trying to … Data always feeds this thirst and interest in so much as you find something that’s interesting and then want to go and find out more and understand why that occurs. People who attend cervical smears are less likely, that sounds like because they’re also the people that are pretty good about health and coming in, right?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah. I mean, none of its kind of [inaudible 00:08:41].

Adam Smith:

No.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Healthy people are more likely to be activated patients, that sort of thing. So a lot of it isn’t really novel insights, but I guess it’s features that are not normally collected as part of clinical trials and one of the indicators of just healthier people who are less frail and that just happens to be the signal you get. So if you had access to banking data, would you get that in an even stronger way is the question.

Adam Smith:

Mm-hmm (affirmative). I have seen that done before with … Talked about before with shopping data, with loyalty cards’ shopping data to understand how did people’s shopping habits change over time, particularly post and pre-diagnosis. Fascinating. All very interesting. And well done all of you on having gotten to the point of … Well, Maxine, don’t worry.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I’m just here sipping a small little glass of white wine just being like, no, no, I’m not quite there yet.

Adam Smith:

So general question to all of you then, has anybody actually enjoyed the experience of writing up your thesis? Or anybody speak out, I’m not pointing that question to anybody in particular.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I was looking at the question list and thinking, enjoyment is definitely a relative term. I enjoy writing. Writing is something that I do like doing, but writing an entire thesis … Mm. I don’t know how much of that is enjoyment and borderline hysteria really.

Adam Smith:

It’s something I quite like because when I’ve done writing up before, getting it down on paper what’s in your head, because you spend so much time. I mean, this is just all-consuming, from waking up in the morning and standing in the shower and then suddenly, I’ll have a ooh, I’ve thought of a really good way to present that, and then I’ll go back and write. And I think sometimes actually just sitting there and getting it down, I quite enjoy.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Unfortunately, this is the sort of thing that would go down really badly if I heard it. I’m having the best time writing up. I absolutely love it, kind of for that reason, that I’ve been working on this thing for three years and I’ve … Various projects that started and didn’t quite finish. And I think that’s the nature of doing data analyses is that you can start things quite easily, but finishing them is probably a bit harder. And it’s just so satisfying having that focus and having a reason not to reply to your emails and just say, “You know what? Leave me alone. I’m hibernating and I’m writing up”, and it’s very calm and peaceful and cerebral.

Adam Smith:

But as long as you really are writing up. That’s not just suddenly become the all-round excuse for getting out of everything else you should be doing.

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, but it helps.

Adam Smith:

Do we use that? I mean, do we think we use oh, yeah, I can’t possibly do anything else now, I’m writing up? Is that a good excuse?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I did try and say no to a lot of things during my writing up period, but to an extent, my husband was kind of like the divine intervention in that regard. He’s like, “No, there is more to life than just your thesis. You do need to actually exist outside of your computer keyboard.” So yeah, I did try and get out of things.

Adam Smith:

So not just use as an excuse and kidding ourselves in the process. Josie, you’ve been very quiet.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Hmm. It’s just thinking about it and reflecting. Definitely enjoyed little bits of it. I’m actually really enjoying doing the amendments because it’s more like editing and fine-tuning and the content is already there. And it’s quite nice, actually, looking back at your thesis and thinking, oh, this is quite good actually. I’m reading paragraphs and thinking, oh, I can’t believe I wrote this. This is actually all right. So amendments is quite satisfying and it all suddenly feels a lot easier because I think it’s a bit like that, isn’t it? Once you’ve been through something, it feels really difficult at the time, and then you maybe go away for a few months and have a break, you come back to it and start again and it all feels a lot easier because you’ve been through the process once already. So, I’m definitely feeling that at the moment.

Adam Smith:

Do you think some of this comes down to the nature of your research and the way you’re approaching your PhD in the first place as opposed to when is the appropriate time to actually start writing? Because I’ve been seeing all too often in other how-to guides and top tips and things that the recommendation is always to start writing as early as possible, but, of course, some research lends itself to that approach and some doesn’t. I know from talking to you before outside, of course, you’re a jobbing consultant psychiatrist and your PhD was mixed around as you continued to study and do other things. So you’re in health services research-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

When did you actually start writing?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

So I probably started writing in the middle, so I was doing my literature review, and I did a national survey as part of my background and I wrote up a paper.

Adam Smith:

That’s always a good way to feel like you’re doing something.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

I’ve done a survey.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Get a paper out. Yeah, exactly.

Adam Smith:

Survey’s out there.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah. So that was good. So I did that, probably, year two. So I did it part-time, so six years. And then I did most of the writing up in the last 18 months and I did it alongside working full-time in my first consultant job, which I do not recommend. It was pretty awful. So I used both of my annual leave and study leave entitlement to do it, so I just chip, chip, chip, chip away at it whilst I was working and then blast it during my two weeks off here and there throughout those 18 months. So, got there in the end.

Adam Smith:

So that’s quite hard again. So that’s doing evenings and weekends-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, very much so.

