On the reg
Inger and Jason talk about work, but you know - not in a boring way. Practical, implementable productivity hacks to help you live a more balanced life. Find us at ontheregteam.com
On the reg
Where Inger makes Jason read a Romance Novel (again!)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!
Longtime listeners who have been asking for Jason to read another romance novel: Inger has delivered! Jason reads Rebecca Yarros's 'The Fourth Wing' and only throws up a little bit in his mouth :-)
After a bit of mail bag, we go deep on the subject of reading: how much of it there is; how tedious academic reading can be; how tired this reading makes us; the feelings of Guilt when you read for pleasure; and the myth of 'keeping up with the literature'.
Finally we talk about how many books we own: how much is too many and when/how should you slim down a collection? Inger feels better about her massive collection when she compares herself to Umberto Eco, and Jason has a mild panic attack at the idea of putting together a display shelf.
We finish with a tribute to the late, great Professor Peter Elbow (one of Inger's most beloved writers about writing) and a two minute tip about buying study aids.
Note, we were going to try to put out a video version of this one - but there were technical problems. Hence the references to showing the camera books. We will try again next time.
What we talked about
- Cornell template technique
- Note taking Matrix instructions
- Umberto Eco in his 50,000 book library (video evidence!)
- Marie Kondo's life changing magic of tidying up
- Rebecca Yarros - The Fourth Wing
- Writing without Teachers
Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on <pod@ontheregteam.com>
- Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.
- See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at enquiries@ontheregteam.com
- Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)
- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).
- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com.
- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site
Jason: [00:00:00] That's nice.
Inger: It is nice. . I'm just checking to see like with my sunburn, whether my sunburn is making me look like a raccoon, but it doesn't look too bad in this lighting.
Jason: Did you get sunburn?
Inger: How did you manage that?
You know, like you think after all this sun experience that you would remember to put it on. But I have so many ungents now, like I've got peptides. You love your peptides. You know, there's like chemical labels on everything and I'm like, I have this whole thing, but I don't put them on in any particular order, which I think is where I made my mistake.
And then I think I forgot the last bit, which was the sunscreen. And then I sat outside. I had a lovely chat with someone. Uh, in the morning when it was overcast, and then I'm like, Hmm, I feel a bit warm. And then last night I was like, ah, face smash. My face. Hello? Vera Cream. You know, self-hatred, ,
Both: the whole deal.
Jason: Oh yeah. I, yeah, I, um, oh no, I won't tell that story. It, it [00:01:00] involves being very, very burn. That's all.
I'm, I'm gonna kick us off. Hey.
Inger: Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: Welcome to On The Reg. I'm Dr. Jason Downes and I'm here with my good friend, Professor Ingrid Mewburn from the Australian National University, but she is better known as the thesis whisperer on the internet.
Uh, and we're here for another episode of On The Reg. Where we talk about work, but you know, not in a boring way, practical, implementable productivity hacks to help you live a more balanced life. And today we're going to talk about reading. And yes, Inga has made me read another damn romance book.
Inger: Right. It is, like, Rebecca Yarris, the fourth wing. Yes. Discover the thrilling must read global phenomenon.
Jason: The number one bestselling author. Friends,
Inger: enemies, lovers. Everyone has an agenda. Anyway. Every night. Did you finish it? Could be your
Jason: last. Ha!
Inger: Did you finish it?
Jason: Graduate or die. Um, yes I did. About half an hour ago.
Inger: Okay, good. [00:02:00] So it's fresh in your mind. Good. Yeah, I had to get up.
Jason: I had to get up this morning.
We'll come
Inger: back to it. We're going to do a review. It's going to be a thing. People have been asking for this, Jason, and I just want our, I just want our listeners to know that I deliver.
Jason: Okay.
Inger: Yeah. You
Jason: do.
Inger: That's all.
Jason: You do. I'll see if I can find the I can't quite remember where it was. I'll have to flick through it a little bit and see if I can find it a little bit later, but.
There was like three or four sentences in there that I just, like, I just got a little bit sick in my throat. That's all I'm saying. I just like, just a little bit. It just like threw up a little bit.
Inger: Just a little bit. Only three or four sentences. That's not bad.
Jason: On another, right next to one another. Do you know
Inger: punch
Jason: in the face, another punch in the face, a third punch in the face.
And I'm like, I can't, I don't even think I can continue on. Like that's done it for me. Anyway, we'll talk about this a little bit later. So . Um, have you been since we last caught up? I'm just trying to remember when the last time was we caught up. We recorded a special [00:03:00] little episode.
Inger: Yeah. Which I have not done anything with.
So I just sat there. I put a microphone in front of you when we were in Sydney and I said, speak. And you're like, we've only got 10 minutes in this. And like 40 minutes later, I was like, okay, I'll turn it off now. I don't know. I haven't listened to it. I suspect we were both a bit delirious, but maybe I'll put it out as a special.
Jason: Yeah. Bonus content. About thesis,
Inger: about, about thesis bootcamp we talked about, you know, what we were doing in Sydney. So we were in Sydney together. That was fun. That was fun. Then I went up to Newcastle, um, with our good friend Coralie English and did a, what did I do with them? What's our writing one?
What's our pop hit called? It's called?
Jason: Writing Under Pressure.
Inger: Writing Under Pressure. And that was great. Um, there were big mosquitoes in Newcastle, like really big ones. And everywhere you walked, there was like cans of Aragard strategically placed. And the whole place kind of smelled like Aragard, which is, for non Australian listeners, our, our nation's favorite personal insect repellent spray.
Um, [00:04:00] so that was, yeah, and people like, cause there's been like. Bad diseases go around with the mosquitoes and people were like on it and I don't feel like I had enough of the mosquito awareness but I felt the fear around me so I did slather myself with that.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: Stayed in a rather nice hotel. I had breakfast with some of my gay besties.
Drove back home again, only cost me 16 bucks to drive back home, which was good, you know. Took the new, new Volvo on my first solo road trip really. So you know, I feel like I've got the hang of it now. Me and that car, yeah, we're bards. I did have this funny incident where I was charging outside of Newcastle, like, just some rando, out of the way, industrial estate.
This charging station was at the back and I'm, there's me, um, my bright yellow Volvo and all my professor makeup, you know, I was all, you know, I'm a little bit in my kind of like, not in my civvies.
Right. And [00:05:00] then a purple , BYD seal pulls up next to me and there's a trans woman and, and her boyfriend, they get out and they're like, we're checking away and they're like, um, filling up their car and then this, this. And look, I'll admit this car pulled up and it was like a, one of those like manly type of, you know, twin cab type of ute one of the manly cars, Petro masculinity, you know, like it screamed it and it had it had Queensland plates and it was full of men, probably about my age, maybe a bit younger, but they look like they'd had a hard life and they wind down the window and they're like.
Oi! And I thought, Oh, here we go. Right. Like, am I being called to service to put myself in harm's way for my young trans friend here? And they're like, laugh! And I was like, yes. And they're like, how much did it cost you to get here from Canberra?
I said, Oh, well, yeah, about 16 bucks. They're like, Oh, that's good. Isn't it? [00:06:00] And I said, yeah, it's pretty good. Oh, so like, it's really, it's a really cheap car. Is it? I'm like, well, I mean, it's not cheap to buy, but yeah, yeah. It's really cheap to run. And they're like, oh, right. You got, you got one of those batteries at home as well, love?
I'm like, yes, yes, I do, but you don't need a battery. And then, so I just had this discussion, the trans woman standing there like a bit like. What's happening right now? And they're like, okay, see you later! And I thought, don't judge Inga.
Jason: That's it. Don't
Inger: judge, right? That's
Jason: it.
Inger: Oh,
Jason: sounds good. We've compared the price of vehicle running costs before a few times.
And like, I'd hate to think how much it would have cost me to drive. Don't. No, no,
Inger: it was lucky you flew, it was much cheaper for you to fly. Um, yeah, so, but the problem with that was I was away when I changed my password for my Mac. Um, and I learned subsequently that one should not do this when one is not actually on campus, preferably [00:07:00] plugged into a wall socket.
Not something they tell you when they hand you your computer.
Both: No.
Inger: And so, so my identity inside ANU has gone, I think the technical term is hinky.
Both: Oh.
Inger: Um, and just some systems sometimes don't recognize me and stuff. And, and so I've been having this long term, and every time I talk to an ITS person, they're like, Oh, you forgot your password.
I'm like. I didn't forget my password, it forgot me, I think, like, can we, can we talk about the fact that, some system didn't talk to another system in certain circumstances and it's not working. So, you know, as long as I keep paying me, I keep getting my Volvo money.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: You know, that's the main
Jason: one, isn't it really?
I mean, let's be honest. It really
Inger: is. I'm still waiting on my puppy. So I, I, you know, I've got two children to pay for the Volvo and the puppy, so still haven't heard any news. I
Jason: sent you, I sent you some light reading, uh, for the puppy, in fact, did you see that in the chat? No. I [00:08:00] sent you in the chat, let me see if I can pull it up.
Listeners, we
Inger: have like multiple chat channels. We're a small company of two people and somehow we have four chat channels.
Both: Yes.
Inger: But it's good. It's good. Because when you want to like search for something, you can usually find it.
Jason: Yeah. Under the, under the water cooler.
Inger: We have the water cooler, yes, which is just for Brando stuff, yes.
I can have a look at the water cooler. Oh my God, don't just make me do this in the middle of potting. Yes. Oh, you, something about dog training manual. Oh, military dogs.
Jason: Yes. The basic training. You have seen what
Inger: my dog will look like, haven't you? I don't. Yes, I have. Taking it to war, it's really going to be.
Jason: Basic Training and Care of Military Dogs, Field Manual, FM TAC 20 TAC 20 TAC 1972. Okay. This is how they. This is how to
Inger: train your dog.
Jason: Yeah, for kind of [00:09:00] Southeast Asian war theatre, sort of Vietnam War era.
Inger: The world of dog training has changed a lot, like, because I can do my reading. When I was pregnant with Brendan, I read, like, a lot, reading, I mean, reading's how I, you know, seek to control the uncontrollable.
I read about it, right? Okay. Coming back to that theme. Um. Yes. And I've been, I started reading about puppy training, I'm like, wow, this is really different. Like, I remember my father used to just get a rolled up newspaper and smack the dog across the snout when it did the things that you didn't want it to do.
And that kind of seemed to work pretty quickly. But you know, we don't train with fear anymore, Jason.
Jason: Right.
Inger: It's all rewards. It's all psychology. Or as Brendan, my son, who does actually train dogs for a living, he says that it's, um, it's gaslighting. You basically just gaslight them. It's inconsistent reward schedules.
Anyway, so I'm doing all my reading. I've even pulled up Donna Haraway one of my favorite philosophers, her companion [00:10:00] manifesto, right? So I'm not only doing my practical dog training, I'm getting into the philosophy of dog training.
Jason: Right.
Inger: Why am I not,
Jason: why am I not surprised?
Inger: I'm completely nerd, I'm over nerding it, like I can feel it, like it's the autistic side of me, which is special interests.
This has become one.
Jason: I have I have something for you in fact, but I'm not going to share it with you just yet. Uh, but I've got something that I'm going to give you to help you on your way on your dog journey. Is that when I
Inger: come down in a couple of weeks?
Jason: Ah, yep. Yep. Next time we'll see ya.
Yep.
Inger: Yep.
Jason: Absolutely. You're gonna love it. I've been coming
Inger: down, by the way, with a carload full of the things that my relatives want me to buy for their pets. So should you have an order for the for the discount man to, for the milk? With the new cat? I mean, who I haven't seen yet. Seen one try.
Jason: No, the cat, it, like, it's, no, it's all teeth and claws.
So, is it, okay. It gets [00:11:00] nothing. Nothing.
Inger: Oh, so it doesn't, it doesn't want to come up and like, enjoy your company. No. No. No. Yeah. Well, what have you been up to then?
Jason: Um, not a lot. I've been working and flying. I've been running around and the most recent one I've just come back from Brisbane, the University of Queensland, the good folk at the Faculty of Science invited us up to give some workshops there.
