On the reg

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What would a bullet journal look like if you designed it specifically for doing a PhD?In this episode, Inger and Jason crack open a brand-new bullet journal and build one from scratch. 

Jason tries to narrate as we go, but this one is probably a lot more enjoyable on Youtube, where you can see what we are doing... watch it here

They cover the basics — daily logs, monthly spreads, collections, indexing and threading — then start adding tools specifically for researchers.

Along the way they explore concept maps, the “bedraggled daisy” for finding your research niche, reading metadata, supervision notes, tracking academic service and expenses, and creating a master index across years of notebooks.

They also get distracted by AI and learning, supervision calendars, stickers, small dogs, Rococo ladies and the surprisingly important question of whether fleas explain the invention of the lapdog.

Links and things mentioned in this episode:

• The official Bullet Journal website
• Kirsten Luker — Salsa Dancing into the Social Sciences
• Writing Partners / Shut Up & Write
• Isabel’s guide to DOIs
• Zenodo
• Yap: A Short History of Small Dogs
• Latte’s Instagram: @coton_lattemewburn

Got something to add to the mailbag? Email us at [email protected].

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

We’re back! Sort of. Monthly-ish. Regular-ish. With a puppy.

In this episode of On the Reg, Inger introduces Latte Sipping Socialist, her new desk dog and emerging productivity expert. Meanwhile Jason has actually been working and explains how ClickUp has become his work gravity well.

Then we open the mailbag to discuss:

• building a note-taking system when ADHD and object permanence are working against you
• combining bullet journals with Zotero, Obsidian and NotebookLM
• managing complex or collaborative research projects
• Bullet Journal nerdery 
• Typst as a possible plain-text academic writing tool
• cheaper ways to record and edit video
• why Monday is obviously the first day of the week

Our major work problem is the vexed issue of AI in doctoral education.

Should universities restrict generative AI so students still learn the foundational practices of thinking and writing? Or do bans simply drive AI use underground, without guidance or education?

We discuss AI dependency, inconsistent policies, writing as thinking, assessment reform, oral examinations, the future of the dissertation and whether academic writing may become the intellectual equivalent of artisanal stonemasonry.

There are no easy answers. There is, however, a small brown-and-white dog who looks suspiciously AI-generated...

Things we mention:

• Visit Tiny Latte on Instagram @coton_lattemewburn
• Download Jason's notes on Claude integration in Clickup
• Curtis McHale’s website
• Typist website
• OBS: Alternative to Riverside: https://obsproject.com
• Davinci resolve studio 
• Rectangle Window management (for mac and windows): https://rectangleapp.com/
• A system for writing by Dotto
• Rooster TV show on HBO
• The P In PhD doesn't stand for Prompt
• BuJo sticker shop 

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Inger has A Lot Going On At The Moment - and has the tshirt to prove it. Jason's been Getting Things Done, even if his fridge broke. Things have been better in OTR land, but an episode was finally recorded!

There's a lot of chat in this one because the mail bag was, as usual, excellent. 

In the work problems segment Inger plugs the new book she's written with Pat Thomson, Helen Kara and Aimee Grant... While the title is boring and the cover is ugly, she thinks the book is actually great.

Rebecca sent us in a two minute tip and it's great! You'll have to listen to the end to hear it.

Things we mentioned:

• Inger's Taylor Swift coded tshirt
• OTRT home page (to see our new logo)
• QPR conference (we're having a booth!)
• The new book "Managing your research project"
• Indyx App (Inger's wardrobe organisation app)
• Inger's expensive boots
• And her expensive leather jacket comes from Leatheron
• Inger's eBay page
• First edition of How To Fix your Academic Writing Trouble (2nd edition out November this year)
• Hazel for the Mac
• Example of a patched in ChatGPT image on Inger's Instagram
• The Boring Conference
• Sneeze Count paper
• A historian's take on LLMs

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

We're on YouTube! Watch this episode here

Vote on Jason's wardrobe edit here

(If you want to see Jason's beard, Inger's Pinterest boards and the AI video Inger made to demonstrate Jason's fashion style, jump over there and have a look!)