Adam Smith:

And do you have these focused short periods of time where you do that?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah. So my clinical job was so tiring, I had to write first thing in the morning. I tried writing in the evening and it just didn’t work. So I’m not a natural early riser, but I had to become one. So I would try and squeeze in between one and three hours of writing before my clinical job every day.

Adam Smith:

Before work? Wait a second.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

And then do a full day at the weekend.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

What time were you getting up?

Adam Smith:

That’s five-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Five.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Oh, god.

Adam Smith:

Did you go for a run before that as well?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I actually did.

Adam Smith:

How was running at four?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I actually did because I think you can get quite depressed and quite miserable when you’re working that hard and for me, exercise is a way to stave that off. So I found out early on that I had to do something to keep myself going, so, actually, exercising first thing in the morning was a really good way to do that. I would highly recommend it.

Adam Smith:

I’ve heard so many people say that. I just turn to pasta.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Pasta is good too because you’re going to eat a load of pasta and-

Maxine Mackintosh:

[crosstalk 00:14:50].

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

You’re going to have to run to keep the weight off.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Justifies eating that.

Adam Smith:

I’m not even saying pasta, it’s Haribo and red wine at the time.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, both of those featured as well.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Soaked in?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I don’t even want to think about how much chocolate I ate during my writing up period.

Adam Smith:

So when did you start writing, Marianne?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Well, I spent most of the first year of my PhD doing experiments and not really doing any journal reading or anything, which was probably a bad plan. But I started writing properly at the start of my second year and I did my introductory chapter, which took ages because at that time, I still wasn’t completely sure what I was doing. That standard PhD thing of you don’t really properly understand what is that you’re all about until towards the end of your second year. So-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It took me way longer than that, by the way.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Oh.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I’m still not sure if I know what I’m doing, but there you go.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I should add I did my PhD full-time and I completed within the three years of funding as well, so I handed in pretty much on the last day of my funding was when I submitted my thesis. So yeah, so I wrote mostly … I started writing in the second year, I did a couple of chapters then. Everybody has different approaches to writing their thesis, in my case, because it was a series of very closely interlinked studies that were using the same method that developed and iterated over the course of the PhD period. It meant that I could do my introductory chapter and my methods chapter quite early on, and then the rest of it was just individual experiment chapters written up. So I did the vast majority of my writing in my final year, actually took place while I was conducting my final study. So I was sitting in the hospital at Gartnavel General Hospital up in Glasgow and whenever I didn’t have somebody coming in to be tested for the experiment, I would be writing my thesis.

Adam Smith:

So, I guess, is there something there about even if you’re not going to dive into that first chapter and dive into writing … I mean, having good documentation is a given anyway, right? Do we even need to say that? But I suppose even in just documenting your experiments, actually, if you make a really good job of that and do that really thoroughly, actually you’ve got some …

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I think for clinical studies-

Adam Smith:

There can be a lot of copy and paste after that.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Even just the ethical approval because you have to get ethics for everything that you do involving human subjects.

Adam Smith:

Not in health service research.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, it really-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Oh, I did.

Adam Smith:

You did?

Maxine Mackintosh:

[crosstalk 00:17:15] electronic records, which I find always a bit surprising, but …

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. And so the protocol that you do in order to get the ethical approval to actually gather your data is a really good starting point for your thesis chapter, especially if you’re doing a series of self-contained experiment chapters. So I had an overall methods chapter which introduced the actual concept and the method of doing it, and then in the individual experiment chapters, I would document what changes I made.

Adam Smith:

So putting a lot of effort into your eth … Which, of course, you have to do anyway into ethics, can then … That can lead onto what you’re going to write.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Essentially, yeah. It just makes that process of turning your protocol into a chapter easier.

Adam Smith:

What about you, Maxine? Have you-

Maxine Mackintosh:

I think a slightly different approach, but I think it’s going okay. So I started writing in July and I’m handing in in the next month or so, and I hadn’t written anything really before.

Adam Smith:

Wait a second. We should say this because these podcasts-

Maxine Mackintosh:

July, August.

Adam Smith:

Don’t all go out straight away.

Maxine Mackintosh:

It’ll be three months.

Adam Smith:

So it’s the end of August now.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

So three months.

Maxine Mackintosh:

So whenever I read a paper, I write quite thorough notes on it and that’s just stored, but I hadn’t really written anything. I’m actually very, very glad I didn’t because when I started writing, I thought, actually, that analysis I did in year one would work much better with this analysis in year three and that bit of year two would work really well in year one. And actually, the beauty of doing data science is you can move scripts around and rejig them fairly easily. So actually, I completely restructured the thesis even though the content was largely the same. And yeah, and it’s just been quite easy … I found it quite easy to write, partly because I had written so many notes on all the papers as well. But one thing that I did a couple weeks ago, which was unpleasant but I think the thesis will be a lot better as a result, is because of the knowledge I now have of writing it now, I realised there was a small mistake, a small bug in my code from year one.

Adam Smith:

So you wanted to redo that experiment?