And I just want to say Inga, that the second workshop was for the HDR students and it was on AI, harnessing AI in the research space. So how can you use AI to. Ethically and appropriately support research, project management, that sort of thing. Yes. You are famous. That's all I'm saying. Right? Like, I just like, hi, this is, um, Jason and Inga, um, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I'm talking away about our business and then it sort of like dawned on [00:12:00] me, I've got all these people in front of me. And the. politely listening and it was lovely. Um, and I said, Oh, you might know her as the thesis whisperer. And then there was 120 people in this room.
Both: Yes. And
Jason: they all did exactly the same thing.
It was like, Oh yes.
Inger: People
Jason: at the end of the session. Not
Inger: exactly known by my face. No. Because I tend to hide behind the kind of like pile of papers avatar on the socials and people often think I'm a man. Oh really? Yeah, like I do get emails, dear mister, you know. Anyway, yeah, so that's good, it's good to know.
Jason: Yeah, yeah, people came up to me after the workshop. Yeah,
Inger: they
Jason: were like, say g'day to Inga for me, and I was like, oh sure, I will.
Inger: And you ran into, in a coffee shop, my friend, my good and dear friend, Dr Rachel Pearce. Yes. Yes. That was lovely. At the Feliwet.
Jason: Yes.
Inger: Yes. Yeah. Um, the person who thought up Circle of Niceness.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: It
Jason: was lovely. Um, I didn't [00:13:00] have a great deal of time to talk to her, I was meeting someone else there, which just by the way, I have discovered that where the seat of power is, at the University of Queensland. It's in that cafe.
Inger: Oh, right. So you've got the right cafe to hang out in that everyone goes to?
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. Yes. Oh, I was like, Oh, there's so and so. Oh, yeah.
Inger: Okay. See, we've been up to see you UQ. Quite. Thank you for being such a, such a good customer of ours. Yeah. We love it every time we go.
Jason: It's been really good too, because it's been different stuff. So, gave a presentation to one of the schools there on their strategic planning day.
And then, yeah, we've done writing under pressure and research project management and done a few things with them just recently. But, you know, the AI stuff clearly is where all the interest lies at the moment, I think.
Inger: I still feel like I'm teaching people to Google.
I mean, I know I'm not, I mean, intellectually, I know I'm not, because when I get in front of someone, I always go, I, they go, [00:14:00] they give me a problem and I go, uh, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber, jibber. And like, by 25 minutes later, they're just in there like. So I know that it's not Googling, but I find working with AI very intuitive, but like clearly that's not necessarily how everyone approaches it.
Jason: I can't figure it out. It's the appropriate use case, I think. So I asked the question, you know, what have you been using AI for as part of that slide deck and people were putting up stuff and mostly people seem to be saying things like email, um, and. And dinner plans.
Inger: That's what our research is showing us.
You know, that, that, that big survey we did, and we asked people how they were using AI and email was like the most. Mentioned category, some people said teaching a little bit, but not so much.
Jason: Yeah. So when, when we started to demonstrate some of the things that you could do [00:15:00] with it to kind of speed up the research process and that sort of stuff, there was you know, people were like, Oh, I never thought of using it like that before.
But it's a very specific use case, right? Like where it's, you know, you're doing research and you can't imagine doing research any other way because that's the way we've done it for decades and decades and decades sort of thing. And your supervisor taught you how to do it the same way that they were taught how to do it.
And so it's ingrained and then this technology comes along and just changes it up and I don't think people have actually. I've done that bit where you go, okay, all right, stop all the old rules no longer apply. What do I have to do now? Or how do I use this in order to make this better, faster, whatever,
Both: um,
Jason: you know, along with all the risk assessment stuff that you have to do as part of that.
But, um, I just don't think people have had time to stop and think about it like that.
Inger: Yeah. But there's a lot, a lot of ethical objection. There's a lot of conscientious objectors out [00:16:00] there. Like a lot. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: I was having a talk with one candidate. At bootcamp at the ANU bootcamp, which I ran a week and, Oh, I don't know.
What is time? What is time?
Both: It's
Inger: a pandemic. Yeah. And she was just like, well, I I've decided I'm not using AI. And I said, Oh, okay. Um, you know, totally valid choice doing a PhD. It's hard to manage the, it's hard to maintain your knowledge and surround it. You know, it's still, you know, I can understand you want to do it all, all the hard way, sure.
She goes, no, ever. And I was like. Oh, and she's like, Oh no, no, this is like a commitment to me. Like, this is my commitment. And I was like, Oh, okay. And then I thought like the conversation stayed with me, , and I thought to myself, are you actually going to be able to maintain that? And be an academic, I don't think you can, like, because your students are going to be using it.
So if you're not using it, you don't actually know what your students are dealing with anyway. Like I'm not sure that's a position you can even take, [00:17:00] like, I don't love that that's the case, just to be clear I think people should not feel pressured. And one of the things we do when we teach very much is to, talk about choices and talk about, you know, it's not a toy.
You, don't just jump in a really expensive, like, burn a lot of fuel to get down to the shops when you can walk, that kind of thing. Like there's ways to think about these environmental impacts and all the other impacts. But yeah, I just, it just sort of struck me, I thought, well, you're just putting a line through your academic career.
Like I didn't want to say that to her because she was very, you know, bless her, really committed. Bless her. I
Jason: mean, the, where I can see this, if she's teaching. Then she's going to bump into this AI, whether she likes it or not, because at the moment we're using AI to build lesson plans and rubrics and assessment and all that sort of stuff and make it all line up, right?
But the way in which the. The sector is structured around the HESF, the Higher Education Standards Framework, right? Where you have to [00:18:00] show alignment between what it is that you're doing and, and the course learning outcomes and program level outcomes and all that sort of stuff. All of that is an intensely manual process with spreadsheets and, you know, bailing twine and fencing wire at the moment, right?
But there will be a tool that will come out. So, and if it's not already out there, I haven't been looking that we'll just do that for you.
Inger: Yeah,
Jason: and you're not gonna have a choice, but the institution's gonna say use I don't know. AI for teachers or whatever the damn tool, my AI or whatever the cool tool will be called, right?
Inger: Can you imagine it? It's going to be shit, isn't it? Yeah. It's also going to be shit. Like if we don't kind of take like authorship into our own hands, and this is Mark Carrigan's point in generative AI for academics, you know, if we don't take it into our hands, what will happen? And this has happened so many other areas is we'll get these enterprise kind of systems that are like really constrained creativity and [00:19:00] all the rest of it.
Anyway, I just, it was just, I don't know, I couldn't work out how to say to her, that's not a tenable position for you to take. But that's what I wanted to say. Like. Sorry to have to rip the Band Aid off for you, love, but I don't think you can do that. She can at the moment. Well, you definitely can do it during your PhD, I reckon.
Like, you know, we did that great I thought fantastic session for University of Western Sydney bootcamp. So by the end of bootcamp, we'd had three days, I think we'd built a lot of trust with them and they wrote over 500, 000 words. I mean, look at them go.
Jason: Half a million words, right? Like that's nuts. And like,
Inger: how many people do we have?
Like 45 something? Like,
Jason: I think on the, I think on the last day, so just the people who were left in the room because we had a few who started with our close to the end of their thesis anyway. And so they. Completed. Yeah. They wrote all words.
Inger: They had to write their , they finished their thesis, which
Jason: was great.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Um, so I, I think we, in the end, we had 43 people. [00:20:00] This is the number of words that I've written, that I've been here.
Inger: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We had 44 the next week at a NU. And they wrote 60, 000 words more than that. So, cause only cause I goaded them and said, Hey, University of Western Sydney did half a million.
What are you going to, what do you got for me? Anyway, you know, and I have this whole routine of mother, mother needs more, you know, cause I call Taylor Swift mother. You know, it's not like mother, mother, mother knows mother needs more, anyway, um, so, so, so yeah, we did the session at the end of that, where we, um, I think it worked well.
Cause we talked to, we sort of did a pipeline approach, like here's Inga with her notes. And her ideas, and she's now going to do this. And then you sat there with your Director of Quality and Standards hat on, like your last job in academia, and you're like, yeah, that's okay. What I would ask for was this, whatever, blah, blah, blah.
And then we went through and then you were like, where I started to sort of walk over the line. Yeah. Some, some people from [00:21:00] there were like, Oh, it's too hard. Like it's too much of a gray area. I'm just going to form my PhD. I'm just going to do. Do it by hand, and then I'll figure it out afterwards, but I've had my eyes open.
I thought that was a good, valid position to take, but she wasn't having a bar of that. And because you weren't there, I couldn't, I just couldn't embody that teaching as well as we did it together anyway. Like, it's rare that we get a chance to be together in the classroom. It was good fun. Yeah. But yeah, it was great, I thought, better together, right?
Jason: Yeah, yeah. Other than that, I like, there's not been a lot going on in my world. It's really, it's been a lot of travel over the last little
Inger: bit. Yeah, you've been working real hard. And also talking to accountants about trying to get, uh, listeners. Uh, like it's, it's one thing to earn money, it's another thing to pay yourself without like getting into trouble with things like GST and,
Jason: you know,
Inger: anyway, Jason's figured it out.
Jason: I tell you, it's [00:22:00] been a lot of help.
Inger: Got the accountant on speed dial, but we're, we're getting there.
Jason: Yeah, yeah, there's, um, yeah, there's a lot, but anyway, it's all been good. It's all been good. So building kind of in the back end, building some processes to make sure that our work's going a whole lot easier.
Um, including, I had a problem with OmniFocus not doing what I wanted it to do. And I solved that problem in the shower this morning. So I'm quite keen to give it, give it a go later this afternoon, see if my solution works. Excellent. I love that program. Right. You just have to kind of.
Inger: Yeah. You just have to think about it.
Every now and then you're just like it's OmniFocus has got me. Yeah. In it's comforting business process like GRASP. Yeah.
Jason: And if you don't, if it's not doable one way, it's so full featured that you can do it some other way. Right. Like you just have to kind of come at it from a slightly different angle and it'll let you do it.
I reckon. You're much
Inger: more creative with it than me though, but we could talk about that forever. I've only got my eye on the clock because, I'm taking two hours out of work time. [00:23:00] Right. I've got to get back to it, Jason.
Jason: Dang. I know. I can do me a dust here.
Inger: I know. I've time shifted to this evening and I don't want to be, you know, here till midnight.
Jason: Fair enough. Mailbag section. Yes. We love hearing from you all. This is our chance to share the interesting things our listeners share with us. Um, don't forget we have a shiny new email address. This is the last time that we will change this. Yeah, we promise. You can write to us at pod.
That's pod, P O D, at ontheregteam. com and we'll make sure that your email makes it to the next episode. So, Inga, Rachel from the UK has a question about how we back up our IT stacks.
Inger: Oh, man. So this is actually really like given my identity crisis problems at ITS and the possibility that my machine may have to just be blattered and rebuilt from scratch.
This is very front of mind, so I'll read Rachel's letter. Thanks for [00:24:00] writing to us, Rachel. Hi Ingrid and Jason, long time listener here, big fan of the podcast and my house thanks you for the lengthy pods. Super useful for getting housework done. I do often sell us as the housework companion.
I discovered the Thesis Whisperer website when I started my PhD in 2020 during lockdown in the UK. So many of the how to PhD sites that I found were US based, but as an Australian academia is more like the, as Australian academia is more like the UK, your perspective is far more relevant. Thank you.
We're basically the same. We're just like this colonial thing, anyway the blog was, and still is an absolute lifesaver from the listen to your auntie thesis whisperer encouragement to the detailed writing advice. I cannot thank you enough. Oh, thanks Rachel. You know, I often say that the blog just runs on love.
Both: Like,
Inger: there's kind of no other reason to do it. Do you know what I mean? Like, I mean, there is, but like, that's the payment. That's all I need. Um, onto my question. What do both of you do to ensure everything in your IT stack is backed up and retrievable? Is that [00:25:00] even possible for all of it? Good question.
Beyond backing up my laptop. To an external hard drive, what else should I be doing? Everything saved on the university service is backed up, but so much of what I do is saved in the cloud and I'm not in control of those backups. Man, that's a good question for context. Ooh, two days ago, disaster struck. I updated my task manager and the shiny new update that deleted all my tasks.
Oh my God. I'm
Both: actually, I'm
Inger: actually having vicarious trauma, Rachel. Rachel goes on cue, mild panic, frenzied emailing and putting in of IT tickets and deep breathing. Thankfully, I do not rely entirely on this task manager. Still being a fan of pen and paper. So it wasn't a complete disaster and everything is now being restored.
