I’ve been really enjoying reading draft grant proposals and helping people articulate their plans more clearly so they have a better chance of actually getting the grant they apply for.

I’ve been helping folks with Standard Research Grants, Aboriginal Research Grants and even Community University Research Alliance (CURA) grants.

You folks are doing such fascinating work.

How was your week?

Busy, eh?

New classes. New students. Meetings. Receptions.

No matter how well prepared you are, it always feels like you aren’t.

Don’t worry, things are going to settle down now and you can get into a routine that includes time for your research, teaching preparation, office hours to deal with students, and your various administrative responsibilities.

Don’t forget 30-minutes a day can be effective!

Inspiring post

One of the readers of this newsletter wrote a rather inspiring post on her blog this week.

Keri blogs at Diary of a Dandelion Diva and like many of us in the academic world thinks of the New Year as starting in September. Her Resolution for the New Year post reviews her achievements over this past year and looks forward to maintaining her research momentum through the fall term.

Keri is lucky enough to be anticipating a sabbatical in January but even if you aren’t her post has some great ideas in it.

As I take stock at the end of the summer I am, for the first time in my academic career, pleased with the amount of work I did over the past 4 months. Did I get everything crossed off the very ambitious list I made back in May? No, but I got quite a bit of it done. I finished up a couple of very big, daunting tasks that have been hanging over my head for…oh…well, quite some time. I also got some new writing done and have reconnected with the research I’ve been wanting to work on for a while. …

One of the things that was giving me a considerable amount of angst over the last few years was that I’d gathered all this great stuff but have not found time to really work with it. It was really great to get in to this material in a meaningful way this summer. …

I’ve begun working through the material I collected over the past few summers and am starting to see the work I want to do on this subject come together in ways that continue to excite me.

Read the whole thing here.

This is a timely reminder that research is more that trips to archives, interviews or whatever it is to collect your “data”.

Research is a process

Consulting sources. Conducting interviews. That stuff really feels like research.

But the big thoughts you think about that material are also a crucial part of the process.

Thinking those big thoughts might be done through systematic analysis, or daydreaming, or writing mind-maps, or notes, or shitty first drafts (as Anne Lamott calls them).

What are you doing to create space for thinking big thoughts (or even little tiny thoughts) about all that material lying around on your desk?

Some changes to the newsletter

I had some positive feedback about the links I shared last week.

For those of you who read this in a feedreader, I’ve started “sharing” things in Google Reader. You can follow me there. Or click through to the blog and see the most recent shared items in the sidebar.

And for those who receive an e-mail newsletter, I’m going to play around with the template so that there is a side column with the Google widget in it so you can see what I’ve been sharing lately and click through to things that interest you.

In the meantime, if you click on the title of this post, you will go through to the website and see the list in the sidebar there.