Maxine Mackintosh:

It’s actually worse than that, it was the thing that defined the entire cohort that will define the rest of the PhD. And it wasn’t wrong, but it just wasn’t quite what I was expecting it to be and it wasn’t quite the cohort I’d wanted. And so I ended up rewriting all the code for my PhD, but programmer now Maxine is much better than programmer in year one. So actually, my code is now infinitely more reproducible, infinitely cleaner and actually, I’m really pleased because I want to publish all my code along with my papers.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, that counts.

Maxine Mackintosh:

And I’d be so embarrassed to publish the code I’d written in my year one, so it’s been-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Nobody wants to see my code.

Adam Smith:

It’s a good question though. So that raises an interesting point, doesn’t it? Which is if you do save all to the end, is it really hard then to look back on your work from year one or those first experiments that you were doing and go, actually, I’m quite proud of those, I’m quite happy to include them. Or you’re tempted to say oh, actually, I really want to redo that now because I know it will be better. I suppose that … If you didn’t want to do that, that would lend itself to writing as you went, wouldn’t it, because then you would just move on. You’d put that part to bed and you wouldn’t be revisiting it in quite such a way as you are.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

There is something about how you mature as a researcher throughout the course of your PhD that makes writing up at the end a lot easier than it is at the beginning.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Because with the perspective of the several years of research that you’ve done, you’re able to conceptualize so much more in your head and work out a logical structure for your thesis that you just would not have been able to do at the beginning. So although everybody does give the advice of you should always be writing, I think yes, you can always be writing, but writing notes and the little bits that you need to do in terms of your upgrade, your ethics, any papers. But actually, the thesis proper naturally comes together towards the end once you’ve done so many years of thinking about a topic, everything just kind of falls into place. It did for me anyway.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Or if you’ve already written some chapters, just revisiting them at the end.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Exactly, yeah.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Just because the person you were when you wrote those is not going to be the same person you are when you do your final … Your discussion and conclusion chapter and your … It’s-

Adam Smith:

But as you say, as well, I think don’t then be too precious about … Or worried too much if you haven’t written absolutely perfect chapters early on because you’re really going to want to look at all this more strongly and more thoroughly towards the end.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

And I think that, to an extent, can influence how you feel about your writing as a whole. Because I remember definitely … It was probably about … It’s the first half of my final year, where I went through a phase of just being like, oh, god, nothing is finished. I haven’t finished a single chapter. Because everything was just in that draft status of I’ve got comments, I need to rework this, I need to redo that, oh, god, that experiment that I wrote up before, I actually understand why I did that experiment now, let’s just rework that a little bit so it fits in with the overall narrative of what I’m doing. And so there wasn’t really any chapter that I could say that I’d conclusively finished and could actually put to bed, and that really got to me actually. I did definitely have a period where I just felt really overwhelmed by the sheer unfinishedness of the whole thing.

Adam Smith:

Okay, so takeaways from that little question then seemed to be that there isn’t necessarily any rights and wrongs about when to start, but from your experience here, the idea of doing the substantive part of the writing toward the end, based on the rounded position of the last three or five years, however long it’s taken you to do this, but keeping awesome notes throughout, really good documentation. Your ethics application can be a good starting point to also get your head in the right place and to get the document down. Does that sound reasonable?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Adam Smith:

So moving on then, what was your … I think my next question here I had written down before, which was what was your process? But I feel, to some extent, we’ve got that. But what about more practically? What about your process practically? So, Josie, you got up at four, went for a run.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Not quite four.

Adam Smith:

Fed the horses.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

No.

Adam Smith:

And then …

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

No.

Adam Smith:

Wrote in the mornings.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Not quite. Definitely had to have a morning routine to get myself up and going. And the thing that I found really, really helpful was this big A4 book that I had and I used to write a diary entry every day before I started doing anything and then once I’d done my work. And I will just start writing about anything, even just how I was feeling that morning, what was going round my head, what I really wanted to get done in my next little work period.

Adam Smith:

You’ve given this advice to patients, haven’t you? I can tell. This is straight out your textbook for what you suggest.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

No, no. Maybe a little bit.

Adam Smith:

The diary.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, keep … Well, diaries are really helpful. And one of the best bits of advice anybody gave me was that you can’t edit a blank page, and then if you just start writing anything, anything at all, could be nonsense, at least you’ve got something to edit.

Adam Smith:

Ooh, that’s a quote for the podcast cover. You can’t edit a blank page.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

You absolutely can’t.

Adam Smith:

What about you, Maxine? So you’ve just had three months, mostly of the summer. Have you had the cricket on in the background as well? We’ve had the World Cup and The Ashes. No?

Maxine Mackintosh:

No.

Adam Smith:

Not a cricket-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Absolute silence worker.

Adam Smith:

So during this three months writing, have you been at home, at work? Where have you bene?

Maxine Mackintosh:

So I live in London, but my partner lives in Oxford and Oxford’s a very nice place for lots of reasons, but also it’s quite a useful place to write up if you don’t know anyone in the city. So I moved to Oxford to write up because, partly, it’s just a new environment. It’s also nice to be next to a partner who can just be like, “Can you just do the washing up tonight? Can you just cook tonight? Can you just do everything, please, for me?” And it’s just been nice to be in a different environment. So I moved to Oxford and I am a hyper morning person and I also like it because by the time you get up and have done numerous hours of work, then the rest of the world wakes up and then the noise of emails and communication starts, and that’s something I find quite hard to silence.

