Category Archives: Strategy

Well, my month of exercising and writing my dissertation 5 days a week is up–in fact, I finished on September 13.

In the sense that I dissertated for 42 hours in a month, the experiment was a success. Even though I knew it was an arbitrary goal, I held on to a sense of urgency and convinced myself that it was important to finish at all costs.

But that sense of urgency wasn’t always my friend. There were three weekdays that I did not work–and not because I was lazy or unmotivated. They were days when I had a lot of time-sensitive work to do for my part-time job. And once I missed a day, it was very hard for me to make it up. I was truly working as hard as I could. During the second, third, and fourth weekends of the month, I had an underlying sense of stress because I knew I had days to make up, but I wasn’t able to alleviate any of it until the very end of my experiment.

Was it worth it? I don’t think so. I worked hard all month–I deserved peaceful weekends. Instead, the dissertating I did on the weekends felt like a punishment.

Also, remember how I judged myself on hours spent? That was a bad idea too. I was acutely aware, every day, of the minutes ticking by–I practically jumped out of my chair at the two-hour mark.

Joan Bolker, as usual, is right about everything. It’s far better to have a goal for the day, and reward yourself for completing it instead of punishing yourself for not completing it. The risk of setting a goal for the day is that it will take too long or too short of time to constitute a good day’s work, and for me, it is harder to figure out a reasonable goal during the revision process. Still, the task-related goal gives a better sense of purpose than the time-logged one.

I want to keep the consistency that I developed over the month. So I’ve decided to try a reward-based system. If I work five days a week, I get to buy a new-old romance novel from the used book store. I think this is brilliant for a few reasons:

1. It facilitates happy, relaxed weekends.
2. My reward is not expensive–only a few dollars per week.
3. I am not in the habit of buying pleasure-reading books for myself, so I don’t think it will be difficult for me to refrain from buying books when  I haven’t met my goal.
4. I can gloat over the fact that I haven’t become snotty about books just because I’m about to be a doctor of literature.

On the flip side, if I don’t meet my goal, it won’t have an effect on the next week of work. I can still take the weekend to recuperate and start all over on Monday. The “you’ve been bad, and now you have to be extra good to make up for it” philosophy doesn’t work in child rearing, dieting, dog-training, or dissertating.

As a kid, I was kind of a quote-hound. As a cynical academic, I can kind of see how an inspiring quote has only a very limited ability to change one’s life. Also, I tend to quote things like, “it jarred my slats” from L.M. Montgomery’s  Jane of Lantern Hill that I find amusing but mystify the people I’m talking to.

Anyway, I cracked open the September issue of Real Simple this morning and saw a quote that seemed pertinent to my dissertation this morning:

Nothing great has been and nothing great can be accomplished without passion.–G.W.F. Hegel

Yes, I thought to myself. I need to get some passion going. Then I did a double-take and flipped back to another quote a few pages earlier:

One of the symptoms of approaching nervous breakdowns is the belief that one’s work is terribly important. If I were a medical man, I should prescribe a holiday to any patient who considered his work important.–Bertrand Russell

There are a lot of contradictory adages out there that have a ring of truth. While some dissertators I know draw a lot of comfort and even strength from a mantra of some sort, it’s good to be adaptable.

For example, when I told the now-Doctor Gale that “There shouldn’t be all this craziness,” she used it as a sort of grounding tool while she was revising her dissertation. I was a little surprised that what I’d said seemed so meaningful to her, but when she repeated it back to me a couple of months ago (I didn’t even recognize it as my own phrase) it seemed like a crucial idea to hold on to. OMG, There really SHOULDN’T be all this craziness. Wow!!!

There’s only a little of summer left, so maybe now is a good time for all of us to assess whether or not we need more passion for our work or more vacation in the next few weeks. I fall into the passion camp at the moment, but I know there’s some of you out there who haven’t let yourselves take enough of a break this summer. There’s still time!

Before I started writing my dissertation, I found that freewrites were about the only way I could accomplish anything tangible. I did a lot of reading and a lot of thinking, and the freewrites allowed me to record my thoughts a couple of times a day (on a good day). I did very little re-reading of this writing–but the act of writing helped keep me moving.

Some people are proponents of the “write without letting your pencil leave the page until the timer rings” freewriting method. I got along better when I had a specific topic (a book I’d just read) and simply tried to type quickly until I ran out of steam — usually around ten minutes. I let myself pause instead of making myself write “I don’t know what to write” because I found that if I wrote continuously, a bunch of complaining would seep into the writing that was actually not emotionally helpful to put on paper.

Once I started researching my specific chapters (instead of the general reading I did at first), I stopped needed freewrites so much–I typed notes about my sources (with any additional dissertation thoughts, related or unrelated, in parentheses). And I typed my chapters. But I didn’t need to do the free-form, no-planned-direction type of writing for a least a couple of years.

All the sudden, with a complete draft of my dissertation done, I find myself turning to freewriting again at the advice of my Dissertation Support Group. And I’m reminded that freewrites can be good for getting unstuck any time. At the very least, some writing is happening.

I never want to freewrite–I always want to do the “actual” writing that other people will see as part of the dissertation document. But even at this late stage, sometimes I really don’t see another way to get the project moving.

Both of my brother-in-laws, who work in the restaurant industry, are happy to work seven days a week. Imagining chopping vegetables for eight hours straight and then having to cover someone on my day off is downright appalling to me. But they are both of the opinion that a weekend (or other two-day break) breaks up their routine in a bad way. Another way of putting this is that Mondays are terrible precisely because you’ve had time off. You’re not used to working, and now you have to get used to it, and fast.

I really believe that working five days a week is best for me. But there are other ways of working it out–writing six or seven days a week, writing every other day, two days on/one day off . . . it’s worth experimenting, especially at the beginning of the dissertation writing process to find out what patterns keep you in your groove.

Another advantage of experimenting with your work habits is that you will confident that you’ve chosen the best process for you, which can be comforting when you discover other people’s habits. I usually have a reaction like “how could you possibly work that much?” and people tend to react to me like, “it’s amazing how you’re able to make so much time for things besides work!” As far as I can tell, there’s usually a bit of jealousy on both sides. But what other people do is not important. It’s only important that you aren’t ignorant of your own best practices.