On Target with WR Time Tracker

I accomplished my writing goals for today. I was able to put in 5 hours of work on my dissertation. This allowed me to write about 4 pages of material, which is the most progress that I've made in several weeks.

I used WR Time Tracker, a free web-based project management application, to keep track of my progress through the day. You can have as many activities pertaining to your dissertation as you like and keep track of how much time you spend on those activities. A very nice feature is that it gives you a pie chart so you have a visual representation of how much time you spend on each activity (see screen shot to the left).

In addition, I detailed a proposed outline for finishing this section of my literature review. Here it is:

(1) Fukuyama review
(2) Define apocalypticism (2 branches)
(3) Pervasiveness of both branches
(4) Apocalyptic terror brings these branches together (first time in modern history to face this kind of threat - Kurth)
(5) Summary of sub-section
(6) Summary of section

Actually, I finished the Fukuyama review today. May goals for tomorrow are:

1) on hour of writing before work tomorrow. This means I'm up at 4:00 am.
2) in that our I will define the two branches of apocalypticism
3) tomorrow evening, I will spend on hour revising and planning my writing for the following day.

Recommitting to the Process

I really do want to finish my dissertation, but I've made little progress in the past month. So, I have to change things up. Today, I signed up for The Secrets of Dissertation Success coaching site. It has valuable practical helps in various media forms and 2 email coaching sessions per month for a relatively low cost. Follow this link to find more.

Step two: I revised by time line as follows:

9-May	Graduation!!!
1-Apr	Revisions complete
15-Mar	Final Defense
1-Mar	Chapter 5 finished
1-Jan	Chapter 4 finished
1-Nov	Proposal Defended and Accepted
25-Sep	Chapter 3 finished
25-Jul	Chapter 2 finished
25-May	Recommit to process

Step 3: I have to make promises to myself that I can deliver on. I think I really need to invest 20 hours a week to meet the schedule above. So, that means 2 hours a day Monday through Friday and 10 hours over the weekend. I am going to try this, quick track of the time I am spending, and revise as necessary. I plan to write at least 1 hour before I go to work and I'll use an hour in the evening for reading and preparing my writing session for the next day.

Step 4: I'll journal my daily promises here and to monitor if I am keeping them.

True Confessions

Since my last major post entitled If You Keep Doing What You've Been Doing, You Will Keep Getting What You Have Been Getting, I haven't been following my own advice.

I started out well writing 200 words and rewarding myself. However, gradually, I drifted back into old habits and making little progress. You might say, I started doing what I had been doing and I got the same results that I had been getting. What went wrong?

1) My environment changed - slowly. Since January, may work load at work has gradually increased, and more recently, dramatically increased. I did not read the changes in my environment and make appropriate adjustments in my commitments to the dissertation process. Consequently, in order to deal with the increasing pressure at work - I allowed myself to drift back in to my old unproductive habits.

2) I did not regularly review my commitments i.e. writing 200 words and rewarding myself and writing in the mornings before work.

What do I plan to do about it?

1) recommit myself to my commitments and attempt to stay attentive to how to adopt them to my environment. I intend to start writing 200 words with a reward and writing again in the morning. However, I may need to adjust my morning writing to burst of a few days or 1 week. It is difficult, for me, to sustain weeks of getting up at 3:00 am to write.

2) Make a small change. I often find Nancy Wichard's blog Successful Writing Tips helpful in jump starting my writing process. In her post Three Quick Fixes to Jolt You into Action on Your Dissertation (see RSS feed in left column), she proposes putting a short cut on your desktop for your dissertation so it is only one click away. Well, I cleaned up my desktop so there are only 8 icons on my desktop (including my dissertation). Then I gave my dissertation a distinctive green arrow icon. The green arrow icon makes the dissertation easy to identify and the image, for me, symbolizes forward action - get going!

Points to Ponder
Has your environment been slowly or rapidly changing around you and causing you to drop your dissertation as you, perhaps unconsciously, attempt to navigate the changes? What do you need to do to adjust your commitment to your dissertation to your changing environment?

If You Keep Doing What You've Been Doing, You'll Keep Getting what You've Been Getting

It's been a long time since I made a post to this blog. That's because I've really been struggling with this dissertation. Even though I've been making steady progress, it has been extremely slow progress. So slow in fact, that it appears almost impossible that I will reach my goal of graduating in May.

In coaching teams, I have often use the phrase that titles this blog entry: If you keep doing what you've been doing, you'll keep getting what you've been getting. It is truly insane to think that if you are not happy with the results you are getting in a certain project that you can get different results by continuing to do what you've been doing - or worse yet - by doing more of what you've been doing!

So, over the course of the past month I've been trying to change the way I do things in regard to this dissertation project. So, what did I change?

Well, I know that my mind is quicker and fresher in the morning, but I've been working on my dissertation in the evenings after work when I'm already spent. So, I changed the time I work on my dissertation. I get up two hours earlier in the morning and work on my dissertation before I go to work. The advantage is that by time I go to work, I know I've already made progress on the dissertation and that feels very good! I also go to bed two hours earlier in the evening.

However, it has not been enough. Even though, I was putting the time in first thing in the morning, which for me was a major step in the right direction - progress was still slow. Thankfully, yesterday I read one of the RSS feeds on this blog, What to do if you are not making the progress that you want. This article talks about setting reasonable goals and rewarding yourself for making those goals.

