Writing for the sake of it? 📠

I'm definitely getting worse about doing this  - note to self: set aside a specific time each week for blog writing...

This actually links to something that one of my PhD supervisors keeps telling me: try to write (not just reading about things or making figures in preparation for writing, but actually write) for an hour every day. I am really struggling with this. Not because I don't like writing - for someone who found English classes so tedious at school, I've actually always loved putting pen to paper - but because I simply do not have that much to write about at the moment! Once I get started, I'm generally pretty fast, and an hour is often enough for me to churn out several thousand words. There are not enough thoughts in my brain to produce that every day...

This is partly also why I haven't written for a while. Yes, I've been busy. Yes, I've been out enjoying the sunshine at weekends rather than spending yet more time sat at my computer. But I also just wasn't feeling sufficiently inspired by anything to actually write about it. 

I'm currently at a bit of a block in my project - I've got a set of models that I need to run, but the input data for them are in the wrong format, so I need to convert them using a pre-model model which I just cannot get my head around at all. I won't bore you with the details. My poor family spent almost 2 hours last night watching my screen share as I tried to explain the problem to them and see if they could spot the flaws in my logic. Thankfully, this is what supervisors are for, and after two weeks of battling with this particular really-very-minor-but-causing-a-major-blockage issue, he solved it overnight. I think this is where I'm struggling with my project at the moment: when I really had no clue what I was doing, I didn't feel bad asking for help at every turn, but now that I'm close to understanding what's going on, it's so much more frustrating when I can't work it out for myself. When I then do work out (or rather, get told) what the problem is, it then seems really obvious and I feel like an idiot for not being able to break through that last little thing without help.

I know it's stupid. I know it's a sign that I am actually improving, because I can now get much further than I could previously before I have to admit defeat and ask for help. But that's the exact issue: it feels like I'm admitting defeat, rather than celebrating how far I got this time before needing help.

And that comes back to the writing thing. By writing for an hour every day, I would achieve something every day. Today is feeling like a bit of a slump day, because everything I've done for the past month either seems to be not working, taking forever, or finding out that the thing I was missing in my last task was indeed something very stupid (on this occasion, the reason my probability distribution was failing was simply that I had the parameters for it in the wrong order, and the correct order was written out right in front of me when I actually put it through the model). So, blog time. This way, I've both got something of my chest, and achieved something with my day, even if it's not strictly related to my PhD.

So, plan for the next few weeks? Celebrate the little wins. Try to take any recommendations or criticisms as help, not personally (even as I'm writing this, I can see my supervisor adding comments to my literature review, which I always HATE reading - not because he's insensitive or overly critical, but because I really suck at having anyone tell me something I've done isn't perfect). Avoid thoughts of throwing any computers out of high windows when models don't work... seems like a reasonable goal, right?

I couldn't write all this and not put a single photo in, so here's the view out of the window next to my desk at uni -- there's definitely some perks to long evenings in the office!