My motivation, just in general, has gone up and down a little in the last little while. I have not been lazy, no not at all. I’ve just spent more time doing random things, replying to emails, reading, contemplating and so on, rather than really getting focused on one task. I guess it is a symptom of my overall strategy – have too many projects and bounce from one to the next as soon as I hit a brick wall.

Sue and I have made some progress on the various projects we are working on. Firstly, we still havent’ heard back from the WPLL journal about our typology discussion piece but I have had some communication from them and I am now officially a rewiever for them. Ann-Marie gave me some feedback on our COVID article and now I’ve shared that with Sue we are going to take a slightly different direction. I’ve updated the abstract and the first small section, so again, progress. We have also had one good shut-up and write-type session working on the TAFE project article AND Sue FINALLY has made some progress getting access to the list of student details we need to send out the surveys. We have also made some progress on coding the UNESCO report. Slow and steady in that case.

I have 2 sections of literature reviews to write. One is about the government incentives for teachers to relocate to Rural, Regional and Remote (RRR) areas and the other is around change fatigue. I’ve read quite a few things on RRR incentives and made a lot of notes but they are very much just spewed onto the document and not well written at all. Same sort of thing with change fatigue except I haven’t done quite as much reading. Those two things should be 2nd and 3rd priority for me at the moment as they both have due dates before the end of this year. The other thing is rehearsing for the 3 different presentations I have at conferences Nov/Dec!

Then of course my confirmation report should be my number 1 priority at the moment, and I just haven’t been able to make it so! I spent an hour or so this morning looking at the interventions (my findings bascially) in the first scoping literature review. I added a column to the spreadsheet, classified them all and made a table in the draft of the article. That counts as PhD progress, just it should have been on the confirmation report. I did go through it on the weekend, at least up to the method section. I’m adding in better signposting and more clarity around the link to research questions and things like that. I’m around 1500 words over the limit at the moment but I will worry about that later. I still have a lot of work to do on the method section. THAT is the main thing I am putting off. Sigh.

In other news, my solo project around enabling educators views on equity discourses is moving along. I should have ethics approval very very soon. I have actually met all the requirements, I’m just waiting for Sue Evans to go into the system and change the status to approved. THEN I will write something for the NAEEA newsletter and the data collection will begin! It’s nice to focus on this as a postive thing. It’s exciting. The method section of my confirmation report is not. I just keep reminding myself of how much I have learnt and telling myself that if getting a PhD was easy, everyone would have one!