“It’s not enough to be busy...the question is: what are we busy about?” Henry David Thoreau

This full day session is delivered by an external presenter, Dr Adrian West, Company of Mind.

** available for bookings from Friday, 10 January 2020

Everyone seems to be too busy and have too much to do. Yet at each stage of your career you typically have to take on more (think what you'd need to do as an academic?). So how are you going to use the opportunity to develop better ways and skills for coping - now?

The transition to doing research is quite a step change and a real opportunity to develop skills and habits to make your self-organisation more efficient. It's particularly clear when you're first exposed to the demands of research: information, literature, ideas, tasks, responsibilities...and little externally imposed structure to help you. It can become obviously overwhelming. That's a good thing because it galvanises us to develop new skills for coping, which will stand us in good stead for our future lives too (it's part of the transformative value of doing research degrees).

But how exactly are you going to do that? Will it take effort? (remember how much effort you put into learning the alphabet - wasn't that worthwhile?).

In this workshop we'll look at a variety of tools, practices and disciplines that will help us. From overarching practices for handling "everything" (thereby reducing that stress), to ways of managing and making use of all the ideas you have or have read, to how to develop the kind of memory that a scholar needs.

Facilitator: Dr Adrian West, Company of Mind
Dr. Adrian West co-founded the shared virtual reality research group at The University of Manchester. He has held UK and EU research grants, leading both Technology and Psychology contributions, and has also been an expert reviewer in technology for the European Commission. He went on to lead a team of engineers at a U.S. Venture capital funded technology company which was sold off to IBM in 2008. Adrian has been Research Director for The Edward de Bono Foundation which specialises in thinking as a skill and has inspired over 200 cross-discipline innovation teams in academia and industry. His research interest in perception and thinking developed into Company of Mind, which facilitates thinking skills for corporations, Government bodies, and Universities. He is routinely voted best Lecturer by technology students, and by business leaders when he presents on innovation and thinking skills.

Registration: You are recommended to use your University of Liverpool email to register on Eventbrite and then the calendar invitation will be added to your University calendar. We reserve the right to remove registrations of attendees who do not appear to be members of this University.

Getting Organised for Research (and Life) by Company of Mind