June 1, 2019

Meticulous May

I can’t believe we are in June. It is literally freaking me out because I am leaving to attend a friend’s destination wedding and had planned to finish all my chapters before the end of this month. I really did hustle hard in May but I’m not sure if it was enough to get me to where I need to be.

May was a pretty crazy but relatively productive month. I finished running my intervention in the first week of May. I had been running this since mid-January so I was really excited to close my intervention and get onto to the next step of analysing. I had made appointments with statisticians to help me guide my data analyses. While it was insightful to see two different statisticians, I also found it overwhelming because they had very different approaches and I needed to work out what would work best in my situation, and I hadn’t done anything similar involving a large data set of this sort. Most tasks have been taking longer than anticipated as some sections needed to be analysed multiple times or in different ways. There were times I felt too overwhelmed as there was simply too much to do! I tried to get around this by writing a clear plan of what needs to be done and changing tasks frequently (when possible) to overcome fatigue associated with data analyses.

In other news, I was away in Hamilton Island for a hens getaway (blog coming up soon) and also attended the 9 to Thrive Summit with Business Chicks. On the whole, May was pretty tedious but was a huge learning curve for me as I discovered new ways of doing things. Unfortunately, most of these were learnt the hard way after spending huge chunks of my time. But it was really useful to learn these techniques and has helped me feel more equipped to tackle similar analyses in the future (if there is a next time) :P

Here are some of my May eats. Due to Ramadan, most of the photos I took this month were fruit and veggie platters.

Solo iftar spread
Chickpea chaat (click here for recipe)
Oat, almond and sultana biscuits (recipe adapted from here)
Prawn and calamari risotto with mushroom and spinach
Oat, cranberry and peanut butter slice