During the 1-day Thesis Bootcamp we completed 12 Pomodoros — or 5 hours of focused writing. Quite an accomplishment.
As the facilitator, I was ‘in the trenches’ with the other Bootcampers. My writing project involved progressing a paper for a special issue that I’d been mentally planning for many months (egads, it’s nearly a year!). I ‘arrived’ at the Virtual session armed with: notes about the method and the results of our analysis from my co-author, the target word count, and a blank page. By the end of the session I’d drafted half of the paper.
We had 9 PhD students enrolled and two academic staff (1 facilitating, 1 PGR Director seeing what it was about). We had 2 last-minute withdrawals and 3 who left before the session finished.
Feedback was very positive (4.75/5 stars)!
- This Writing Bootcamp was very successful. I was able to work on my analytical discussion for my second chapter, and successfully completely 1200 words.
- I wanted to thank you again for organising the bootcamp. It was highly beneficial and your calm approach was really appreciated. I would be very interested to attend another bootcamp.
- I find that Pomodoro technique was very useful. I will definitely try to incorporate this going forward. I also enjoyed writing together and plan to do this more often with friends.
- The commitment! I didn’t necessarily follow the breaks religiously, sometimes I carried on working during a break, and sometimes I extended the break by few minutes. Ultimately it depends on what I am doing, and I don’t want to break the work at the wrong point. But the monitoring, the writing together and commitment all made it work.
- Pomodoro – to have regular breaks mentally and physically to get up and move. The controlling purpose – to bring focus and clarity to what I am working on/thought process.
Suggested improvements, were to keep with the longer lunch (45-minutes as planned instead of shortening it to 30) and to ensure the Zoom host (me) was vigilant about muting attendees who left their mics on.