Adam Smith:

I said this on the WhatsApp recently and that golden hour, I was exactly the same. That golden hour, I get so efficient during that one hour in a morning when it is quiet and there aren’t emails coming in because I’m the worst person to be distracted. An email will come in and suddenly, that will take my entire attention for the next half an hour.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, exactly.

Adam Smith:

And it shouldn’t do. I mean, it’s just because I’m bad at prioritising. I say this, my boss isn’t listening.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I resisted it for so long, this working in the morning business, because I am a night owl through and through.

Adam Smith:

Me too. I-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I really resisted it. But working full-time, it was actually the only way that I could get it done. And you slip back into your natural patterns, don’t you? So as soon as I submitted, straight back to being a night owl. But now I’m doing amendments, the only way I’ve been able to do it is to come back to being an early morning riser and getting it done. And it’s actually quite nice to learn that you can do that, that you can switch in and out of that mode, so you know you’ve got it in your armoury. So if you’re ever faced with a tight deadline in the future, you really need to get something done, you can go into that battle mode.

Adam Smith:

And did you have a partner to use as a slave during your-

Maxine Mackintosh:

So my supervisors, I’ve got a data one and a dementia one, but because I’m using GP data, if I put the diagnostic codes in front of my dementia neuroscience supervisor, he doesn’t really know why weird things are coded by odd GPs around the country. Whereas my partner’s a GP, so I’ll be like, “What on earth is that code?” And he’ll say, “Oh, yeah, that year, we just happened to be paid at that time and so we all just decided to code it in that way.” And so those sorts of insights are really useful.

Adam Smith:

Yeah, because there was some enhanced service that meant-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Adam Smith:

If you … Ah, interesting.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

It’s all coming out now.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah. So he’s also-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Helpful.

Maxine Mackintosh:

He’s both a pre-husband and also, an at home supervisor, which I think is probably an unhelpful blurring of dynamics. But for me, just the blank page thing, I think, was really useful. What I would do is I would choose a paper that I thought that was amazing, that I would never be able to write anything like that. I would copy and paste particular sections of it onto a blank page and just use those as anchors, and then by the end of the various iterations, there wouldn’t be any of it left. But it was just helpful providing that skeleton and it was a paper I really admired, that I would hope that one day I could do something so great. So, that’s how I used it.

Adam Smith:

Did anybody go on a retreat? Because I know various universities, I saw this recently, I think it’s Goodenough College has a writing retreat in Scotland you can book and go to and things like that. Nobody-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, we never really had anything like that offered to us at … Well, it was Glasgow Caledonian Uni I went to.

Adam Smith:

You were at Glasgow, so you just have to go in a tent in Loch Lomond and you’re covered.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I know. There was-

Adam Smith:

It’s a retreat, isn’t it?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

One tea shop that I used to basically just go into and just sit in there and just … But I did quite a bit of writing at home, but the bulk of it was done at the hospital.

Adam Smith:

So you were at the hospital too for most of your writ …

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Varied.

Adam Smith:

Oh, no. Of course, in the morning, you were early-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, so I was at … Sometimes at home and sometimes I would go into my work office. Very lucky. Most doctors don’t have offices anymore, but I do have my own office, so I would use that or the hospital library. Or at the weekends, take myself somewhere else, maybe sit in a coffee shop and do it there.

Adam Smith:

I was going to say, is anybody else a coffee shop writer?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Oh, gosh. So-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Definitely.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I know Adam also lives in Oxford. There’s a new coffee shop in Jericho that has the most exquisite coffee and I didn’t think myself a coffee snob until I found this place. And they play amazing music and the coffee barista guy is so nice and the coffee is delicious, I think I single-handedly bankroll the organisation at the moment.

Adam Smith:

Also, as well, Oxford is fantastic in so much as, and somebody’s going to correct me on this, but if I recall, it’s got 156 libraries in Oxford between the various colleges. So yeah, we’re very lucky in Oxford to have those places and such historic buildings and things. Although, they’re not always the comfiest of seats.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Lots of them are based in basements, which I find incredibly annoying.

Adam Smith:

Well, that’s because they don’t want the light coming in ruining the books, ancient tapestries. But you’re right, they do. Or they have special film on the windows that does exactly the same thing.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Mm.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

It helps with that transformation process of becoming a troglodyte with your fingers-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, exactly.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Welded to the computer keyboard.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Ooh. Well, that’s a good point actually. Are you PC or Mac people?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Mac.

Adam Smith:

You’re Mac.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I’ve all this weird thing whereby I have a virtual machine, so I do all my data analysis in a secure environment, which is a Windows computer on my Mac.

