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I support researchers and doctoral students who are exhausted, overwhelmed, and done with pretending.I don’t offer magic bullets or mindset platitudes. I offer clear-sighted structure - sanity-saving tools - honest encouragement - fierce clarity - and, always, kindness - Because in the world of academia, those things are radical. Get regular updates, offers and help from my DocDates emails.
Hey Reader.Hello! I was going through my inbox this morning, deleting emails. Lots of emails. Offers, guides, free downloads, must-do-this, open-this-now, here’s-how-to-fix-that kind of emails. You know the sort. And I caught myself deleting emails from people offering to teach me how to manage my Google Workspace, write better emails, organise my sales pages and all sorts of other things that I’m apparently doing wrong. And then I stopped - because I realised that I’ve actually got a fairly...
Hey Reader. It has been a while since I emailed you. I could pretend this was a carefully considered business decision. It wasn’t. Life got very full, several things needed my attention at once, and the emails slipped off the list. So I’m starting again with something useful. Have you ever read the same paragraph of an academic paper four times and still had absolutely no idea what it meant? The sentences look like English. All the right academic words are present. And yet meaning has failed...
Hey Reader. I'm going to be blunt today. Hope you're ready! Here’s something I’ve noticed after 20-plus years of supervising doctorates: most stuck students aren’t actually stuck where they think they are. They think it’s a writing problem, so they force themselves to write. They think it’s a structure problem, so the writing goes nowhere. They think they need to read more, so they read - but it’s a contribution problem, so the reading just adds to the pile. Different problem, different move....