Yay! However, it has spoken the, focused the mind rather in thinking about what other things I do not want to lose and that are on web slash cloud slash software dependent. The contracts, contacts saved in my online email, the website saved in pocket, [00:26:00] everything in my online family calendar, exclamation mark, so many phone acts.
Save searches in database, I'm sure there are others I'm forgetting. Any and all advice appreciated. Thank you from Rachel, who is at the University of Bath, a beautiful university, I've been there many years ago, um, stands out in my mind as I, I did a present, I did a workshop in a stately country home.
That had peacocks on the lawn, it was great. Nice. Uh, Rachel, God damn, that's a good question, because it's actually, as I was reading it out, I'm like, Ooh, yeah, I'm like mentally indexing how many places I have things. And like what one general comment is actually the dispersed nature of all my information landscape is probably a strength.
If everything's on your computer and something goes wrong with your hard drive, you are fucked. But if you've got things in different places, you haven't lost everything. So, so with my recent thing, for instance, I realized I have got a lot on my computer, [00:27:00] but most of it's sitting in teams that's important.
And then other things are in Google and whatever, but you raised an interesting point. Like, what if you lose access, you lose your identity tokens, you can't log in, you can't exactly ring a helpline for Google. Um, and I suppose maybe all I can say to this one is maybe we need to stick a pin in it and actually give it a good hard thinking about, because.
It's, it's how you obviously can't back up everything. I think that would actually be impossible, but how do you, how do you prepare for just disaster recovery? Maybe? I don't know. What do you think?
Jason: Um, I, what do I, what do I think? So when I think about, I have a very similar situation to what Rachel's is in that most of my stuff is backed up.
Via some service that I buy. So OmniFocus, all, you know, our OmniFocus lists are synced across the Omni [00:28:00] server. Um, so that, that means our phones and our, like our laptops all stay in sync, all of that sort of
Inger: stuff.
Jason: So they've got, they've got a copy. Mine
Inger: broke the other day with all this malarkey. But I must say it, it, it healed itself seamlessly, didn't lose anything.
So that service is actually really good.
Jason: Yeah. And then, you know, all the Google stuff,
Both: to
Jason: a certain extent I've, I just have to. Believe that, that, that Google's not going to lose my shit. Um,
Inger: have you looked at what's happening in America? I mean, I did make the pledge that we were not going to mention, and like, we were going to provide an island of sanity away from all of that.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: But it has made me think like. But I do rely on like servers in California like a lot.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: And Kentucky and, you know.
Jason: Apple has a big chunk of my contacts and, uh, my family calendars that I share with across my family and all that sort of stuff. So, [00:29:00] um, that's why I pay the. 20 bucks a month for these services.
Right. There's,
Both: yeah,
Jason: to a certain extent, it's like you, that's part of the contract. You will make sure that it's uptime all the time for me.
Inger: Yeah, yeah,
Jason: yeah. Um, but
Inger: there's a lot of trust built in that.
Jason: Yeah. And then Mm, you know, in other services, like I've got online cloud storage services, you know, think drop boxes and those kinds of services as well, where I've got stuff stored, um.
And yeah, I don't, I don't have a local backup of any of those. I know there are services that you can pay for. So like Backblaze is one that I'm aware of, which will, which will do a complete, you know, whole environment. back up and store it somewhere safely, but again, yeah, but again, it's the same, it's the same thing you're paying backblaze to do that job.
And if so, I don't, I don't know that you can side [00:30:00] step it. I think you just kind of have to go. You know, these firms are big enough, hopefully they're not going to fail me.
Inger: Well, the other thing is, you know, we've got our Obsidian database and we've gone through a lot of GitHub. Yes, yes. But one thing that we've done with our sensitive documents, we don't want Google to have, is that we've got both got Obsidian on our individual machines and we use GitHub to sync between them.
And so in that way, you don't, you don't ever really need a backup because there's multiple copies all the time. So if your computer went down. And I, I, I've pushed my latest subsidy and changes. And it's an elegant solution, but it's not, and I think you'll agree with me. A person who's not techie and is used to a more of a GUI kind of interface. It's a bit, um. It's a bit 1996, it feels 1996 to me, where you've got to understand that files have locations and, that kind of thing.
So that [00:31:00] system, while it works once you've set it up, setting it up is a little bit of a pain and fixing it if it goes broken is a little bit of a pain. And one thing that you, you trade off that sort of freedom to own your own data for. neat user interface in something like Dropbox. Right. So these are the trade offs you make.
I am pretty attracted to that idea of someone being a kind of data butler for you and going, and you just say, I've got stuff here, here, and here, here's all my logins go like back it up for me. No, I
Jason: think, I think I, I must've, I must've not explained it properly. The it doesn't go to all of your services and, and.
You don't do that back up. It's just like your system. Imagine like time machine, right?
Both: Yeah. For your
Jason: Mac. Same sort of thing, right? But it's, it's, it's update of everything that's on your machine
Inger: stored away. Yeah. Yeah. It's stored off site, which is helpful. Right.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: The other thing I would say, and I know this is [00:32:00] really endearingly old fashioned perhaps, um, a safe in your house, uh, a fireproof safe.
In your house with a disc that you pull out. This is what we've always done. Yeah you pull the disc out, like, yeah, you do time machine, like, which is wireless on the Mac, but you pull the disc out, plug it in, run back up, get it back in the safe, um, you know. Uh, my sister went recently traveling and spilled a water bottle over her machine keyboard.
Both: Oh, damn. Which is,
Inger: you know, probably not a bad thing because she was on holiday and that meant that she couldn't. But she I, I suspect her husband being like my husband, a forward thinker in this kind of thing. She was like, yeah, it was fun. I just, like, had everything and I was like, oh, okay. I'm not sure I could say the same thing.
No. But I do regularly take that. Disc out of, out of the safe, plug it in whenever I think of it and just do it. So, [00:33:00] yeah,
Jason: that sounds like a job for OmniFocus, that one.
Inger: It is a good topic though. Maybe we'll need to return to it in more detail. What else have we got?
Jason: We've got Hugh who writes to us and asks us about the execution stage of getting things done.
Inger: I always hate that word used in terms of getting things done. It always, it's a bit, execution. Anyway, you like it because it's like military and shit. Yeah.
Jason: And on the front of my.
Inger: Execute, execute, execute.
Jason: Yeah. That's the theme for the year. Sure. Yeah. Get things done. Um, dear Inga and Jason, I'm almost a year into my PhD and started listening to the pod a few months ago.
I hope you started in the middle somewhere. I really do. Yeah, at least
Inger: I don't go all the way back here.
Jason: I was completely overwhelmed by all the hacks that I, as a young PhD student, was not doing. Since then, I found a peace, I have found peace, and started implementing many tips and hacks mentioned, especially around task capturing, tracking, and management.
However,
Both: I find
Jason: myself struggling with the [00:34:00] actual part of Doing the to do list. Yeah, the doing bit. Yeah, yeah. Oh,
Inger: damn. If only it was just organizing it all to be done, it'd be fine, wouldn't it?
Jason: Making it look pretty. Yeah. I'm working my way through the planning and background research stage of my PhD, taking notes in Obsidian, of course.
Inger: Great. Nice.
Jason: Good job.
Inger: I love to see that.
Jason: We've got a whole, we've got a whole workshop on how to take notes in Obsidian. Yeah. Features. Much of this work feels too vague to be able to complete effectively, especially when you could theoretically take notes on a topic forever.
Inger: Sure. Yeah. As a
Jason: result, often my to do list looks like 1.
Read article by Jones et al 2. Take notes on x topic 3. Take notes on topic Y for email supervisor. My plan is to start setting a time within which to complete each task. For example, take notes on X topic for 45 minutes. I was wondering if you guys had any more tips on how to write more effective to do lists, tips for breaking down research and note taking slash topic summaries into [00:35:00] smaller manageable pieces, or tips for navigating the sometimes vague world of background research and note taking on topics.
Once again, big fan, big fan of the pod and thanks for all the tips. All the best, Hugh.
Inger: Yeah, wow.
Jason: I know there's a lot there, right?
Inger: Yeah. So let's start. Time boxing is good. I mean, it's the start, like putting a boundary around it. It's like, if I may step back from this, like to, to the like broader problem that you're trying to solve here, Hugh, which is, it's infinite.
There's so much information out there, right? There, and even when you narrow it down and narrow it down, like there's still, I mean, I'm in the narrowest of narrow research fields, right? Really? And I've got a thousand articles in my database that are. directly relevant to what I do. So like this this reading and taking notes business is like.
Just the most, it is the most difficult part. So first of all, I suppose demystify the fact that we [00:36:00] don't talk about it much. Everyone else seems to do it easily. That's because they're just not sharing the struggle with you, right? It is, it is quintessential to, to the research business. And the thing that I talk about with, PhD students, the thing that they get most confused about is how much is enough.
And the enough piece is really difficult because it's kind of a Goldilocks dilemma, right? It's too hot, too cold, just right. And no one knows what just right is actually. And so you've got to be the one who decides what the boundaries are. And when you're first looking into a topic that's the worst stage of it because it's like opening an enormous, like, you know, in Raiders of the Lost Ark at the end of the first movie where.
Like they take the ARC and they're putting it in the government warehouse and it just like gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and that's, you think there isn't much literature and you start looking and looking and looking and it just gets bigger and bigger and bigger. So um, one, the only technique I've ever found that puts boundaries around [00:37:00] it really usefully is the Cornell note taking template.
Both: Um,
Inger: so I've got a, I've got a blog post on that and we'll post it. And the sort of variation of that is a note taking matrix. So the idea behind a matrix is that down the side, you've got the names of papers. Right. And, the, and the, and the columns that are, what are we, golems and rows. So rows are papers, the names of papers, and the row, the columns are questions, right?
So you've got a question like. So for instance, I did one on academic productivity once, and one of the questions in the, in the matrix was, what is productivity actually? How do people define it? So each time I read a paper, I only concentrated on that cell. So that paper in the row, and the cell was.
How do they define productivity? I'd just look through the paper and I'd find if they had a definition and if they did, I'd write the definition. If they didn't have a definition, I'd just say, [00:38:00] did not define it or ill defined, right? And if you do that to subsequent number of rows, you'll find that you'll either end up with like five definitions.
And 10 non definitions. And then you can globally say something like, most people who write about academic productivity, leave the term undefined.
Both: A
Inger: notable exception is Mew, Byrne and Downs, 2025, who say that productivity should be. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And so each row, each each column has a different question and you can only, I like doing them in Google sheets actually, cause you can keep infinitely adding rows and it doesn't have all the formatting kind of guff that you get with with doing it in Excel, you know, where Excel just has weird, it's designed for handling numbers, not for words.
But Google things are much more flexible than that. And so then as you go along, more questions emerge or the questions might be coming from the literature. What doesn't work with that method is when you take your research questions and you put them in the columns because [00:39:00] they're too big. Right? So breaking it down.
So they're, they're the two, and the Cornell temp note taking template is like a, it's just a single page variation of the same thing. I, Catherine loves it, right? Catherine Firth. Um, and, and lots of people do. I, I can, I value it, but I think if I'm really going to do analytical work across literature, like we're talking about here, Hugo, I would use a note taking matrix.
And you teach that in our, we, what's called building a second brain. We, we still haven't got a good name for it. Have we?
Jason: From notes to prose at the moment.
Inger: Notes to
Jason: prose.
Inger: All right. I still don't love it.
Jason: Okay. But it was your idea.
Inger: I know. I know. Maybe it needs to be like a system for writing or something like that, because that's really what it's designed to be.
But you teach that method in that, and do you, I usually find people's eyes get very wide when you explain it and you put, what do you find?
Jason: Yeah. Um, it was pretty [00:40:00] good. In fact, I taught it just the other day. Um, people, people go, Oh yeah, that's a really, what I like about it. And I think this is what other people like about it as well.
It's simple to implement in terms of what it does. It's like really easy to understand what it is that you're trying to achieve there. And you also get that visual representation that you can stand back from the spreadsheet and you can quickly see. how many papers have answered the question or not.
Um, which is, you know, really good. Uh, you know, it doesn't have to be overly complicated.
