Siliceous and Delicious

It’s been an adventurous month. Much learned, but also much exhausted—and I’m looking forward to a time of less job-hunting insanity ahead. There are some more options to explore, but there is also a renewed sense in my mind that I need to focus on the morphospace, and get it done, and move on and get the rest of my thesis done, before I can do anything else.

With that in mind, I gave myself some leisurely time this morning to think about what I want to accomplish this week. I picked a couple of tasks for the morphospace—trawling the literature for Cretaceous diatom occurrences to expand the temporal reach of the data, reading a number of papers and Sofy’s thesis—and also set aside some time to follow up on Laura’s recommendations based on my self-assessment exercise. I also scheduled some time for exercise and, crucially, some time to schedule the next week. This may sound like a joke, but I actually have found this to be one of the more important factors in keeping myself on track—it’s one thing working through the OmniFocus list, reviewing, adding, checking, and selecting tasks for the week ahead, but it’s quite another to make sure that’s not just a one-off event followed by a fall from the horse and several weeks in a ditch.

I was definitely having a hard time buckling down and actually getting to work research-wise, my brain still being fully absorbed in career-thinking mode, so I actually spent a bit of time researching one Laura’s leads, a company called Forrester Research. Although their website was a bit opaque, I found a pretty decent description of what they do elsewhere on the web:

Forrester Research is a market research firm focused on Internet and technology. The company sells reports and research briefs to corporate clients. Company reports cover factors such as market forces, industry trends, and consumer behaviors. The company also provides consulting services and online tools.

I found it somewhat reassuring that at least somebody could explain in a paragraph what the company actually does—which seems to be better than many of the companies I’ve come across recently…