Adam Smith:

But your documents in Mac?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Half and half, annoyingly, because I’ve got half of my PhD’s on this virtual machine and half is … So some of the documentation has to happen-

Adam Smith:

You’re going to stick it all together as a PDF later?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, I think so. It’s-

Adam Smith:

So, you’re going to have format problems, right?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It doesn’t matter so much now. I was in the libraries, so just coming back to where we were writing. So King’s has several libraries and being in different libraries, for some reason, I found quite helpful, just even different views out of the windows, just mixing it up, having different work settings is really helpful. When I used that, they all used Windows, I have a Mac at home. Actually, the newer versions of Word, not a problem.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, it’s sort of back in the old days-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, it’s not really an issue now.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

You’re used to having all those compatibility issues.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

You just-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Like at conferences and stuff with presentations between Mac and PC and stuff.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah. It’s fine now.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Doesn’t matter now.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It’s just your fingers that have to learn the interface.

Adam Smith:

Marianne, are you Mac or Windows?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Windows.

Adam Smith:

Windows. You mean you haven’t sat and screamed bastard at your computer because-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I have, but not for that reason.

Adam Smith:

You can’t make that … Why is that line there? And the line shouldn’t be there. There’s nothing to suggest why there’s an empty line in that place and you’ve reformatted. No?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I think the new version of Office with Mac is actually … It’s fine. It’s really transferable.

Adam Smith:

So make sure you’re using the newest-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

The newest version, yeah.

Adam Smith:

Versions.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I was actually a Latek person.

Adam Smith:

Using Word ’97.

Maxine Mackintosh:

So formatting is really not a problem with LaTeX, if you’re happy using HTML code to format your documents. But one thing I realised, that if your supervisors or the people commenting on your documents are not comfortable with using LaTeX-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yep.

Maxine Mackintosh:

[crosstalk 00:31:35] quite quickly.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I tried to teach myself how to use it. I was so motivated at the start of my PhD, I was like, “Right, going to teach myself LaTeX. I’m going to do everything. It’s going to be so beautifully laid out.” And my supervisor was like, “What?”

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

“No.”

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

And just to [inaudible 00:31:48], I have absolutely no idea what these guys are talking about.

Adam Smith:

No, I-

Maxine Mackintosh:

If you were going to build a website that was your PhD, that’s what you do. So you’d write instructions-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Ah, okay.

Maxine Mackintosh:

The top of your document that would say every heading is like this, this is the formatter, everything, and everything is codified. So it’s effectively like-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Okay, that sounds terrifying.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Programming your PhD and then you just write.

Adam Smith:

Is that like in Word when you go to the top and you pick what font you want or the document to be-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Kind of. Yeah, yeah. So that’s the kind-

Adam Smith:

And say headers will be in 14?

Maxine Mackintosh:

I can drop a-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, you have more control over everything. My problem was trying to do tables in LaTeX.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, tables are a faff.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

As a new person to LaTeX, trying to learn how to do table layouts was just no.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Or screen-grabbing tables, which I think is slightly lazy practice because tables are the one thing that I think LaTeX is really bad at.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. And so-

Adam Smith:

So do you screen-grab-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I ended up abandoning it in the end and I did everything in Word.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, that’s what I did.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I screen-grabbed everything and for my tables and figures, it’s by far the easiest way to get them in, I would say.

Adam Smith:

As long as the resolution’s good enough then for reproduction in print.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

And I think there’s nothing worse than when you go to print file and you realise that the quality’s crap and then you’re hunting back through all your … Trying to find where to get that table came from in the first place.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

See, I offer an adhoc service in my uni now for reformatting diagrams-

Adam Smith:

Do you? You’ve got a-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

To 300 DPI for journal submissions.

Adam Smith:

Is that earning you lots of cash? Is that-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

More like lots and lots of tea, but …

Maxine Mackintosh:

I think this raises a more serious point about things like version control and comments and set your documents up so that it’s easy to use it. And I think that version control and PhD comments is, I think, terrible because-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Don’t call it final final final-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Final final point.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Or your finally finally.

Maxine Mackintosh:

New date. Yeah, exactly that sort of thing. So for example, I would thoroughly recommend using Google Docs and using something like Zotero, which is a referencing software that’s compatible with Google Docs, because Google Docs has a way easier version to get comments simultaneously and live from other people on. Whereas-

Adam Smith:

And then you can take it … I mean, you can always-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Ah, but this, again, depends on your supervisor.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Mm. Yeah.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah. So-

Adam Smith:

On whether they’re working-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Luckily, I’ve got a highly techy supervisor and one supervisor is so old-school that he will print it off, so it doesn’t really matter what happens actually. But yeah, I would agree, I check whoever’s going to give your comments, what they’re comfortable with. But things like OneDrive, which is the equivalent of the live document sharing for Microsoft, just I don’t think is very good. And I think the most effective is Google Docs, if your supervisors are willing to use.

Adam Smith:

Everybody’s going to have a-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, so if you happen to have a techy supervisor, I definitely did not.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I feel like just sitting down with for half an hour and being like, this is Google Doc, welcome to the 21st century, would be a helpful life lesson more generally.

