As most of those of you who read my blog regularly can see, I’ve been blogging less in 2022, 2023 and 2024. I am not certain that this was a product of more work at my university, but instead, a bit of a writer’s block because of fear of uselessness. Let me explain.
When I began blogging (in 2006, 18 years ago), I did so to build a space for myself to think out loud, to write to a different audience (that was not entirely academic but also not the general public). As time has gone by, thousands of people began reading my blog and using my resources, either for themselves or to teach others how to do certain things in academia. While that made me extraordinarily proud (and still is a high point for me), it also made me feel responsible for posting USEFUL stuff.
And then, at some point, my blog stopped being (for me) a space for self-reflection and think things out loud, and began to remain in my head as a resource that I had to maintain, in one way or another. I felt that I didn’t have enough topics to blog about. That also led to a drought, and huge gaps on my blog.
This end-of-the-year in 2024 helped me think that this is not really a smart way of approaching my blog, especially for me. Yes, I want to write useful stuff, and particularly things that have been revealed to me through the many years I’ve been in academia (and government, and civil society, and industry), but I also want to have a space where I just dump thoughts and think things through. I’ll still write things that I have learned that I feel that might be useful for people to read, but I will also dump here my self-reflections whenever I feel that I need to think things through.
I hope that my blog and resources pages will remain useful for readers, but I also hope that rethinking my approach to blogging will enable me to feel even more free to write about the things that I am thinking about but I don’t have a scholarly space (in a journal or a book) to write.
Here’s to a new era and a new beginning for my blog.
I have learned so much from your blog as an academic based in the UK. So pleased to see you will be continuing to use it and thank you for all the insights you have shared so far.
I came across your website coincidentally as I was researching something around ‘everything notebook’ and have read almost all of your other posts. I learn so much from your thoughtful blog posts and am so thankful for them in helping me get more organised and productive as an academic.
I’ve followed your blog for years, especially your tips for the Everything Notebook and how to be better organized as a PhD student. While your blog has useful resources, I think what has drawn me to it repeatedly is your ability to share your personal experiences and how you solve problems with writing, note-taking, organizing, as well as other topics like responding to reviewers, addressing challenging situations, venting about writer’s block, etc. When you share your personal experiences, your audience connects with that. You don’t always need to tell us how you solved a problem, because you may not have found a solution right away, but still needed to share your thoughts. Your readers connect with that too, and makes us feel like someone out there gets us! In turn, we feel less lonely in our struggle, and we move forward with a little more confidence that struggling is normal and we’re not lesser students / researchers because of our struggles. Please continue your posts, they are always helpful. Also, I always love when you post photos, because I’m such a visual person, so it helps. Thanks, and wishing you the best moving forward!