Inger: No, it doesn't. Elicit AI, so E L I C I T is basically an AI empowered implementation of that. Like it's a sleeper hit that one. Because you, same thing, rows are papers, names and columns are questions, but the column questions are go back to ChatGPT and use tokens, bring tokens from ChatGPT to, [00:41:00] to drive an answer.
So you can ask the question and get it to read the paper for you. And when you click on the on the piece of text that it makes for you, it goes and shows you which bits of the paper that it distilled that from.
Jason: I mean,
Inger: But, you know, nothing nothing replicates reading it yourself. You've got to read it yourself.
And I'll, I get a bit, you just have to in the end. I think you need stuff if you don't.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. You absolutely have to.
Inger: I mean, we could talk forever on this one too, Hugo, but maybe that's a tip to follow up and write back to us.
Jason: Yeah. And look, and then the other one, which. Um, I, you know, I try that all the time is word your tasks clearly, like frame the language that you're using to construct your task really, really clearly and use a verb.
So it's, . Take notes on area X is probably not specific enough. I think like it's got a, it's got a verb, right? [00:42:00] Not take note, take, right?
Both: Yeah, but yeah,
Jason: but it's, it's not, I don't think specific enough. So really
Inger: give it a Y, give it a Y and do that. Take notes on topic X for
Jason: yes.
Inger: Yeah,
Jason: particular outcome, because what, what you need to do is be able to ask, answer the question, have I completed this task or not?
And the only way you can do that is if you have that, did I take the notes and did I get for, for whatever that reason was, yes or no. And if you find yourself. Where your tasks are worded to Wooly probably going to be difficult to answer that question. Yeah. So
Inger: this way, I think the note taking template, um, and the note taking matrix that we're talking about is really helpful for what you're saying, because if you say, take notes and you say all the way down column one, for instance.
Yeah. So. In a session, I'm going to give myself 45 minutes. I'm going to [00:43:00] take notes and I'm just going to be column one. I think it gives you that scope you're looking for, which is, if you're gonna spend 45 minutes, here's a concrete amount of tasks that you can finish in 45 minutes.
You can go down column one and then you can just search. You go into each paper and you search productivity, first of all. Right? In my, in my use case, how do they define productivity? You search for that word and you see if you can find it in the paper in the first instance. Right? Yep. And you just systematically go through each paper looking for that one thing and then the next lot and then the next lot.
Like, so, you know, that might help. Anyway, report back, Hugo.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: Um, the next one is, um, from Brian Chi Chi Parker on Blue Sky.
Inger: Blue Sky, yes. Sometimes when people mention us, I just, I just do a screen grab and send it to you from our way. Yes.
Jason: And so here I am, here I am. I'm taking a screen grab and I've put it in our show notes because you said you wanted to give a shout out.
Inger: Yes. So thank you. How did [00:44:00] you say? Brian Chi Chi? That's what I said. I don't know if that's
Jason: right.
Inger: I don't know if it's right, but you said being American and a professor is a bad combination right now. Mental health is in the toilet. On the reg is my only bright spot right now. Heart emoji. So I just sent back, here for your colleague.
We are here for you. I've talked to colleagues in the US three times in the last week and each time it's, it's been tough. So reach out to your colleagues. Yeah. Yeah. Just reach out to one of them if you're, like, I'll just suggest, it's just a suggestion. We fight fascism through local connections, friendships, like this is how we fight fascism and, and a phone call, say, how are you doing?
Hold space for them to have a, have all the feelings about it. It helps them carry on. Right. Yeah, it's tough. You need to know
Jason: that there are people out there who actually do care.
Inger: Yeah. Lots of us care. [00:45:00] We do. Yeah.
Jason: We got an email from Jennifer, um, and Jennifer's doing a bit of a call back here to the previous episode where I think it was, um, Georgia outlined her, the way in which she's using Todoist.
Inger: Oh, yes, yep.
Jason: Yep. And you know, she laid out the structure that she's using for Todoist so that she can get all that sort of stuff done. I've had a few emails, um, asking for Georgia's contact details. Oh, lovely. Yeah. Which has been good. So I've, I've been playing, uh, email matchmaker, uh, a little bit. I love that for
Both: us.
Yeah.
Jason: Yeah. And Jennifer's from Germany and so basically the crux of her email is, can you put me in touch with Giorgio and so I've done that. But she just, um, wanted to say thank you very much for your entertaining and inspiring podcast. We're inspiring, Inga.
Inger: I love that.
Jason: I'm listening to it since episode one and really enjoyed listening to you.
Uh, the next little bit's about how
Inger: Episode one. Oh, that's, that's some solid listening. Thank you, [00:46:00] Jennifer. We appreciate you.
Jason: Um, so, and she just kind of wraps up and says, uh, greetings from Germany and keep up all the great work. So it's nice to know Jennifer from Germany.
Inger: Yeah, it's so, it's so lovely, isn't it?
Like it just, I dunno, just a warm glow of people who care about productivity, but not, not in a boring way. You know, I'm glad that we found an audience about that cause you know, it didn't, it wouldn't necessarily been the case. We were looking at the podcast, we were looking at the podcast charts, weren't we Jason, last night.
Jason: Yes.
Inger: Like, and we're not like, I looked at like 199, which happens to be one of my favorite podcasts, the Bulwark Podcast. I listen to it every day, Tim Miller. It's like the only American news I like, that's it. I listened to that and then I'm done, right? Like I can't listen to any more. Um, but I'm bearing witness via Tim Miller cause he's very.
You know, he's passionate and funny and all those sorts of things. And I looked at his stats and I'm like, wow, that's about as [00:47:00] many, he has many in a month as we've had to do the whole life of the podcast, pretty much.
Jason: Um, and cause we're
Inger: niche, Jason, we are
Jason: very nice. We are very nice. I, um, I shared with I, in fact, I've done that a bit recently.
Remember there was the podcast list from Cherry at Great Australian Podcast.
Inger: Yes. Yes. Yeah.
Jason: Hi Cherry. Um, if you're listening where we were ranked 29th in Australia.
Both: And
Jason: I have been telling, I have been telling people everywhere that we are 29th in Australia. Like we are the 29th most popular Australian made podcast.
Right. And people look at me and go, that's amazing. And I go, yeah, I know. Right. Like we've like, we've found a niche and we are like, we're doing really
Inger: well. We're rocking it. Yeah.
Jason: We're rocking it. And then last night, you know, you shared those. Those other stats. And I instantly wrote back to you and said, it would be great if it was just Australian podcasts so that we could see our name on the list.
And
Inger: then I'm like, yeah, there's a dropdown for that and then you can re sort it and then you're like, damn.
Jason: Damn, we're [00:48:00] not on the list.
Inger: No, we're not. No, we're
Jason: not. And there's 200 other podcasts that are on that list and we're not on, or close, even close to number 200.
Inger: Yeah, but also in our defense, we, we do once a month and some of those podcasts are dropping nearly every day.
Both: I
Inger: don't know how they, they saw it for that. It wasn't clear to me. So like, I'm going to choose to believe Terry.
Jason: Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is the amount of money that those professional, you know, I can have people on there, like the ABC and, you know, channel nine and all that sort of stuff, like they're throwing millions of dollars at their podcasts.
Inger: Yeah. And we throw, our budget is small.
Jason: Our budget is small and we rely on people. From Kofi to help us along a bit.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: So I think we're doing okay.
Inger: Yeah. Yeah. I think we're doing okay. We spend the money well, the tiny amount that we spend on it. We spend it well.
Jason: Yes.
Inger: Yes. But we keep it free and we keep it open for everyone.
And we're not into that subscription malarkey. So there you go.
Jason: And, um, we're not doing any [00:49:00] advertising. No, and
Inger: we don't advertise, no, so everything we say we mean, like we're not paid, even by OmniFocus.
Jason: No.
Inger: Although in the past I have said I'm very open to it, I'm very open to it.
Jason: Ken Casey if you're listening.
Currently
Inger: not, currently not being paid to, to speak in.
Jason: Alright. Next section is our work problems. So in this part of the show, we focus on one aspect of work, and we pretty much just nerd out on that. Let's be honest. We sometimes tackle problems we've had at work, or we discuss the themes suggested by a listener.
We always try and be practical, sharing our own tips, hacks, and view opinions. This week, our topic is reading. Always so full of academic guilt, we are going to talk about books and reading, how to manage the work, how to have fun with it, what apps we use to organize our books and reading, and finally, what happens to your books if you change jobs or retire.
Both: Both
Jason: of those things I am thinking about fairly [00:50:00] carefully, as a matter of fact.
Both: Yeah, yeah. So,
Jason: We're going to do all of that. And also we're going to talk about our romance book review. I'm going to try not to be.
Inger: Can I put, can I put a wrapper around this?
Jason: Yes.
Inger: Just before we start. Just to, to come next.
Those of you who didn't listen to the previous time that I made Jason read a romance book. So context, I am a romance reader. I bloody love it. I've been reading it since 2006, which is when I started my PhD and realized that I didn't need any more uncertainty in my life. So I needed books that I knew how they were going to end.
And more specifically, I knew they were going to end happily. So I didn't know what the characters are going through. Everything's gonna be okay. And I've read, I started off with Jane Austen with kissing, and then Jane Austen with sex, and then I like moved out into every other genre. I don't care. Give it to me.
Put it in my veins. I'll read anything. And my tolerance. My tolerance for spice is [00:51:00] very high. Right. Yeah. It started off being very low and I was like, Ooh, that's a bit, Ooh, Ooh. And then as time went on, I'm like, Hmm, whatever, you know, like aliens, I don't care, right? Like I'm, I'm open anyway, Jason and I talked about this for a long time.
And then I was like, Jason, you could enjoy these books. Maybe all you need is. Military kind of. Yes. So the first, my first attempt was getting you to read Average Everyday Jones, which was a novel about a Navy SEAL, um, veteran, um, accidentally getting someone pregnant on the battlefield and then working it out, those crazy kids working it out, um, and having the baby and you hated it.
I think.
Jason: Heavily ever after. Yes.
Inger: You hated
Jason: it. Um, and
Inger: so, but everyone found it hilarious how much you hated it. And ever since then, people have been going, can you make Jason read another romance book? And I said, yes, but it would have to be like, I tried with the Navy Seals, like I've, I've got to find his gateway drug.[00:52:00]
Anyway. Then I heard about this book. So Rebecca Yarris, the fourth wing, and I've been hearing about this new fashion in romance called romanticy.
Both: Oh. So it's
Inger: romance and fantasy. Right. There've been distinct genres and, and the romance, there's romantic elements in fantasy books, but they're not like the primary, the whole idea of a romance is that the, is that the relationship between the protagonists is the primary thing.
All sorts of other shit can happen, but it's all about whether they get together. Do they? Don't they? And, you know, depending on your tolerance for the level of sex in it.
Both: Anyway,
Inger: I'd been hearing all about this romanticy thing. I've been like, Oh, that's interesting. I'd read a couple of them. And then someone said, you need to read the fourth wing.
Um, no, my sister said, you need to read it. I trust my sister. She said, if you want something to stop you thinking about whatever else is happening in the world, read this book. Anyway, I picked this book up the first night I read it to 1am. The second night I read it till 2am.
And then And then I stopped at a certain point, because I'm like, maybe this is the [00:53:00] book, because It's got dragons in it. Now before, just another little bit of context, one of my favorite, favorite, favorite ever series of books is by Anne McCaffrey, and it's her Dragons of Pern series, and it was written in the sort of 60s, 70s, 80s, and then she like churned them out after a while.
And the premise behind that was that there was this world threatened by this like, um, spore that came from outer space that could only be tackled by flying dragons burning it with fire. Right?
Both: Right.
Inger: And humans would bond with these dragons and then if the human died, the dragon would die. If the dragon died, the human would die.
Whoever the dragon wanted to have sex with, the human had to have sex with. Right.
Both: Right. So
Inger: basically, Rebecca Yarris, bless her heart, has taken the Pern novels, turned up the sex because it was pretty light touch, because it was like on the 13 year old Inga's bookshelf, I could read it. Yeah. Yeah. This one, I don't [00:54:00] think so, would be on the 13 year old.
You have a 13 year old and I wouldn't, I don't know, I wouldn't necessarily leave it lying around. However, it's an education and maybe one needs to have one. Anyway. So, um. Yeah. Yeah. So I, I, she's taken Anne McCaffrey's turned up the sex dial and added Harry Potter to it.
