Welcome and thank you for joining me on this adventure. For the newbies, you can catch up on previous posts: first blog post, second blog post here, third blog post here, fourth blog post here, fifth post here, sixth post here, seventh post here, eighth post here, the ninth post here, tenth post here, eleventh post here and twelfth post here

This was an emergency firefighting week. All the best well-laid out plans went out of the window as I battled to bring down the fire of competing deadlines and sudden shifts in workload that kept popping up: from my fatherhood role, to my PhD supervision role, through my role as a journal co-editor-in-chief, to my friendship roles and football player role – for this one I decided to honour the jersey by signing up for our match on Saturday :D. Suddenly, everything else aside the proposal became urgent and important in ways that I couldn’t quite have foreseen. Added to this mix was my own hesitation and trepidation of beginning the next phase of the proposal development: addressing the feedback comments while also “killing my darlings” by cutting out words/sentences/paragraphs/sections in order to get to the word count limit. It is a painful and putting it off seemed easier. I got into a mindset of wondering if this whole process is worth it if the proposal doesn’t get funded in the end. It took a while for me to shift my mindset to a point remembering that the “best proposal” is a “finished proposal” and that I just need to get it ready for submission without too much over-obsession with the eventual outcome. There is still some ‘cleaning’ work to be done to get the proposal ready in time for submission next week….the countdown is really kicking in!

At end of Week 3, many of the goals set from last week have not been achieved: I haven’t managed to address all the feedback received, the GANTT chart is still not done. Shout out to Emmanuel Sabla for making the first draft of the case study map which we are now refining, and to my colleague Maarten Jacobs for thinking along closely with in restructuring sections of the proposal. I did manage to kill a number of my darlings through the painful editing process in order to bring the word count down. I am still about 10% over the word limit but I will get to within the word limit ultimately.

Goals for Week 1: There is only 1 goal for next week: do all it takes to submit the proposal on time – i.e. before 14.00 CET on Thursday 9 April. How hard can this be?

The adventure continues…see you next week Friday for the next instalment of the #NWOVididiaries blog post.