No New Year's Resolutions

I don't do New Years' Resolutions. Or rather, eighteen years ago, I made a New Year's Resolution to stop making New Years' Resolutions, and it's the only one I've ever managed to stick to! That's partly because I don't see the New Year as anything intrinsically special – if there are things that need to be done differently, then there's no time like the present, right?

That said, there are certain points in the year where the deadlines and daily commitments recede enough that you can spend a bit of time planning ahead, and the New Year is generally one of them. The others, for me, are the start and end of the summer – it's a good time to put your house in order, check that the To Do list is up-to-date, and make sure you're planning in time for the important activities, not just those that are most urgent. Funnily enough, I've just been reading a couple of other posts on exactly that subject. Then again, I've also just been reading that the blog is dead – d'oh! And just when I was getting my into stride, too...

So, what are my plans for the spring, then?

The top priority is funding proposals. I was named as an investigator on just three funding proposals last year, and I wasn't Principle Investigator on any of them. The priority last year really was on tidying up ongoing research – finishing Together Through Play, submitting publications, and reviewing theses. But it's not as if I haven't been working on proposals. I've built up a backlog of four that are getting close to completion, and my goal this year is to get them all submitted. I'm not unrealistic enough to think I'll get them all done this spring, but I would at least like to have my EPSRC Early Career Fellowship in by the end of March. Not least as I'm expecting to take some paternity leave in March! We'll see how that goes.

Another priority is to be hands-on with my research this year. I was going to say “more hands on”, but I think I've been doing this pretty effectively over the last 18 months. Nevertheless, I want to make sure that that continues. The time I've spent with Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Python and LabVIEW over that period, and the time spent building the manipulandum has really brought home to me the benefits of keeping your technical skills sharp.

For one thing, it makes you an actual engineer, rather than someone who just “thinks about engineering”. It also means that all the technical skills don't walk out the door with every PhD student who graduates, or PDRA who moves on to better things. And it's much easier to supervise projects when you have a good idea of how to implement things yourself, rather than when you're depending on third parties for support – I found this when I ended up being the technical support on the Together Through Play project. That, and it makes proposal writing much easier.

I've already spent an afternoon with Opotrak this year, looking at getting the manipulandum up and running with it, and developing some data capture and post-processing software to go with it. It's a slow process, not least as this is effectively “overtime” - work I have to put in over and above my day-to-day teaching and supervision duties. Still, it makes me tick, and scratches an itch that you don't get just telling other people about doing this, or in the case of PhD students, watching other people do it on your behalf.

Another thing that I want to do this year is to try and get more engaged with Disabled People's organisations here in Leeds. One of the many things that Together Through Play has opened my eyes to is the number of these organisations here in Leeds, and it makes sense to try and get involved with them. I'm viewing the collaboration with Breeze as a step towards this. Experience tells me that this is anything but easy – you don't get a workload allowance for it, so it's another thing that you end up doing over and above normal duties, mixed in with caring for your family, and trying to sustain some semblance of work-life balance. So I'm always a bit trepidacious: but there's also the risk of having a bunch of ideas that are really just technical toys, or taking disability as an “interesting theoretical problem” to be solved with gadgets. Or research as voyeurism – that's another risk. After all, just because educators or clinicians, or other researchers want the tools you're working on, doesn't automatically mean they'll benefit the people who kindly volunteer for your research. So, we'll see how that goes, too.

No resolutions, then, but a few targets. It's going to be an interesting year.