Both: Yes.
Inger: So basically dragons people are learning to ride the dragons.
They're going through some sort of militaristic training. There's a war on. It's unspecified what the war's about until kind of the very end of the. this book and people wear leather and they throw knives at each other and there's a bit of Bujo wrestling. Okay, over to you Jason. This is what I gave Jason to read and actually the first time you sent me an image of how far you got, I was impressed.
Jason: Yeah, I, I, I figured I had to break its back, right? Otherwise I just wasn't going to
Inger: And can I also say, you, you said friends of yours then contacted you. I know Ben Crowell, um, messaged me on Blue [00:55:00] Sky and said, great choice for Jason. So he's obviously read it and he thought it was great. Your friend is a Adam, Andrew, Alex, Alex, hi Alex, sorry about that, um, also has read it. And we both agree it's tropey and stupid, but we can't stop reading it.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah.
Inger: Yeah. Oh
Jason: dang. Um.
Inger: Okay. Go Jason. Sorry. I just felt I needed to give. A lot of context so people can understand the face that you're making right now.
Jason: And like the one that you gave me last time was only a couple of hundred pages, right?
Inger: Yeah, yeah it was.
Jason: So you could grit your teeth and white knuckle your way through it if you had to?
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: This one's 600 pages, Inga. I
Inger: know.
Jason: 600.
Inger: I mean, it's a doorstop.
Jason: Like, if you wanted to ease me into the genre, you couldn't have chosen a thinner time?
Inger: It's
Jason: all
Inger: I'm saying. It's romanticy, romance, like fantasy book.
Romance books are short. Fantasy books are [00:56:00] not, like. Oh,
Jason: dang. Anyway so what did I think? So let's cover off the whole fantasy bit. Um, I haven't read any of that sort of stuff. I mean, the, most of the fantasy stuff that I've read many, many, many years ago, I haven't read any for a while now was. The Dragonlance series and kind of all of those, which had
Inger: Dragonlance in the title, but didn't really do dragons.
Jason: Yeah, that's right.
Inger: I don't remember dragons really being featured.
Jason: Yeah, that's right. That's right. So, um, so this, so this came as a bit of a change for me. All of that dragon lore was new to me, you know, the whole bonding. So you
Inger: didn't have the history, um, Anne McCaffrey, right.
Jason: And I'm like, oh, okay, so this is how they do it now, right?
Okay, there's bonding and, okay, okay, fine, okay, whatever. Sure, that's not implausible at all. Yeah, and then it just, like, it continues on. People go into the whole, [00:57:00] they go into the training thing, the cadets, they go in there, there's all this intrigue, people try and kill each other for reasons that are not great.
And people die,
Inger: like, she kills, like, she just kills them off with gay abandon.
Jason: Yeah, yeah, she tries to poison a whole bunch of them, which I thought was stupid.
Inger: I actually liked her poisoning technique. I was like, oh, yeah.
Jason: Um, but you know, made enemies just by being a person, really, just by being there. You know, that's
Inger: the world though.
I mean, you know, that can happen.
Jason: Yeah. Um, and so there was, there was an awful lot and you had sold this to me as a romance novel. So there was 400 pages of not romance novel. Well,
Inger: that's why I thought it might go down easy.
Jason: I'm like, it's like, you know, from page one, I was like, okay, let's see how this is a romance novel.
400 pages later, I'm going like, there doesn't appear to be any romance moves whatsoever going on inside this romance novel, as far as I can tell. You know the moves,
Inger: because I use [00:58:00] the moves to teach move step approach of functional linguistics. Yeah, and I'm
Jason: looking for them now, right? And so it wasn't
Inger: until Yeah, but they have adhesion though.
They do adhesion. Because they're bound up through their dragons. Yeah, don't they? Yeah, but not
Jason: until right at the, like, not until page 400. No, no, that's
Inger: the middle of the, no, that's the middle of the book.
Jason: No. Yeah.
Inger: Yeah. Is that?
Jason: Okay.
Inger: Yeah.
Both: I don't know. Like,
Inger: I would call that adhesion.
Both: Okay. All right. They're
Inger: also thrown together by the fact that he's a wing leader and like, that's a little bit dodged.
Like, the power relations in that are a bit like, eye opening. But he's Yeah. You know, he's not that much older than her. So maybe that makes it okay. I don't
Jason: know.
Inger: It's very gender inclusive though. People are gay and you know, like, yeah, yeah. Which I
Jason: did, I did find interesting as I was reading through, I was like, Oh look, I hadn't come across that before in this genre.
Inger: That person who just had their head torn off. It's bisexual.
Jason: There you go.
Inger: And we're not just killing them because they're bisexual, we're killing all [00:59:00] the straight people as
Jason: well. Yeah, there's a lot of death. A lot of people get killed.
Inger: Yeah. A lot of
Jason: names get read out on the death scroll or whatever it is.
Inger: Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. Um. I do think it does, it does follow the, like if we say that this moves in a romance novel, the meet cute. Well, they meet, there's, you know, she's walking across the bridge about to fall down into, like, cavernous abyss, and they meet at the end of the bridge. You know, there's a kind of meet cute there.
That's like It's not cute, but it's a meeting and they're definitely suspicious of each other and they're definitely thrown together and there's bedroom business.
Jason: I did send you that text when I got to that chapter, I was like, Ooh, spicy chapter.
Inger: I thought it was, it was like a moderate spice level for me.
Like moderate. Yeah. Yeah. But it was like, probably not what you want to put in front of Jack right now.
Jason: No. This one will go under the top shelf of the bookshelf, I think, you know, the one where, you know, if he [01:00:00] needed to pull it down, he'd have to climb up onto the back of the couch. Yeah,
Inger: you'd actually hear him doing it.
You could give it to Kath. You could give it to Kath though. Good. She might like it.
Jason: Might be one of those, might be one of the books that I put in kind of that way into the bookshelf.
Inger: Not spying out. Not spying out. So
Jason: yeah,
Inger: but I would say like, okay, we would, then we had a text about it and I said, I've never been so simultaneously engaged and annoyed by a book since I read The Da Vinci Code, which is like one of those books again, like this one where everyone's like, you have to read
Both: it.
Yeah. And I
Inger: read it and the whole time I'm reading it, I'm like, why can't I stop? This is annoying me.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: It's the mystery element of it, right? Yeah. Like it's mysterious. You want to know what happens, right? That's basically it.
Jason: I think with the Da Vinci code one because it's familiar enough, right? Like we all know about the Catholics and we all know about Rome and like, these are things that we can go, Oh yeah, I wonder how that works, you know, the deep dark [01:01:00] parts of the church
Both: and,
Jason: and so you kind of follow along.
Because of that. And yes, maybe it is this kind of grand chase through all these architectural blah, blah, blahs in order to get to the thing. Right. I don't know. But that was entertaining, but yeah, I read it once, put it down and did not pick up the next one.
Inger: Right.
Jason: Yeah. Which is pretty much what's going to happen here.
Inger: Yeah, you're not going to, you're not going to go in, there wasn't enough of a mystery at the end where I was like, what now I have to, now, damn it, now I have to read the next one.
Jason: No, I'll be happy to get the cliff notes from you. Thanks very much.
Inger: Tell me how it ends.
Jason: So, I, while you were explaining the background, I quickly went to see if I could find the quotes.
I'm not sure that this is the quote exactly, the one that made me throw up this morning when I read it. You
Inger: said some of it made you throw up a little bit in your mouth.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Okay.
Jason: And here's page 472 of uh. I love
Inger: how specific you're being.
Jason: If if people want to read along.[01:02:00]
His eyes darken. I'm going to keep you, he promises, just like he did last night, or was it this morning? You're mine, Violet. I lift my chin. Only if you're mine. Oh, bleh. I've been yours for longer than you could ever imagine. Oh, yeah. I was like, will you? I was just like, oh, please. Make it stop.
Inger: Still, like, okay, we're hanging shit, but we both read it. I read it in like two and a half sittings. I bloody enjoyed it. Rebecca Yarris, thanks for writing it.
Graduate or die, it says on the back.
Jason: And we're only, you want, so for context Violet, the main character in this book Becomes a cadet in this thing. Uh, and it's three years you have to go between becoming a cadet and graduating. And there's
Inger: three books.
Jason: Yeah. And 600 pages in, we're only [01:03:00] at the kind of the end of the first year, really.
Yeah. Almost at the end of the first year.
Inger: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Both: Yeah. I don't think I can do 1800
Inger: pages of this. But she sold an absolute metric shit ton of it. She's also, I need to point out, she is a mother of six children, Jason.
Jason: Oh, really?
Inger: Like, she wrote this, like, hefty book. Yeah. Six kids at home. And she's written, like, 15 other books or something.
Like, she's prolific. Like, I bow down. Okay. Like, and you sold a fucking shit ton of them. Good for you. I enjoyed it. I will try a third time on the romance. I don't know what I've got in the, Sally Ann Wary gave me, gave you a, uh, yes. Assuming you have not yet cracked that one open. I
Jason: have.
I started it.
Inger: Um,
Jason: and it reminded me of the first one that you gave me kind of right, right at the start. I went like, Oh
Inger: yeah.
Jason: You won't knuckle
Inger: your way, no.
Jason: The problem is, [01:04:00] we lead such very, very busy lives here at Castle Downs, right? And so for me to actually read something, I have to stop doing something else.
Both: We're
Jason: at Jiu Jitsu, I'm at Jiu Jitsu five times a week, if I'm not traveling Jack's got karate, we're sailing, like, you know, and then the only other time that's available to us is when on the weekends we're doing stuff just to keep the house afloat. You know, food in the fridge. And between that
Inger: you're working.
Yeah. And flying a lot. But you're on planes a lot.
Jason: Yeah, but I get motion sickness.
Inger: Oh, do you?
Jason: Yeah, so if I was to read on a plane and we were to go through turbulence, it would be very quick between You know, sitting here by myself and then sitting here with my lunch,
Both: right?
Jason: Yeah. I can't look down and read.
I can't do it in cars. Can't do it anywhere like that. I can't
Inger: do it in cars. I can do it in planes. It's weird. Like, I don't know. My brain thinks they're distinct. Anyway, [01:05:00] so that leads us actually onto our The second topic, by the way, um, Claude, our podcast producer produced this outline for us. Yes. I should have said that at the start.
Thank you, Claude. And next thing Claude suggested we talk about is there, I think we're down to reading for work versus reading for pleasure.
Jason: Yeah. So the academic reading load challenge. Oh my God, there is so much reading that you have to do. How professional reading can cure the joy of recreational reading.
Um, and reading guilt, do you feel bad reading just for fun? So, my PhD killed me for reading. Did it? It just, it really did. I used to read a lot. Oh. And I did my PhD and I graduated in 2014. Um, for my PhD, if I've read a dozen books in that 12 years, I'd be surprised.
Inger: You mean fiction books? [01:06:00] Oh, a dozen fiction books.
Jason: Yeah, I'd be surprised. Wow. Reading for kind of pleasure type thing. I'd be surprised. I read a lot of, I read a lot of the books that around things like personal productivity, you know, I've got a lot kind of that interest in that sort of stuff. And I read airport. book shop, book shop, business books as well,
Inger: um,
Jason: yeah, a little bit.
Not a great deal though. And then I pick up books that you recommend that you've read. You know, so, um, the Annie Duke book, I think it was Quit and the one on externalizing your thoughts and Murphy Paul.
Inger: Yes. Extended Mind. Yep. Extended Mind.
Jason: That's right.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: I've read those. Although, Kath the other day, she was out shopping.
Inger: Yes.
Jason: Um, she was op shopping, in fact. She does do an
Inger: op shop. She does do an
Jason: op shop. And so she bought me a copy of Mac Donaldson, V. C. Yeah, which is Victoria Cross, um, called The Crossroad, which is Mark [01:07:00] Donaldson is an Australian soldier. Was an Australian soldier. I'm not sure if he still is or not, but it's his biography about his time in Afghanistan and, and those sorts of places.
So I'll be reading that one. Yeah. Read bio,
Inger: bio. But I would call them nonfiction though, like Yeah. You know,
Jason: but I, pretty much all of that, I, I stopped reading. Um, I've only just more recently started reading again. Alex has. Giving me some recommendations for some books. I read one, uh, a couple of months ago called the ministry of time.
