For a post-mortem.

Well, I’ve submitted my research paper.

How do I feel about it? I’m pleased with how it turned out and I found it to be a rewarding experience – it has certainly made me think a lot more, and has been incisively relevant for my work.

This morning was a bit stressful as the broadband was playing up and I had some last minute changes to make and quite a few references to double check. It didn’t help that I was constantly switching between laptop and iPad because my laptop is so old that it turns out that it no longer supports the latest browsers. As a result, it was submitted a few minutes past the deadline, which has really disappointed me. Even more so, that when I’d taken a break and had another look, I saw a few incomplete references and other errors in the paper. Word blindness.

Previously, I have completed work with time enough left to review at my leisure, and so I’m wondering what went wrong this time. I certainly planned to have it completed with time to spare, and it’s not like I haven’t had since the Spring to do it.

On reflection:

• I struggled for ages to think of a subject – I kicked the proverbial can down the road.
• it took me a long time to work out how I could encompass the areas in which I’m interested – self, memory, mapping, and materials – into a cohesive and comprehensive research question.
• maybe the scope of it was too much – it encompassed philosophy, psychology, cartography and cognitive archaeology. There was a lot to research to extrapolate relevant concepts. Whilst Perplexity helped refine searches, I still had to read all the sources eg material engagement theory was developed over a period of a couple of decades, through numerous published papers, and a lot of the sources were heavy and difficult reading, my aged brain not being able to digest and assimilate a vast amount of information anymore
• I can’t multi-think the way I used to. I can only focus on one demanding mental load at a time otherwise I feel overwhelmed and can’t function
• I didn’t appreciate the amount of work that was still to do after my last session with Janet. I was so relieved that my second draft had legs that I think I took my foot off the pedal and let other things get in the way, although I did make some work.
• I think that I anticipated being able to really crack on in the last month but various things got in the way of this, feeling under the weather with one thing after another, and the print sale. I spent so much more time and mental bandwidth on that than I anticipated, but, it was a valuable learning experience.

This really does sound like a roll call of excuses, but at the end of the day, what’s done is done, and all I can do is try not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.

Now for the video and blog curation…