Yesterday I stayed home and failed to work, so today I went to my office. I was there for about 6 hours, and I got maybe 2 hours of real work done. It's tempting to feel really shitty about that, but I'm trying to have the mindset that something is better than nothing.
I remember the Dissertation Coach commenting that she has clients who avoid work all week, and then finally get motivated by her impending phone call (she has weekly phone meetings with her clients, who report their progress and then work with her to make a new plan for the next week). So they work for only a few hours in total all week, but still they get more done than they otherwise would without the accountability of the scheduled phone calls. Today when I sensed I was straying too much, I called EGM and we agreed to write for 30 minutes and then call back. It worked. Then we did it again. I still ended up reading a bunch of crap on wikipedia, but at the end of the day I had the introduction to my last chapter fleshed out, made the realization that I needed to report some addition results, calculated said results, and made a table to display them. So I could have done a lot more, but it was better than nothing.
6 comments:
Something is definitely better than nothing. I've been trying really hard to at least get something done each day. Sometimes recently I've been feeling anxious and wondering if I'm working enough (whatever that means) but then I try to feel ok with my progress as long as I'm actually getting something accomplished.
I'm glad now that I'm having weekly meetings with my advisor because, just like those phone calls, I've got someone to be accountable to on a regular basis.
I think you got a lot of work done!
I had a lot of trouble at the end of my PhD. I ended up scheduling every minute of my day - down to eating and goofing off - and wearing a timer for about 8 hrs a day. It was very rigid, but I finished in time. Every time my buzzer went off, I felt like I had accomplished something.
i'm trying to adopt that attitude, in hopes that it will spark me to do tiny bits of work when i only have ten or fifteen minutes in between other larger chunks of work. my hope is that those little bits will add up to something in the end.
Karina, savor the weekly meetings! They must be SO helpful.
Nina - I think it looks like more on paper that it actually was.
JP - maybe I'll try that for the next few weeks. I'm really getting down to the wire!
gigirose - consistency seems to be the key. Good luck!
Good for you! I procrastinated like crazy and ended up starting my dissertation three weeks before it needed to be handed in. Then a hurricane struck, which was pretty distracting and I lost power for a couple of days. Talk about kicking yourself in the ass. Luckily I am a good and fast writer, but the experience was way more stressful than it needed to be and I had no one to blame but myself.
Post a Comment