Tags: thesis, stress, work, balance, PhD
Date: 12 November 2009 19:43:21
I'm a week and a half into my new job, and I'm terrified about getting behind on my thesis. I'm not sure how to make more time for it - my concern is really that I can't give it much quality time. Even though my hours at work are pretty good and I'm home at a reasonably early time, I'm finding I do need a bit of "vegging out time" in order to wind down and get any of the emotion from the day out of my system (and dealing with people in their raw, everyday lives is very emotional, I'd forgotten just how much). I had planned on coming home and doing an hour or so thesis work before cooking/eating, but I'm struggling a bit with that. Partly because of the need to veg out for a bit first, and partly because I'm being really really good at not eating between meals or snacking on junk while I'm at work, but this means that I come home really really hungry so I'm having to cook earlier than I had planned. And once I've eaten, the last thing I want to do is fire up the old brain cells. I'm not really sure how to balance these demands on my time and on my brain and on my emotions.
I'm also missing the intellectual stimulation of university. Today as I drove around I spotted the spire of the university's main building in the distance, and felt a little twinge of, well, not sadness exactly, but just a feeling of missing out a bit. The distance has been good for me, it (along with my current job) has given me a lot of clarity about where I think I want to go with life and career (such as it is/will be - I'll never be the ultra-ambitious type). But I feel like I'm losing my touch very quickly, and that's a bit scary. I have a couple of small things to do (an abstract for a conference talk I'm giving next summer, and updating my biographical details for the book anthology I'll hopefully be part of) as well as my current thesis chapter, and they both feel like the intellectual equivalent of climbing Mount Everest (especially the abstract - you'd think after all the talks I've given I'd be fine with writing a mere 200 words, but they're nearly as hard to write as the full paper!). I think I'm going to give them a go now, and then dig out someone else's thesis (in a sort-of-similar vein to mine) to remind myself what I'm aspiring to. (I know that last sentence has terrible grammar, but I'm tired).