Adam Smith:

If you put it in Google Doc, I mean, worst case scenarios is you can print off. I mean, ultimately, you can give them a hard copy if they’re willing to do that. Or, I suppose, I’ve done this before, where you just copy it out … They can download it still as a Word document, but their comments aren’t … It makes more work for you then, of course, because you’ve got to incorporate them back in. But that’s good advice.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I don’t know if there’s issues around if you’ve got sensitive data, putting it on Google Docs. I certainly had that as an issue. Some of my data was quite sensitive, so I wouldn’t have really been happy putting it on Google Docs.

Adam Smith:

Data storage. Well, I’m sure each institution will have their own advice and guidance around data storage. But I think you all make good points, actually, just about your filing system and way you organize your work in terms of version control, where you’re keeping your documents, keeping track of all those things.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Back everything up.

Adam Smith:

Back everything up.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah. Triple back up.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Forever.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Forever.

Adam Smith:

Not just saving that one copy that’s on your desktop.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

No. Two computers, two memory sticks-

Adam Smith:

The version.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

And your email.

Adam Smith:

Did you all do that?

Maxine Mackintosh:

I’m wedded to the cloud.

Adam Smith:

Yeah.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah, I did use Dropbox very heavily during my PhD. I know there’s a lot of data protection issues surrounding these things now, but certainly for the thesis, which didn’t have any identifiable patient data in it and my datasets, which were also completely anonymized. I remember there was one time, I just did a complete … Fat fingered the keyboard and deleted two months’ worth of data and Dropbox is like, “Would you like this back?”, and I’m like, yes. So that is definitely the benefit of cloud storage.

Adam Smith:

We’ve been talking quite a while already and I have a whole list of questions still, so I’m going to run through these really quickly because I want answers to these. So, did you read anybody else’s theses before you cracked into your own-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yes.

Adam Smith:

On your topic? You did.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yes.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

One of the most helpful things I did.

Adam Smith:

You did too.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I only read my supervisor’s and she joked to me when she gave it to me, “Oh, if you lose it and forget to give it back to me, I’m not going to cry about it.” I didn’t get what she meant at the time, but now I do. I never want to see mine again.

Adam Smith:

So you just read your supervisor’s. You read, Maxine?

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, I didn’t. Mine has … It’s quite-

Adam Smith:

You’re so unique-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Well, no, no. But it’s a weirdly interdisciplinary PhD, to such extent, I was struggling to get examiners who will feel qualified to cover all bits of it. But as a result, every time I read a version, I thought, actually, that doesn’t feel like my sort of thesis, so I stopped trying to read and actually, I’m just doing me and we’ll see how that goes.

Adam Smith:

That’s good. I suppose there can be a sense of a … It can be distracting in so much as you start to then try and emulate what you’ve seen as opposed to writing your own thing. I think at least having a flick through so you should what one generally looks like in terms of how many pages does a thesis … How many pages did other people’s theses have? How-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I googled so many times how many pages should a thesis be? How many words should a thesis be?

Adam Smith:

You googled that.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

All the time. Obsessive about it.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

It varies so much though.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It does, it varies so much. And it’s worth checking your own university’s guidance on that over and above everything else.

Adam Smith:

How many drafts?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Draft chapters, but only one draft of the full thesis.

Adam Smith:

Just one draft and-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, and then that’s it.

Adam Smith:

You worked through.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I’m in the kind of … This blurry period of iterations and drafts, all different stages, so I don’t know yet.

Adam Smith:

Yours has just been an entire organic, there’s been no-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Is that another thing about using the cloud is so much as you don’t have drafts because every amendment is stored and you can go back? So actually-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

Would you still store drafts in versions like that or do you just have one that’s an organic document from start to finish?

Maxine Mackintosh:

If there’s been a really big jump, I will save a previous version just because maybe post-hoc, there will be a paragraph that didn’t fit in that section of the thesis, but would be really good for paper. But-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Or you spent three hours reorganising a bunch of tables and you just … The thought of having to redo all of that-

Adam Smith:

Just in case you change your mind.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I kept separate documents which were discards from … So I had a live document rather than keeping the versions of the drafts, but anything I took out, I kept into a file which I would call methods chapter discards, just in case I ever needed it again.

Adam Smith:

And I had here a question about formatting tips, but I think we’ve covered that to be quite honest.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

One tip I would share about formatting, particularly for Microsoft Word users, is that you know the heading styles at the top, you’ve got the ribbon and you’ve got all the different styles? You can actually make your own custom one. Some university libraries give you a guide on how to do it. It’s definitely worth doing and doing all of your chapters using that same style because then that way, you’ve got all of your headings and everything’s all set up. And then that way, when you actually combine all of the individual chapters together to make the final thesis, all the numberings are correct.

Adam Smith:

That’s useful.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

And it actually works properly and you don’t have to spend hours reformatting everything once you’ve got your final big document.

Adam Smith:

We mentioned before, the conversation with your supervisors about their preferred format, of course, is quite important, particularly … How often were you sending your off to your supervisors for comments?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Once per chapter. My supervisor was quite strict on that. She only ever wanted to see anything once.

Adam Smith:

Once per chapter.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

So I had to make sure the first draft was a good one.

Adam Smith:

Has your supervisor even seen yours?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, again-

Adam Smith:

But he only had a week to comment.

