December 2016 round-up

And so December, and 2016, came to an end.

 

My focus for this year was ‘connections’ – connecting with ideas, places and people. While the first two were easy, the last one was a bit of a struggle for an introvert like me. But I did it. And it was great.

 

For 2017, I am focusing on ‘shipping’, which Seth Godin describes as making things happen. It is about doing things, and pushing them out when they are ‘good enough’. In my view, it is also about trimming down the to do list, in order to free up time and energy to work on what matters.

 

The main area where I want to ship is, of course, writing. Here, I am going to go through the various papers and writing projects that I have started and, for each one, do one of three things: write it, make it writeable, or move on. ‘Write it’ means that I am making time to finish the manuscript (block time for writing in my diary, deciding what to focus on during each time slot, deciding when and where to submit it to). ‘Make it writeable’ means that I am deciding how to fill in the gaps (e.g., collect more data, or look at some specific literature) to bring it to a stage where I can produce a draft. And ‘move on’ is for the other cases which I can not hope to publish in a good journal for a reasonable amount of work, and it means that I am removing these projects from my list. It is not about giving up on those projects, but about getting rid of projects that are not worth my time and energy, and are only distracting me from the papers that I should be focusing on.

But, before I dive into 2017, let’s review December 2016. These were the highlights.

 

Researching

No new major projects or data collection efforts. This month was mostly about consolidating ongoing projects.

(PS – I am starting the year with a literature refresh on the topic of social media in the business to business context. If you came across interesting articles, reports or statistics on the use of social media by these organisations, please let me know, so that I can add it to my reading list).

 

Writing

My goal was to complete the draft of the SM IQ paper before the end of 2016, which has not happened. I did do some tweaking on two other papers, though.

 

I really need to up my writing game next month – both in terms of getting back into a good routine of writing every day, and in terms of adopting an approach of shipping stuff when it is good enough.

 

Teaching

On the teaching front, I was mostly busy setting up the module that I will be leading next semester.

I also did a talk on wearables, and had a couple of PhD supervision meetings.

 

Learning

I joined an Internet of Things meet up, and learned a little bit about technical aspects such as “low energy Bluetooth connections”.

 

Do you have a theme, or focus, or goal for the New Year? What is it?