In this episode we discuss Inger's fascination with fashion youtube influencers and what we can learn for planning out the academic / researcher / enterprenerd year.

Things we mentioned

• Inger uses the MiGoals journal in addition to a regular Bullet Journal
• Working 9 to 5 not a way to make an academic living (Inger's most downloaded academic paper)
• Blog post: Thesis Prison
• Book: Tiny Experiments
• Nest Labs article on Note Takers
• App: Obsidian  and how to back up Obsidian using GitHub
• Gazman (for the style challenged young man who needs to update their wardrobe for work)
• Alison Bornstein Internet Personality
• SUK workwear
• Inger's Pinterest Boards
• Claudia Winkelman
• Jason's wardrobe edit questionnaire
• Book: Wear it Well by Alison Bornstein
• Narelle Lemon
• Book: Objective Secure
• Book: Measure what matters
• Book: Building a second brain
• Kane Murdoch Blog
• Shout out to Erin from Good Prose Studios for book editing

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Hey! Jason will be in the UK in Late April. If you'd like to chat to him about the trip and possibly having him visit you, email us on [email protected]

Watch this episode on YouTube

The banter section of this episode is lost to history because Jason forgot to hit record! After a short intro by Inger, the team go straight into the mail bag. Let's face it, this is the good stuff anyway - who needs Tinny and puppy news?

In our work problems segment, we discuss the appearance of ChatGPT as a referrer to the Thesis Whisperer blog and what it might mean for researcher visibility. How does an LLM decide on what is an 'authoritative source' on the internet? Is this a new form of 'research impact' and what should researchers do about it, if anything?

This episode also ends abruptly when Inger gets a phone call - the next episode will be much more polished, we promise!

Things we mentioned:

• Tiago Forte's PARA book
• Blooms Taxonomy
• Amazing Marvin app
• Click up app
• Be visible or vanish book
• The Enshittification of Academic Social Media

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Welcome to the first Youtube video version of the pod! 

Watch it here

Sorry for the sound quality for the first 10 minutes - promise it gets better when we remembered to turn the mics on! The filming/recording took ages, through many interruptions, and bad technical decisions... so much effort in fact, that we are not sure if we will do it again. Let us know if you like it and we might persist!

In this episode we talk about Boredom at work. Inger reads Jason in on the literature and floats her theory that the PhD is an exercise in training boredom tolerance.

Things we mentioned:

• Thesis Whisperer post about boredom in PhD study
• Savers - the thrifting superstore
• An academic affair - new romance book set in Australian Academia by Jodie McAllister
• The Dopamine Brain (book)
• Enshittification (book)
• One Battle After Another
• Tron: Ares
• Soul by Pixar
• Scispace AI

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Jason has been living his best life, travelling NZ (where he did not touch boiling mud, as much as he was tempted to) and having excuses to eat pepper steak pies. Meanwhile Inger has been having a shit time at work and waiting for her puppy to arrive.

After a confession during the mailbag segment, we hear all about Jason's star keynote at the ASPIRE conference, which led to... well, a bit of a rant on Inger's part at least. You get the picture!

Things we mentioned:

• ANU Vice Chancellor resigns
• Jason and Ginger Cat
• Blossom - puppy mum to be
• Rich Academic / Poor Academic
• Little National Hotel Newcastle
• Perplexity AI
• Slides: How to think about AI in the workplace
• AI as thinking partner framework
• AI as verifier framework
• AI as Information Processor Framework
• How I used Claude as a ready-to-hand technology to help me build a Structured Dialogic Thinking Bot
• Inger's structured dialogic inquiry bot (free to use)
• Black Hawk Down
• Free Time by Jenny Blake
• The EMyth
• Breakneck - China's quest to build the future
• AI as normal technology
• The communist takeover of universities is imminent
• The Curated Closet
• ICE menu bar app

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

Inger is in town, so Jason took her to a pod casting studio as a treat for episode 80 (can you believe it?!). The sound is very nice on this one folks, but This is a Studio in Prahran can take ALL the credit.

