Productive June Starts TOMORROW!

So May was particularly unproductive in the first year of my PhD (that's sooo 2009, but anyway). Only being 2 months in, I thought that I'd be still madly reading and coming up with awesome ideas for my thesis, but the procrastination had already set in. Another PhD buddy and I even bought a whole-year pass to the uni gym as a way to get out of the office. Bad news is we procrastinated from that too and actually wasted a lot of money by not really going ever. Oops.

So as a way to get back on track, 'Productive June' was born. Basically this meant we put up propaganda posters to try and motivate/guilt us to do more work. It wasn't overly successful - because mostly we spent June making posters and running around to see if other people were being productive. Yet it somehow stuck. Last year was yet another 'successful' Productive June.

This May has actually been (well mostly) productive for me (read: me going AAARGH and running around like a crazy person because of all the deadlines I had to meet). So hopefully that will spill over into June. At the very least, the conference at the end of June (in NYC woo!) will be good. 

So without further ado, behold my propaganda posters (and mad putting text over clip art skillZ) - feel free to use them if you also need to be guilted into doing work this June.

Click to enlarge; Feel free to use these (with credit)

Any creative Productive June slogans you can think of? Let me know and I might make more posters (after I've finished being super-productive, of course)! :)

Creativity attempt - complete!

So in my new quest to accomplish 30 life goals before 30, I became re-interested in #9: finishing my honeymoon collage. See here for the before shots.

And now for the finished product (prepare to be underwhelmed hahaha):

Love a good bandwagon.

So I have seen quite a few blogs recently that have lists of life goals they'd like to accomplish, usually 30 things before 30. Or you could be really ambitious like my buddy Anide and have 111 things to do in 2011! As I'm quite good at sitting around doing nothing, I'm not so brave as to attempt the 111... so I'll just have to settle for 30 things to accomplish before I turn 30 (which is coming a bit too soon for my liking)! 

So here goes...

meh.

I have a very important talk on Friday - it's to the psych department at uni about all my PhD research so far. Also, I invited some important people in my area to come listen and give feedback. I'm now regretting doing that!

I think this cool picture sums up pretty well how I feel about working on this talk right now:

[source]

Thanks to TriGirl for pointing this out to me!

*Update: Talk finished, ended up going quite well. Thanks for the support :)

WTH Wednesdays + Husband Quotes: Combined at Last?!

Planking Australia Facebook Page

I think it might be mostly an Australian thing (although there are fears it's SPREADING TO NZ!!!) so far. Love it or hate it, it's caught a lot of attention: PLANKING. What is it? Well, it "involves somebody lying flat on their stomach in unusual or different environments, [it] is a burgeoning internet craze that has attracted thousands of fans right across Australia" - Article from the Brisbane Times.

Here's where the husband quotes part comes in. Last week I came back to my desk in the PhD office to find the following note about a called I'd missed:

"[husband] called, he wanted to tell you he went on facebook finally. He took a planking photo". 

Husband never uses facebook (to the point where he'll attempt to boycott events where he was only invited via facebook - at least he gets into the boycotting spirit) and so he thought it worthy of calling to tell me he'd gone on to post his planking picture. While some of these attempts can be amusing and require a fair bit of skill (I'll admit I attempted it badly on a table), people have taken it way too far and mostly it's just become pretty dangerous. This is evidenced by reports of people being seriously hurt attempting these stunts. I have one word for these people (no offence Husband but you're included hehe): GOOBERS. 

P.S. According to this article, planking is so out, and teapotting is now in!? Slow news day I guess.