That was great. I think we talked about it a little bit on the pod. Yeah.
Inger: Yeah. There's a TV show, you know, they've done a TV show on Netflix for it. Right.
Jason: No, I did not know.
Inger: Yes, they have a Spanish version. Yeah, it's good. Yeah. I enjoyed it. Yeah.
Jason: Oh, okay. Yeah. Um, but yeah, it's just, it's hard. Uh, and, and I, I.
Blame my PhD for it, because I read for, [01:08:00] it very much, it was a lift and I read for work, you know, I read for a purpose and it was that very close reading, that analytical reading that you do, and I just couldn't go back to reading for pleasure. I'm only just returning to it now, what's it, 2025 or like 11 years later.
I'm only just really coming back to it now.
Inger: See my problem with it when I started my PhD had the same reaction because it sort of burns out your reading circuits. You've read all day. You're exhausted. You've got no space for it.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: And and. The problem for me at that point was that reading's my sleeping pill.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Right. It's just, I've, I was read to as a child, as soon as I could read, I read, it's a part of my bedtime going to sleep. My brain expects it and I couldn't sleep because all I do is like, I couldn't read those books late at night because although they're boring. They, you know, didn't actually do the business and hence the, hence the, um, romance reading was my solution to that.
And I have, I could say like you, I could say [01:09:00] in the last, well, how long has it been? Nearly 20 years. Holy crap. Since I started my PhD, I've read non romance books. Yeah. Fiction books that weren't romance.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: Because romance is all I can tolerate. Because it doesn't demand a lot of you. You know, what's going to happen, you know.
It's like, it's easy. It's just, um, surface reading really. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think, and I, and I talked to a lot of people, you know, boot camps and various things that we run. And if you ever come into this topic, people do talk about it like a kind of a lost, you know, something they've lost. And that they grieve that they've lost.
So, you know,
Jason: Um,
Inger: yeah, yeah. Is Jack home is he?
Jason: He just walked through the door and I tried to, I tried to mute and yell at him. So
Inger: I
Jason: think,
Inger: yeah, people just feel like. And so I think that the answer to that, like there is no answer, you've got to [01:10:00] find your own way through. Like if you want reading for pleasure back in your life, but I think that also thinking about reading as work and being more intentional about it, don't do more reading than you have to do.
Right. And that doesn't mean that you don't you don't do it properly in inverted commas. It just means that you, you. For instance, someone said to me the other day, Oh Inga, how do you keep up with the field? I said, what do you mean? They said, Oh, well, your colleagues are publishing papers and blah, blah, blah.
And do you have mailing lists and you know, do you have Google alerts? And I'm like, I thought about it. I thought, yeah, I used to do that. And I stopped. Probably about eight or nine years ago, it's just stopped because I used to try and put a morning aside to like keep up with the literature in my area.
And I realized two things. A lot of it's not that interesting. Sorry, not sorry, but it isn't. Like a lot of it is we tried this thing. The students liked it. It worked the end in my field in education. So if I'm going to read anything, I probably want to read outside of that. And when I want to read in my [01:11:00] field in order to situate my literature within it, then I, I intentionally read those bits of my field that have moved on since last I read it that relate to whatever it is I'm talking about.
So doing stuff on neurodivergence, I've done some reading in disability generally. So I just do searches for things I need and I don't bother trying to keep up. I mean, your mileage may vary in different disciplines, it might be more necessary, but I think that is, I have not yet met one person who, I've never met someone and maybe someone will write to us who has.
Uh, routine for this that enables them to stay abreast of the literature in inverted commas successfully and happily. I've just not, no one's ever solved that problem. I figured out everyone was saying they were doing it and I don't think they were. I think it's like legitimate academic deviance, right?
We all read kind of opportunistically for what we need to do to write.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: And then [01:12:00] the other bit about, do you read what your colleagues are writing? Yeah. Yeah. When they send it to me.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: And they do. And I send my stuff to them. And that's lovely. It's like a gift economy. It's like, Oh, it's a little package in the mail.
Both: Yeah.
Inger: What, what's Pat ridden lately, you know,
Both: or
Inger: they socialize it on the socials or something. I do, yeah, I just do think there's no. I think anyone who, look, I don't know, maybe this is too big a claim, but I reckon anyone who says that they genuinely came up with their field is lying.
Jason: Yeah. I mean, the fire hose is too big, let's be, let's be honest, right?
Given all of the pressures of being an academic, the, you cannot afford to take that amount of time just to be reading everything. So I used to do the same, I would subscribe to journals that were in my discipline area. So, you know, the ASTAR journals. All that sort of stuff. And I was reading in the field of strategy, organizational strategy.
The problem with the field of organizational [01:13:00] strategy is it's broad.
Both: And
Jason: so what you end up doing is you end up reading across, broadly across a field. And, nine times out of 10, you're never going to get that time back again. Like someone's, and you, and so I used to hate it. I used to, I used to really, really hate it because you, you'd read because you felt like you had to read to keep.
Yeah,
Inger: resentful. You feel resentful. Yeah. But
Jason: I'm like, it's not helping me right now. Sort of thing. Yeah. And so that idea that, um, you raised. Uh, where Richard Feynman's 12 questions, I think it was that Tiago Forte book, building a second brain,
Both: where
Jason: you've got these kind of 12 questions or, you know, number of questions that you really want to answer.
I think your approach is correct. You just keep those 12 questions or however many questions you've got in your front of your brain and you read for those.
Both: Yeah.
Jason: And you just kind of go like, there are other questions, but other people can answer those questions and I'll let you do that.
Inger: Yeah. Totally.
Jason: [01:14:00] Unless the only other way I would come into that would be as if I met someone and they said something and it sounded really interesting. Yeah. It's like, Oh yeah, that does sound that does. So, um, just the other day I was at the university of Queensland. I was talking, hi, Jonathan, if you're listening.
Um, I was talking to Jonathan Corcoran there. He's the associate dean for research and the faculty of science. His background was as a geographer and we got to, we got to talking. And so I. Mentioned that my PhD had things to do with maps. Turns out that he's one of his first jobs was working for the ordinance office in the UK as a cartographer.
So we quickly bond, we quickly bonded on these, on this idea. On the map, map map thing, right? Yeah. We're talking about how they're, you know, political devices, these maps. You, you deliberately leave things off maps to keep kind of silence the information. Like you don't present stuff to people. And we, we.
Went sideways to critical cartography [01:15:00] and we nerded out about because I'd read some critical cartography stuff He knew a whole lot about it as well. Very smart man And then he talked to me about There's some great literature on feminist mapping. I
Both: know
Jason: right and I was like, hello. Hello Really, and he goes on to say that, that mapping is very that some people seem to think that it can sometimes be difficult for women to, um, engage with maps.
As a science, like that kind of cartography is a science because it's very male dominated, and that the way in which the images are chosen to represent things on maps are not geared to be for, um, women to be able to engage with them. And that there that if you. Redesigned maps, including the way in which you drew them in order to reengage with that kind of feminist perspective, that it would [01:16:00] be easier for for women to engage with these maps.
And I was like, I had never ever thought of that. Right. But of course, it might be like, that sounds fascinating, because my, for PhD, that critical cartography stuff, that whole, that, maps are a deliberate effort. Device that are engaged in order to achieve some sort of purpose, sometimes nefarious purposes, you know, sometimes to exert power, sometimes to, bury other ways of knowing and some, you know, like they're, they're just.
They're amazing devices and they get, they get deployed to do all sorts of things, but I'd never thought about it from mapping from a feminist perspective. And I was like, huh, so I'm quite keen now. That's an example of where someone has said something that would align with my research. And then I would go away and I would actually go and look for that sort of stuff.
But I wouldn't have found it otherwise.
Inger: Mr. Thesis Whisperer calls this [01:17:00] nerd sniping. You got nerd sniped, right? And that's like the delightful, I love it when you get your nerd on. I love when all my friends get their nerd on, especially about the thing that they're nerdy about that. It's like way back, you know what I mean?
PhD, often, most of us have gone on and done other things, right? Mine's, hand gestures, yours is maths. And then you, you get all nerdy about it and it's like, Oh yeah. Like you, you, like when you're really interested in a topic, reading about it isn't a chore.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Right. And so maybe that's the key as well.
Like if you're following your interests, like the other day, someone on Blue Sky just posted, Oh, I've done a paper and normally I, you know, don't click on all of these. And this one was about autistic autistic people talking about mutual interests. And so I read it and it's like, really, really interesting.
It really it really unsettled my idea of like, like lots of things and stuff. And I thought, I zipped through it and objectively it was written in the way that most academic papers are. They're not actually written to be entertaining or interesting, but if you are [01:18:00] intrinsically interested in it, and I think it's really okay to be driven by your interests.
Both: When
Inger: you're not immediately working on a project, like a PhD, right? Um, so my PhD student, Jay, the other day sort of stumbled on this area. He's doing sort of security, how universities participate in constructing ideas of security, especially in the South Pacific. Interesting topic, right? Mm hmm. And we got onto this topic of silence and he started to go into this whole area.
You're talking about things that are left off maps. He went into this whole area of silence and he started to send me these papers on silence. I mean, I've got no purpose, other than the fact that maybe I should keep an eye on what he's reading a little bit, but I don't really believe in that as a PhD supervisor, like that's your business, read what you like.
But he was interested enough to send them to me and that like objectively, they just really hooked me and it started me thinking about, you know, what's, what's this silence thing about, right? It's so much more interesting when you start unpacking it, right? That's what reading should be.
Jason: Yep.
Inger: Right. [01:19:00] Then it's not a chore.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Yeah. But you know, you're right that the, the 12 questions, the Richard Feynman kind of idea of always having those active and, and knowing what they are. Yeah. You know, having the, having them written down somewhere so that you go, why is it that, what's silence hooking into?
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: That's one of those questions.
Do I need another new question?
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Um, and it's okay to let questions go too, right? Yeah. I'm not reading, I'm not reading books on critical cartography anymore. Um, like I read enough on it, I've kind of, I've got a handle on it. If someone wants to write something interesting, maybe, but I'm not seeing the, like, I'm not going out and looking for them.
Inger: Yeah. I'm the same with gesture. Like, it's like, but if I wanted to, I could always reactivate the circuits. You know, it's like, it's always lying there. Um, I'm just looking at the time. Yes. What do you want to take on about any of what Claude suggested here?
Jason: Um, no, it was just the last one was really about reading guilt.
Do you [01:20:00] feel bad reading just for fun? Um, it's not so much guilt so much. It's I'm always super aware that I could be doing something else.
Inger: Yes, that's right. My life is It's opportunity cost, right?
Jason: Yeah, my life is so busy and and I say that, you know, in a great way, you know, we're catching up with friends and we're like, we're going out and we're doing all the best stuff, right?
So, um, but taking the time to lie on the couch feels almost not, it's not guilty, it feels decadent.
Inger: I don't mind decadent. I'm happy to lie on the couch. I'm looking forward to having a small dog that I can feed treats to with one hand and just keep reading my books, but probably I'll have to go out walking and doing dog things.
Yes, you will. Looking after it and shit.
Jason: It'll be audiobooks for you.
Inger: Since I put this together and can I suggest, like, we could talk about reading tools and techniques, but it might be good to like dive into that another time I'm interested in this life cycle of the academic library, which is the [01:21:00] title that Claude suggested.
It's just that we talk about personal stories of library clear outs, how to decide what stays and goes when you change focuses and the emotional aspect of looking, letting books go. And Claude got onto this topic by me saying, you know, books, books do identity work by having books on your shelf and people coming into your house or your office.
They see parts of who you are and and that. especially for an academic library in, like, in history and in various other philosophy, uh, particularly in the humanities, like a book lined office is the dream. And I have like a huge office lined with books, which I'm not in right at the moment because the wifi doesn't work.
Anyway. , and I mean, uh, and. I mean, they try, but so both of us have gone through shifts. So I was an architect originally, and I had lots of books on architecture that I spent a lot of money on. And you were doing [01:22:00] business and then you went into quality and standards. And now you're an entrepreneur.
Jason: Yes.
Inger: So like, do you want to tell, where do you want to start with library clear outs? Because we've both got lots of stories.
Jason: Yeah. Um, so when I, so very much when I give a book away, like that. Two things are going on, I'm either giving it to someone, I'm gifting it to someone because I think you should read this, this is going to be great, right?
