Self-Reflexivity

Lately I've been thinking a lot about simple ways to improve my happiness. This was inspired by Gretchen Rubin's 'The Happiness Project' blog and book. I have become much more self-conscious about the way I go about the world and whether I am reaching my own idea of potential. I think this project has come to me at a time when I am ready for it, which fits the saying that when you are ready to learn the teacher will reveal itself to you. Why am I telling you all this? The chapter of the book that I finished over lunch was about allowing yourself to embrace your passions. I'm already doing quite well with this, since mine are finding out about new ideas, discussions, writing and reading. I'm trying to think of ways that I can reflect this in my daily life. For a while I've wanted to use this blog as a place to store quotations, ideas, thoughts and fleeting moments, so my conclusion is that I'm going to start posting something at least 5 days a week. Let's see how I go!

“Well-being is attained by little and little, and nevertheless is no little thing itself.”
Zeno of Citium

I'm joining InAdWriMo 2009!!

Ok thanks to Alice Academic's post that I read this morning, I've decided to join in the challenge of InAdWriMo. It is the academic alternative to NaNoWriMo (Aim: write a 50,000 word novel in a month), which was started by Fumbling Towards Geekdom in 2006.

The aims are as follows:

• Write as much as you can and get those niggling projects finished at least in the rough draft version.
• Post a word count progress bar on your blog
• Write about your progress on your blog
• Register at this post so you can receive moral support from your fellow academic writers.

I'm going to use this as inspiration to help me complete the following tasks:

• write more on my dissertation (7,000)
• write progress review documents (2,000)
• write my conference paper to present end of next week (3,000)
• write a shitty first draft of my book chapter (8,000)

Well I'm going in to start some of this writing and hoping that I can think through my fingers! Best of luck to any of the rest of you who are participating in InAdWriMo 2009 (and to those other academic dissertation writers)!!