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, but, again, I’ve got these very, very different … I only WhatsApp one of my supervisors and the other one, I basically write quill ink letters to. It is a bit … Kind of an odd dynamic. But I generally like to send something as finished as possible and just have a couple conversations in interim, but not actually show them anything just to make sure that I’m on the right track, but I prefer to be like this is my best full chapter-

Adam Smith:

Has anybody had issues in getting feedback in a timely way from supervisors?

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yes.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Not for me.

Maxine Mackintosh:

On one hand, it’s really great, I think, writing up during the summer because the world slows down and you have more time. But at the beginning of the summer, I did email all the people who I was expecting to have comments from various chapters saying, just to let you know, this is my time I’m sending you versions, it’d be really great to know A, if you’re going on holiday and B, how long it’ll take you to look through a chapter that’s X long. And I didn’t get that many responses to that email. And now I’m sending chapters off and I’m getting these out of offices that say I’m back in three or four weeks. It’s turned out to a bit tricky, so yeah.

Adam Smith:

So even when you do try to set those expectations and that timeline down, they don’t necessarily take any notice.

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, not necessarily. So-

Adam Smith:

We won’t ask you who your supervisors-

Maxine Mackintosh:

No, they’re all really wonderful-

Adam Smith:

Or your reviewers.

Maxine Mackintosh:

But just summer’s quite complicated it turns out.

Adam Smith:

Okay, last couple of question. Anything you’d do differently, thinking back? Obviously, you wanted to rethink your whole thing, Maxine, so I won’t ask you that question. What about you Josie, Marianne? Anything you’d-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

I don’t think I could have. Ideally, I wouldn’t have been working full-time, but circumstances meant that I had to, so I don’t think I could’ve done anything differently. But ideally, yes, don’t try and write up whilst you’re working full-time, that’s pretty difficult.

Adam Smith:

That’s super. Last question, any advice that you would pass on? Obviously, I’m hoping our listeners may be in the same situations as you or maybe just starting their PhD. Just give me one top tip. I’m going to pin you down to one top tip in relation to writing.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Familiarise yourself with the referencing software of your choice as early as possible so that you can have a consistent system for managing your references and your PDF files. And however else you prefer to work, if it’s on paper or whatever, just starting at the very beginning with this is how I’m going to organise stuff makes a really big difference because then you’re not in your final year and you’re like, oh, god, where was that paper where I read that one thing? I’m sure there was somebody that said blah, blah, blah, and I really need this to be able to cite it to make this point here in my discussion chapter, and you’ve got no idea where it is.

Adam Smith:

That’s a good point.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Referencing software, you can annotate the references that you put into it.

Adam Smith:

Cool. And I think you’d just recommend that people write their PhDs using pencil and paper as well. Was that … No? Do you know what, that would be so cool, right? I mean, why not?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Sometimes handwriting does make a difference though.

Adam Smith:

You can take pictures of-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

If you’re stuck on a section, being able to actually write it out can sometimes help with the thought process.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I know.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Whatever works for you.

Maxine Mackintosh:

I have two parents who did PhDs on typewriters and they love to tell me how difficult life was using a typewriter and that my life is so easy now, so I’ve got enough of that at home.

Adam Smith:

Well, actually I’ll come to you next, Maxine. What’s your top tip?

Maxine Mackintosh:

I hate survival bias type questions, but I guess I was told to, this is going to go against what’s just been said, but to try not to take a job until you’ve submitted. But then at some point, you have to plan and you have to get on with your life. And so I’m in this very fortunate position where I’ve got some travel fellowships in the autumn, which I can technically be working whilst I’m on them, but I’d like not to. So on one hand, I’ve got a hard deadline. On the other hand, if an accident happens and I have to redo everything, I technically have the time. So I guess it would be think really carefully about what your next step is and the timing of that, and just think realistically about what you can handle doing simultaneously. And I think that’s only a personal decision that anyone by themselves can make.

Adam Smith:

Josie?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

So one of the things I found the most helpful was using project management software for my thesis. I use Trello, which I would highly recommend.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Oh, Trello’s so good.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

So good. So I colour-coded my chapters. If you’ve used Trello before, that will make perfect sense. If not, have a look at Trello. You see that you can designate-

Adam Smith:

T-R-E-L-L-O.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

T-R-E-L-L-O.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. It’s free.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

So you get it as an … It’s free. You can use it on a desk-

Maxine Mackintosh:

I love Asana, but Trello’s also-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Oh, yeah, Asana’s pretty good too. I really took to Trello, you can get it on your phone and on your … And it’s online as well, so you can log in wherever.

Adam Smith:

Do people use Slack for the same thing as well or is that different?

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yes.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Integrates with Slack, but it’s not-

Adam Smith:

Slack.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Substituted for Slack.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

No, I like the simplicity of Trello. So I would have stacks of cards for things like easy wins and bigger jobs. So if I was low on energy and only had an hour, I could look at my easy win list and think, I can do this in an hour, and then I would feel like I was constantly chipping away. And I would code the cards according to colours, so the methods chapter would be a blue card, or the results would be pink and that really, really helped.