And in the back of my mind, I'm always thinking, I wonder if I'm ever going to get that book back again. And so like, I usually go out and then just buy another copy thinking I'm not going to get it back. Sometimes it comes back, sometimes it doesn't. But when I give books away, it's like all of those research books that I get, I think I gave you like eight research books on methods and all that sort of stuff.
Inger: Have yet to be indexed.
Jason: Um, I Um, they were books that I either bought from a PhD or had them as part of my academic library for whatever reason. But when I gave them to you, I'm like, I'm done with this academy stuff. [01:23:00] Like do you know what I mean? They were good
Inger: books. Like I was like, thanks. Thanks.
Great. Sure. You don't want to keep them? You know, you're like, no, I'm done. No, I'm
Jason: done. Um, and it was, that was a really, that was a really good feeling for me. Because I've, you know, conflicted feelings about that kind of academia. , and especially, there are parts of academia that I really do not like, but there are parts of it that I really do like.
I was having a conversation with a student just. The other day, um, he had only had ever got a high school education, then went into the army then got injured in bright, comprehensively injured. And the army paid for him to, he had two choices. I can't remember what the other choice was. It was either go to uni or do something else.
And so the army paid for him to go to, to uni and he did his undergrad, master's, and he's just now a couple of weeks away from his PhD. Amazing. Right.
Inger: That's amazing. Great to meet people like that. It's [01:24:00] inspiring. It's inspiring. And,
Jason: and I'm thrilled that the Australian education system will allow someone in that way and then support them all the way through to a PhD, through to a PhD.
Amazing. Super smart boy. Love that. Hate the toxic nature of some of it, right? So, when I closed those books and I gave those books to you, I I literally was handing that across and I'm just kinda like, this is it now out of my life. And
Inger: yeah, that's a, that's a real unburdening. And some people like I did that with my architecture books.
I just sold them off for cheap and made my friends come and collect them. And then had all these conversations where they finally realized I wasn't an architect anymore. Like a lot of them hadn't. And I'd been five years moved on by that point, like I spent all that money on buying writing books. I talked to Claude though.
My problem now is like, I have a very big library at home and at work and I organize it using library thing, which is still, I think the best product on the market. If you [01:25:00] want to index your physical and your digital books, I would. Um, you can just use your phone to scan the barcode in the back, and most books will pop in there with all the details, like it's your own personal library.
It is very good piece of software. I had reason to use it yesterday looking for a book for Jay, you know, like, do I have this book? I thought I had it, you know, and then, you know, realizing that I'd given it away, so I make notes in there, like I've lent it to so and so, blah, blah, blah.
So I can sort of keep track of at least where they went. You know, I don't always insist on getting them back. Um, but I'm always amused by the, the story about Umberto Eco. So I asked Claude about it and then I cross checked with Chatty G and then I cross checked with the internet cause I couldn't quite believe what I was reading cause I knew he had a big library, his claim, and there's video of him in his library, Umberto Eco, if you don't know him, famous novelist slash academic, actually wrote a book about doing a thesis.
Right. Which is amusing. Yeah. There's videos of him walking through his library, like, so there is actual visual proof. Like, it [01:26:00] is a library. It's like a school library or something. Yeah. It was immense. Like, there's no way, and the point is, of course, he, he never read most of them. Yeah. Right? So he claimed he had 50, 000 books.
And, like, looking at his library, I reckon he probably did. And he, he, he described books as tools. He had this idea of the anti library, that the library was more about the ideas you had not read. And so they were, they were there if you needed them, you had a full tool set. It was like having a, a tool shop with every tool you'd ever want to do anything you ever want to do.
You don't have to use them at this point. Right. So this made me very comfortable with the thousands of books that I own and I own thousands. I know how many there are. And, in 2023, I wouldn't. on sabbatical, as you may remember, and I looked after an academic, deceased academic's house,
Both: in
Inger: the process of helping his kids also unpack that house and get it ready for sale.
He had thousands of books. I brought home, I brought 12 boxes of [01:27:00] books home. Wow. So I further added to mine. So I've got like some great, I've got great stuff because he was a gesture expert. As I explained, I like referenced his work a lot. It was my absolute privilege of my life. One of the best academic.
Experiences I've ever had was looking after Adam Kendon's library and helping his literary executor Yeah also Donate the books because some of them were rare and and so it was an extreme example of what happens to your books And he just never he just is in denial about death and all the rest of it He was writing his last book on his deathbed apparently and he was Like, I'm not going to bother, , people will just deal with my library when I'm gone.
What's your curation strategy? On one hand, you've got the maximalist. You've got Umberto Eco with 50, 000 books and going, Oh, well, you know, I won't read them, doesn't matter.
Both: And
Inger: then you've got somewhere in between, like at the other end, you've got Marie Kondo, right?
If you read the life changing magic of tidying up, she says you should only have about 30. And you should only keep the [01:28:00] ones that spark joy and that you should just regularly get rid of them. So she's like on the extreme minimalist end and, and Claude suggested there were two stops along this spectrum.
There was more towards Umberto Eco. There's an academic pragmatist that you keep only what you regularly cite or teach from. And then there was the more selective curator, keep only significant or hard to replace works, which I thought was. It's quite an interesting strategy, like that assumes that you have access to all the other ones whenever you want to, which a lot of us do in university libraries.
And so I asked it along the lines, my sister had has a collection of porcelain cats and I have a selection of porcelain dancing ladies. You've seen my, they're ridiculous. Anyway, it started as a joke, it's got totally out of hand and she wants to move house now and she had to cut down a selection of cats and she found Claude remarkably helpful
Both: in
Inger: this.
Claude like really got into this. Claude AI from Anthropic, if you don't know Claude got really got into this problem. And so I thought, Oh, I wonder if it's got any practical [01:29:00] solutions for curating your books. Right. Should you be like we are in the last five years of our career?
Both: Yeah.
Inger: So these are the practical tips from Claude.
So I thought they were, they were quite good actually. So Claude suggested, if you haven't touched it in two years rule, like if you don't want to be a maximalist like Umberto Eco and not care about it, like I'm, I'm just with Umberto Eco at the moment. I'm not caring about it. I'm just giving it all. But say you, say you want to be more of a pragmatist or a selective curator.
So if you haven't touched it in two years, unless it's a key reference work. Then you have to consider it for the chopping block. You're now looking at your bookshelf next to your desk with, uh, with, with the eagle eye. Okay. He suggests, Claude suggests keeping books that are heavily annotated. And you've got a really good annotation method where you, in the front cover, Quotes, concepts,
Jason: concepts.
Inger: Yeah. You put the page number and you write it in. So that, so you put the page number and you write. A topic next to it. So you can [01:30:00] quickly find inside that book. You don't put flags on it. So that's a question of heavily annotated. So if you've got a book that you've done a lot of that too, it's a useful object because you can, you've re indexed it for yourself out of print books, you know, since signed or personally significant books, things that people have given to you as gifts.
Maybe? Or books that are core to your teaching. So it's like, okay, even if you haven't touched in two years, maybe you keep those. But if you're questioning culling or the rest, you ask yourself these questions. I thought they were good. Is this easily available digitally through the library or not? Does it represent outdated knowledge in my field?
Which some people it might. Will I actually return to this? Like really, will I? Ever really need to use it if you're not in the Umberto Eco school of everyone's a tool who cares And is this part of my active research area which both of us have curated out of our active research area? So that's like and then it says practical compromises and I thought these were quite good suggestions Taking photos of [01:31:00] important pages or notes before donating or getting rid of keeping one showcase shelf Like, here's the books that represent me as an individual, actually.
Oh, I couldn't do it. It's a showcase shelf. I couldn't do it. Um, for being ruthless elsewhere. I thought that was clever. Yeah. Particularly if you've got a small office. I would have an
Jason: identity crisis.
Inger: About what you put on there.
Jason: Yeah, it's like, you know, I'd have to, I'd go through cycles.
Inger: Yeah. Right. But that's an opportunity to buy more books, surely.
Keeping a digital record of your library before culling. And in fact, I've done that in library thing now, when we do get rid of things. we have a, an anti library, a library of stuff we've had, so we don't re buy it or whatever. So yeah and having a waiting area for books that you're unsure about.
That's a good idea for getting rid of anything is to just put it in a waiting area. So anyway, that's your, that's your reading.
Jason: Yeah,
Inger: I was just,
Jason: I was looking, I was looking at what those suggestions were and then I was looking at my [01:32:00] bookshelf next to the, next to the desk here and I've got a book up there that I reckon I would have bought 2004, it's kind of that time of the world by a guy called Hugh McLeod.
Um, and he used to have a website called Gaping Void and his, his shtick was, uh, little cartoons on the back of business cards.
Inger: Oh, you gave me the book for that.
Jason: Did I?
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: Oh.
Inger: Like a little, well you gave me one of them, the, the napkin drawing book.
Jason: Oh no, that was Dan Roam's, uh, back of the, back of the napkin.
Inger: Yeah. I've got it here. Yeah. Down row in the back of the neck.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. I haven't picked that book up a lot in the last ten. I haven't probably haven't picked it up at all in the last ten years. Mm. But it's one I'd be unwilling to let go of because it's an interesting book. And I'm not quite sure when the next time someone's going to I'm gonna end up having a conversation.
I'm gonna be able to go to the there's nothing I like more than [01:33:00] being able to go to the bookshelf and go, I've got a book about that. Yeah, I know because like it's eclectic, the stuff that I've got on my own. Yeah,
Inger: it really
Jason: is. , and I'm finding now the other, the other part of that is Jack's asking some really interesting questions about how the world works and that sort of stuff.
And I can, you know, I've got, books by. Biologists by Edward O. Wilson and, you know, which is all about consilience. That is the name of the book. Yeah. Talks about the kind of merging of science and art, right?
Both: Yeah, yeah. It's great.
Jason: Yeah. And so I'm able to go to my bookshelf now and pull them down and say, read this chapter or you know, this is, this might help you to be able to understand what's going on in this.
Give you a little bit more context around that sort of stuff. So, I'm now probably At the point where I'm the least willing to get rid of books right now, because I might not have picked them up for a [01:34:00] while, but somebody else in the family is probably going to start picking them up
Both: and
Jason: I found them useful.
I found them useful enough to keep. And there's a few gaps I've given books away, uh, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Was one that I read or really loved a
Inger: classic,
Jason: And, uh, you know, I'll have to replace that one because it's one that I'll wave in front of Jack, you know, at the
Inger: right time.
Yeah, yeah, there'll be a time. Yeah.
Jason: So, yeah, I'm not, I'm not sure about whether I should get rid of them. Yeah, I don't know. It's, it's really. Claude's
Inger: given you some interesting questions to think about. Yeah. As he always does. It really has. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm thinking about it like, um, I'm not going to do anything about my library for now, but when I do exit from ANU and I've chosen my retirement date now, I'd be your advice.
I decided I'd jump off the cliff at the same time as you, you've got a date. I was like, good enough for me. I'll do that. Yeah. I have started to really think like, Ooh, what happens? I thought one, [01:35:00] my first move would be, you know, take whatever it is that you've got. That's really cool. And then, I would just open it and have an open house party for the PhD students and just let them take whatever and sign them, from me to whoever and try and invite old students back and, you know, all that.
And I thought that could be a nice way for them to find homes, right? Which Kennan's book in Cambridge when I was looking after them. So I just invited people back from, it was a nice way to meet people and go, I've got this house. And there's all these books and I'd say, I've got every one of Goffman's books.
And they'd be like, what? I took all the Goffman's you can't have them, but he has other good ones. You might want to come and have a look at people and people took what they wanted. So yeah. Should we start to pull in?
Jason: Yes. Yeah.
Inger: Not that I'm grabbing the wheel of the bus, but I'm just looking at the time.
Jason: I'm just, I'm interested because I've thought long and hard about my own retirement from, you know, the rat race, right?
Both: Yeah.
Jason: , but now I'm thinking about your retirement from the rat [01:36:00] race, um, and we've had lots of conversations about this and, you know, I'm very clear, I have been for a long time,
Inger: right?
Jason: When that day comes, I'm off. Yeah, gone
Inger: fishing. Yes,
Jason: gone fishing.
