Time to reflect on yesterday's presentation....Something interesting happened during my presentation, which tells me a lot about myself. Even though I was well prepared and put a lot of effort into making drawings for my presentation as well as stating…
Tomorrow I will be presenting again at the same symposium where I had my first presentation about my research one year ago. Last year, my presentation wasn't bad, but there was a lot of room for improvement. I've corrected some…
When you are in a PhD program like mine, in which virtually no course work is involved and you are supposed to spend 40 hours a week in your little room with your stack of papers and a computer, you…
The past year, I've been conducting an enormous amount of large-scale experiments (my funder is quite generous). Tomorrow I'll have finished large-scale test number 98, and I will have tested 14 slabs (half-scale slab bridges) and 9 wide beams/slab strips.…
Today, I attended a workshop on Online Networking and Social Media by Floor Drees at the PhD Event 2010. One of the most striking observations was the reluctance of young academics to social media. I was surprised to see that…
Today, I was reading an article on an online newssite. The article was about a company that offers training courses to demotivated and burnt out employees. I thought that sounded interesting (I enjoy reading about personal leadership and development), and…
My first blog post here was all about writing down my new academic year's resolutions and making them public and thus pushing myself to actually do something about it.One of the "problems" I wanted to tackle is that my work-life…
One day, about half a year ago, I was browsing around on the internet during my workhours, and reading the news of the day. One of the articles of the day was about time management software. I read the description…
Before last February, I used to feel a sort of panic on Friday afternoons, thinking: "Oh no, this is the end of the week, and I have done so little!"What I changed last February is that I started to make…
Since August, I have my own Day zero project ( http://dayzeroproject.com/ ), which consists of my 101 goals in 1001 days - ending around April 27th, 2013. I've gradually started to accomplish small things that simply make me feel happier…