Maxine Mackintosh:

That’s so good.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

You can now attach things to Trello cards as well.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, it’s fantastic.

Adam Smith:

That’s so good.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Highly recommend that.

Adam Smith:

It is. And I know because I’ve used Trello as well and there is an app and it’s there on your phone too.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, it’s really good. You can just chip, chip away all the time.

Adam Smith:

And you can delegate things to people as well in that.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, you can.

Maxine Mackintosh:

There’s this thing on Asana that if you complete a task, then you get a unicorn that flies across the screen with confetti-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Oh, I like that.

Maxine Mackintosh:

And you’re like, yeah, that was a win. Thank you.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Feels good.

Adam Smith:

And is this where you got your GP boyfriend, you just delegate him things? Review this.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Review this.

Adam Smith:

He’d just have a Trello work list pop up.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

And one more thing, if I may, which sounds like a really weird thing, but it was a little thing that really kept me going. As one of my procrastinating things was to go on Instagram and actually following the PhD hashtags was quite motivating. So if you follow their hashtags PhD, PhD student, and there’s one called phinished, P-H-I-N-I-S-H-E-D. They’re quite inspiring, you feel like a part of a bigger community of people that’s doing their PhDs and approaching finishing and submission and, actually, that was quite helpful. It’s a lonely business.

Maxine Mackintosh:

That has actually reminded me. One thing I’m finding incredibly useful is having a blacklister for anything on the internet. So, you basically write down every website that you want to not be looking at and it’s called the Self-control app and you basically activate it-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Ah, that’s good.

Maxine Mackintosh:

For any period of time that you want, it could be 20 minutes, it could be eight hours. And-

Adam Smith:

Shouldn’t you get somebody else to do that for you and then they’re the ones with the pin? Anybody with children would know that you can set that screen time-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah.

Adam Smith:

And you only-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Do that to yourself. Do that to yourself. And-

Adam Smith:

Give your phone to your partner and say set screen time up for me and don’t allow me to look at Instagram.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Because it is that thing of losing, as you said-

Adam Smith:

It is.

Maxine Mackintosh:

Right at the beginning, before you know it-

Adam Smith:

The top procrastination-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Half an hour’s gone. Yeah.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

One more tiny thing.

Adam Smith:

Go … No, please, Josie.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Brimming with-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Again … Sorry, this stuff’s coming to me that really, really helped is using the Pomodoro method for working, which is where you set a timer for 50 minutes, you work for 50 minutes and you have a break for 10 minutes and every few hours, you have a longer break. That was an absolute lifesaver for me, so highly recommend that.

Adam Smith:

I’ve got a funny feeling that Josie’s got a good blog in there just to-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Yeah, I feel like-

Adam Smith:

You’ve got a-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Josie’s so in control-

Adam Smith:

There’s a blog-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Of organising her life.

Adam Smith:

I think this podcast needs a-

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Like a swan, the legs are paddling-

Maxine Mackintosh:

Marie Kondo of PhDs right here.

Adam Smith:

It needs a companion blog from Josie with links to all these things, so maybe just a top 10. You write me a top 10 tips for writing and I’ll publish it alongside.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

That’s a deal.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

And just one last thing to finish off.

Adam Smith:

I’ve got a funny feeling we’re going to have lots of one last things.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

I mean, everyone has their own things that motivate them when writing. For me, when I was really struggling to get finished, my husband gave me this suggestion of 1500 word Fridays. So on a Friday, if I’d written 1500 words by the end of the day, then he would buy me a treat.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Aw, that’s-

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Bribery and corruption is the way to go. There we go. Get them words out.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

It’s all about the treats.

Adam Smith:

And that’s how you write a novel as well, isn’t it? Right, I really am going to call a day to it because I think we could … Honestly, we could talk about this all the time and you’ve all had wine, so honestly, this could carry on another hour. It’s time to end today’s podcast. I’d like to thank our panellists, Marianne, Josie and Maxine. For those who are about to start writing, good luck.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Yeah, good luck.

Adam Smith:

And for those that have submitted, tune in next time because next podcast, in two weeks’ time, will be on sitting the viva. All of our panellists can be found on Twitter. Do you want to quickly give your Twitter names?

Dr Marianne Coleman:

Yeah. It’s MPOrthoptics.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

@JosieUJenkinson.

Maxine Mackintosh:

@Maxi_Macki.

Adam Smith:

Fantastic. And if you visit our website, you’ll find profiles of all of our panellists and links to those Twitter feeds as well. If you’ve got anything to add on this topic, please do post a comment on the website or drop us a line on Twitter and we can be found on @dem_researcher, and I’m at @BetterResearch. Finally, please remember to subscribe to the podcast through SoundCloud, iTunes, and Spotify. You can also listen through our website. Please do post reviews, share, and let other people know about it too. And thank you very much everybody, and good luck everybody out there with your own writing.

Dr Marianne Coleman:

You can do it.

Dr Josie Jenkinson:

Thanks, Adam. Yeah, you can do it.

Voice Over:

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