There's a fair bit in the mailbag, leading to discussions about the book Inger wrote with Narelle (and Claude) Rich Academic / Poor Academic and a little bit of Text Expander and Omnifocus talk (because naturally).

In our work problems segment we talk about Analogue Productivity by Curtis Hale and ask "is this book bullshit?". We conclude it isn't, but Inger tells Jason he doesn't have to read it. 

Stay tuned for more about what we are reading and two two minute tips (for a change). We were on the clock for this episode, but maybe it's a good think because it's pretty tight and chock full of productivity goodness! 

Links to stuff

• In Bed with the Right (podcast)
• Soak bath house Brisbane
• Omnishow episode 144
• Lynne's post on BASB for teaching
• How to: Power Automate
• Old ep: trusting the meat computer
• Monsters: a fan's dilemma by Clare Dederer
• Think Again by Adam Grant
• Hard Fork Podcast and Mechanize
• Tiny Experiments book
• OTR linkedin Page

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

In the depths of Canberra winter, no one can hear you scream about AI... except for Jason, who had to hear ALL of Inger's feelings. 

Come for the promise of a 'Is this Book Bullshit?' style review of 'Tiny Experiments' by Jason, stay for the Big Rant about how Inger's anti-AI academic friends now think she is a Republican... it's a lot.

Things we mention:

• Pop Canberra (for the stickers)
• Fated Mates romance podcast stickers
• Indigenous Knowledge Systems Lab
• OmniFocus
• On The Reg Mind Sweep Bot
• Getting Things Done (book)
• Ben Kraal's OTR episode with Inger
• How to Make Notes and Write (book)
• Literary Theory for Robots (book)
• The Utopia of Rules (book)
• Evelyn Frost books 
• Analogue Productivity (book)
• Rethinking Repair (paper)
• On the reg Structured Dialogical Inquiry Bot
• Tiny Experiments (book)
• Listen Later (app)
• On The Reg on Linkedin

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site

Can't be bothered with email or speak pipe? Text us!

This one's a bit overdue folks - that's Inger's fault, don't blame Jason! 

After a long catch up, where we bemoan the state of the higher education sector, and a very full mailbag, we talk about AI powered research workflows. 

Inger talks Jason through her new AI enabled process for doing literature reviews, analysis and writing research papers. The crew muse on the shift in working practices how you might take advantage (or not) in your own work. 

The team are looking at a teaching slide deck as they talk, which Inger stupidly altered, so you can't read along... (doh!). But you can see the final version of it, as delivered, here. The pre-print version of the paper about AI that Inger wrote can be retrieved here.

Things we mentioned:

• Reading like a Mongrel
• Text expander for academics (ebook)
• Bullet Journal (BuJo)
• Speechify
• The art of procrastination (book)
• Microsoft power automate
• Migoals journals 
• Mind on Paper (book)
• Cabells Analytics (for finding journals)
• Consensus
• Elicit
• Semantic Scholar
• MaxQDA Tailwind
• The importance of being intereresting (blog post)
• Cognition in the Wild (book)
• Patter blog (Home of the Queen: Pat Thomson)
• Johnny Saldana's coding manual
• Tiny Experiments (book)
• Amphetamine (app)

Got thoughts and feel pinions? Want to ask a question? You can email us on

-  Leave us a message on www.speakpipe.com/thesiswhisperer.

-  See our workshop catalogue on www.ontheregteam.com. You can book us via emailing Jason at [email protected]

-  Subscribe to the free, monthly Two Minute Tips newsletter here (scroll down to enter your email address)

- We're on BlueSky as @drjd and @thesiswhisperer (but don't expect to hear back from Jason, he's still mostly on a Socials break).

- Read Inger's stuff on www.thesiswhisperer.com. 

- If you want to support our work, you can sign up to be a 'Riding the Bus' member for just $2 a month, via our On The Reg Ko-Fi site