Inger: Yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Jason: Yeah. I've got other things to do, you know, if I, if I was independently wealthy, I'd be doing them today. Let's be clear. Right. But you've often said that you would like to maybe still continue on in some capacity past the retirement date.
And those books would be a way of holding you there, in that space.
Inger: Yeah, but do I want to go on in that capacity, or do I want to start writing romance novels?
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Because, I reckon, Rebecca Yarris, you've inspired me.
Jason: Really? 600 pages? Look, I'd read a ninja one. Are there any romance books about ninjas? I'd read that.
There
Inger: are. Yeah, of course there are. [01:37:00] Look, romance is like porn. If you can think of it, there is some,
Jason: okay. Somewhere someone's written on. Okay.
Inger: Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Jason: I do. I do ninjas. I reckon. I reckon if you, yeah, I could probably come at ninjas. Well, you wrote
Inger: me the outline of a zombie thriller thing. You know, I could do that.
Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: And I'd have the small dog, like Barbara Cartland,
Jason: you know,
Inger: just saying, you can see me inching towards it. I've tried to write romance books while I'm, while I'm working, I can't like times one factor, but the other factor is just the words that come onto the page from my head are all nonfiction, you know, and it's really hard for me to jump tracks and the effort to jump tracks.
I just realized I can't do it. So my, my, my plan is to start writing romance books.
Jason: Okay.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: I'll be, given what you've called your dog, I'll be interested to see what your literary name will be. Yeah.
Inger: I need a pen name. Yeah. Your
Jason: pen name.
Inger: Yeah. Maybe [01:38:00] more than one pen name.
Jason: Yeah. Um, two minute tips, Inga.
Inger: Oh, we're, we're skipping what we've been reading. Can I just say one thing in that?
Jason: Oh yes. Sorry.
Inger: Big shout out for the passing of the great, the legendary Peter Albo, Professor Peter Albo. Um, right. Many books, two of my favorites are Writing Without Teachers, an absolute classic. If you've not read it, do yourself a favor and Vernacular Eloquence, which is almost twice as thick as this book from Rebecca Yarris, uh, but extraordinary work of.
of just extraordinary, right? He talked about how speech and writing, you know, when I talk about speech and writing being related and people moving their lips and tongues and left and right branching syntax
Both: and stuff,
Inger: that's all Peter Albo. Like he was an amazing, amazing academic teacher. Passed away.
He must've been in his nineties. I interviewed him for a podcast a couple of years ago and he was exactly as you'd imagine him to be, right? Just like [01:39:00] generous, thoughtful, funny, kind, um,
Both: Yeah.
Inger: And I thought, I can't believe he's still alive. You look very, very old. Yeah. And I thought we won't have him very much longer, but he still could get on zoom, you know, in his mid nineties.
And he died surrounded by his family, with his loving wife, his grandchildren. He played the cello. I'm sure they played him cello music anyway. Deep respect. We've lost a legend. But if you had to live a life as an academic and a teacher,
Both: in
Inger: Spro Jason, Peter Elbow, He's a firing guy.
Jason: You sent me his, um, obituary and it did, it did read as though he'd, he'd had a life well lived.
Um, yes. Yeah. With purpose and, and not some success as well, right? As part of that. He'd been as successful
Inger: as he wanted to be. I'm sure he could have had more financial success or whatever, but he's, he lived his values and I [01:40:00] just, I just found him very inspiring. It's hard to be sad about someone dying that age, a life well lived, you know, it's not a sadness.
Both: You
Inger: can't have people forever, but it's just like, you know, I just want to say really inspiring. So I've been picking up writing without teachers. I'm rereading it again, just to, and it's lovely and I, it's just as I remembered it. So it's sort of nice to revisit a familiar friend. One book I will never get rid of.
Both: Yeah. Yeah.
Jason: Yeah.
Inger: Anyway. So that was reading. Two minute tips. I don't have one. Go.
Jason: Good. I do have one. Um, and it was inspired just by our conversation just earlier,
Inger: um,
Jason: around taking notes and the Cornell method. Yes.
Inger: Yes.
Jason: If you happen to have a child of or you don't even need to have one if you know a child of high school age,
Both: it
Jason: turns out that the local high school that we send Jack [01:41:00] to, they have book lists every year and there's one book supplying company that supplies the whole book list.
Like it's an academic book list supplier.
Inger: It's easier than it used to be.
Jason: Yeah. So you just like, they give you a list of all these books and you go to this one spot and they have them all there and you just go, I'll have those 16 books or whatever, however many textbooks and all sorts of stuff. But of course they.
They, um, have all sorts of other stuff other than books there, which includes all of the stationery that you could possibly think you might need
Inger: if
Jason: you're, if you have to undertake exams. Oh. So pads, pre printed pads of Cornell notes, for example.
Inger: Really? Really.
Jason: So this, this idea of, rolling your own note taking system and, and that sort of stuff.
You know, I used to, I used to go to the internet and do an image search to find Cornell note templates and then
Both: I'd be [01:42:00] printing
Jason: them off and shit like that. Yeah. No, no, no, no. There's a whole industry out
Both: there.
Jason: Oh my God. Yes. For the collect, for the capturing collection and then resurfacing of ideas that you have to learn in high school.
Turns out probably would work in university too.
Inger: What is the name of this company?
Jason: Well, the one that, one that that we go to is called JP Books. Um, J for Jason. Peter. Peter For Peter. The link. Yeah. I'll give you a link. And they, it's a warehouse really. And out the back I just. Oodles and oodles and oodles of books, but they also had, I, you
Inger: physically go there.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. You turn up.
Inger: Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Okay.
Jason: You could,
Inger: I think. So in the ACT, where I live they don't make you buy any books. Oh, right. They buy all of them for you.
Jason: Okay. That's good.
Inger: Yeah. So I was like, where's the book list? And he's like, we don't have one. So that's not an expense I need to bear.
Jason: Wow. Yeah. Cause the. Which is kind of
Inger: [01:43:00] amazing.
Jason: Every time they change the curriculum.
Inger: I know because it was a shock when he went to uni and he's like, here's a list. I'm like, how much?
Jason: Yeah. Yeah.
Inger: Crazy.
Jason: Yeah, there's a, there was, there is a thriving secondhand book market for, you know, at high school for year 10 English and year 10 Humanities and Maths
Inger: and all that sort of stuff, right?
Jason: I bet, because they're not cheap. They're not cheap, but the moment that they change the curriculum, everybody has to go out and buy the new edition.
Inger: Yeah,
Jason: and it's like mmm.
Inger: Yeah, and trust me when I say that authors are not getting that money
Jason: Yeah,
Inger: because I got my royalty check this morning Jason.
Jason: Yes,
Inger: but how to fix your academic writing trouble
Jason: Yes,
Inger: and I opened it with no joy because I knew
Jason: yeah,
Inger: you know, yeah, it was a hundred and fourteen pounds
Jason: Well, that's the least it's in pounds, right?
Not Australian pesos. Sure. Yeah. Sure.
Inger: Yeah
Jason: Yeah, so that's my two minute tip. It's [01:44:00] Go to these book supplying places where they supply books for people who have to take exams and you can find all the note taking stationery pre printed, ready to go.
Inger: Fantastic. Which
Jason: I thought was really good. So that's it.
Thanks for listening folks. Alright, read
Inger: us
Jason: out. Yes. We love reviews. If you leave a review on Apple Podcasts, we promise to read it out.
Inger: And I haven't done that.
Jason: Desperately doing that now. So there's like music in the background. If we assign
Inger: this a task to any one of us, because like, I feel like every time, I don't know.
I
Jason: think maybe that is the problem. I think our show notes don't say, this is Inga's job. Yeah. This
Inger: is Inga's job. Like we, yeah, no, I can't see anything there. Okay. Carry on.
Jason: Okay. Just scroll down in your podcast player, be, be the person who gives us five stars because we love
Inger: that. Yeah. Yeah. We do love that.
Jason: If you want your question featured on the show in the mailbag, you can either do two things. You can do one of two things. You can email us at pod at on the red team dot com. Um, and that'll go [01:45:00] through to a special email account that I've got set up just exactly for this job. Or you can leave us a speak pipe and you can go to www.
speakpipe. com forward slash thesis whisperer, where I think you've got three minutes. To get your question across.
Inger: And I haven't, I haven't had any in there for two months. So please someone send me one because I get so excited when they come through. Like I get an email notification and I press on it immediately.
It doesn't matter where I am. Like sometimes I'll just be in the middle of a dinner party and husband will go, what are you doing? And I'll be like, someone sent me a speech pipe. Oh my God,
Jason: I'm so excited. Um, I'm having a break from the socials. Let's just be honest about it. I think we should just call it.
I'm just not doing socials. I'm on Instagram a little bit, mostly because of the air fryer chicken recipes.
Inger: Good enough reason.
Jason: Right. There's some pretty good ones in there. Sure. Like it's pretty good. Yeah. And the, and the jiu jitsu [01:46:00] moves. There's a thriving Instagram jiu jitsu sub subculture going on.
Inger: And it's the perfect medium for that actually.
Jason: Yeah. Yeah. Um, but other than that, I'm just like, I think I've actually deleted Facebook. Like I just deleted it off my phone. I was like, there's an account. I don't
Inger: understand people still being in Facebook. I sort of forget Facebook exists and then someone will say, are you coming to the party on Saturday?
I'll be like, what party? And then they'll go, Oh shit, did you not get, Oh, you're not on Facebook, are you? And then there'll be a flurry of last minute, you know, that's my life now. At least people still remember me
Jason: and invite me. But remember, like. We were Facebook, like, all in.
Inger: Oh man, yeah. Yeah, and you had, you had a
Jason: huge following as Thesis Whisperer.
Still have it, still
Inger: have it. I've got 30, 000 followers there. I do post to it, but I'd like duck in, drop a post, duck out again.
Both: Okay.
Inger: Hardly anyone sees it because the algos, I don't pay them. Yeah. Like, you can follow me on Facebook if you want to. I don't recommend it, you know. Like you're better off to just subscribe [01:47:00] straight to the blog.
There's like, scroll down, you'll see, put your email in here and then you will definitely get, people are like, Oh, I didn't realize I could do that. And they're like, Oh, it's sort of like Substack. I'm like, yes, Substack is built. Same software, except it isn't a corporate person with a Nazi kind of, letting think it's okay.
Nazis are there.
Jason: Okay.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: Anyway. Hmm. Um, it costs us about a thousand bucks a year to run this pod.
Inger: And
Jason: I know I now see those, all of those expenses because,
Inger: yeah, cause I signed them all over to you last weekend.
Jason: Yeah. Thanks very much. So there's
Inger: a lot.
Jason: I was like, Oh, look, I opened the email today and I'm like, Oh, there's a, there's a, there's Bus, bpr,
It's like, okay, sure. If you wanna support our work, you can, you can sign up to be a Riding the Bus member for just two bucks a month via our on the Red Cofi site or coffee cofi coffee link in the show notes., and you, you can do that, and you can also sign up [01:48:00] for our newsletter. We have a new newsletter.
Yes, our newsletter
Inger: is going well.
Jason: Yes. Um, but we have not. Some people
Inger: seem to like it. Yeah. We have
Jason: not put the details of where people can sign up for that in the show notes. Have we not? Not in the show notes.
Inger: Oh, Dan, that might be explained why the signups have been good, but not like spectacular.
Jason: Yeah.
So I can't actually point you in the direction of where you have to go to sign that up. It will
Inger: be in the footer. It will be in the footer. It will be in the footer. I will put a link there to the page. Okay. Great. Okay. I didn't realize I hadn't done that. Okay. Good. Easily fixed.
Jason: And so that's how you can help with us to keep the wheels of the bus turning over or wheels of the Jeep, as it were, this week.
Um, Ingo, it's been an absolute pleasure. It's always
Inger: fun.
Jason: Um, I don't want to keep you too much longer because you've time shifted your day to day.
Inger: Yeah.
Jason: So while you're working in the academic salt mines tonight, I'm going to go to jujitsu.
Inger: Yeah. Enjoy that.
Jason: Yeah. Thanks.
Inger: Yeah. All right. All right. I'll see you later.
I'm going to stop it. We have to let it up. Don't forget it has to upload because there's a video [01:49:00] on it. It might be a bit longer. Oh yes. Okay. You ready? Yeah. Stop. Okay. See you next time. Bye.