So, yesterday, I set the goal of writing at least 200 words daily - 6 days a week. This may not sound like much but the cumulative effect is astounding. If you calculate that 200 words is about 1 double spaced page of typed text then in about 6 months you have a 200 page dissertation, which is about the page range I expect for my work. Of course, this assumes everything you write is usable, which I am not naive enough to think that! However, if you look at it over the course of a year, writing 200 words 6 days a week, would give you double the amount of material you need for a 200 page dissertation. So, in that scenario you only need a 50% usability rate!

I tried it yesterday, and I felt like a made more progress in that one day, than I had in the past week. Of course, I wrote more than 200 words. However, I rewarded myself after the 200 the first two hundred words with a break to play my baroque recorder. After the second set of 200, I rewarded myself by doing some personal internet browsing.

I just finished my first 200 words for today, and my reward is spending some time posting to this blog - which I wanted to do for some time, but felt guilty for taking the time away from the dissertation that I was not making much progress on.

Feel like your not making progress? Read some of the RSS feeds on this page for some ideas on things you can change about how you are approaching the process. Ask yourself what can I change today? Then just do it - and keep changing as often as necessary!

Stay on Target with Activity Tracker

Today I started using a new Google Gadget to boost my productivity in my writing process. One productivity activity that I sometimes use is alternating between activities every 15 - 20 minutes. This is good if you are bored or stuck. Using Activity Tracker I set up several sections of my dissertation as activities. I also included 3 non-dissertation activities that I needed to work on today. I set up Activity Tracker to prompt me every 15 minutes to change activities. You can choose different time levels and different languages and voices you would like for your your prompt. In addition to this, Activity Tracker tracks how much time you spend on each task. You can view your results on a graph, print your results, or export them to an Excel file.

Here's the office description from the Activity Tracker site: Track all your daily activity and find how you spend your time with this cool little punchclock gadget. Print cool graph and get a log or timesheet of all your activities. Punch-in when you start and punch-out when done. Let the gadget alert you when you forget to punchin or punchout. Use it - for improving productivity, as a recorder, as stopwatch, to jot down all tasks, for project management, for time management, as a counter, timer,simple tracker, to track todo list, to simply track your progress, to find time spent in meeting and appointments, as a graphing tool. Be productive and effective with this gadget. Perfect for anyone - student, consultant, employee, employer.

Download Activity Tracker for your Google homepage

Getting at Ricoeur's Interpretation Theory with MindManager

I've not written a post lately. However, that is not to say that I have not been working. I have been reading through Ricoeur's book Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning. It is an excellent, but complex, explanation of his theory of interpretation.
To help me truly understand this theory, I've been using MindManager Pro 7, a mind mapping software to help me outline his arguments, keep track of all its internal references, and record my reflections as I learn.

My base map for the book is pictured above. Of course, each of these branches expand to show an unlimited amount of information. For another example, of what can be done in MindManger, see my post of 9/30/2007. The illustration of Ricoeur's Hermeneutic Arc was created in this program.

The real beauty of the program is the multiple ways you can illustrate relationships between topics/concepts. It's my favorite productivity tool. I've been using MindManager since 2002. If you writing a dissertation, want to better manage your projects at work, or even plan your next vacation, I highly recommend that you download the free trial and give it a try.

Get the books!!

I've spent months trying to learn Ricoeur through reading collections of his essays. These collections are fine, but its difficult to pull together the "big picture" of Ricoeur's thinking through reading lots of individual essays - even though the essays are grouped by subject. The advantage has been that I've gotten a pretty good overview of the breadth of his work and its been a good introduction to his concepts, how he uses language, and his style in writing and approaching philosophical problems. The downside is that one misses any complete systematic working out of his major themes.

Currently, I'm struggling to get my mind around his Interpretation Theory. So, I finally bought his book on the subject, and his three volume work Time and Narrative along with Oneself as Another, and The Rule of Metaphor. I've just started to delve into these books this evening and I'm already glad I got them.

For example, in just reading the introduction to Interpretation Theory, I learned that the central aim of the theory is to resolve the apparent conflict between explanation and understanding. Ricoeur does this by first establishing the nature of language as discourse. Then he establishes that only written language fully displays the criteria of discourse. In a third step, he extends plurivocity beyond words and sentences to full works of discourse. The fourth step shows how the conflict between explanation and understand can be overcome by showing how they are dialectically related to each other. Here the term dialectic, I believe, is intended in the Hegelian sense referring to a process of change in which a concept or its realization passes over into and is preserved and fulfilled by its opposite (Merriam-Webster 11th ed.).

The moral of the story: When learning Ricoeur, reading the essay collections is helpful, but don't wait too long to get to the books.

How I Regrouped and Re-Started the Writing Even When Life Encroached

Sep 22nd, 2007 by Nancy Whichard

I’ve been on a trip, away from my writing projects and away from other job-related commitments. It’s hard to come back.

I enjoy writing my blog. I also have another writing project that is new and important to me, but re-starting takes effort.

Coming back to most writing tasks requires more of us than just doing it.

1) It takes self-awareness.
I needed to give myself permission to feel whatever it was that was getting in my way.

2) I am free to choose.
I had quite a bit of work piled up from all corners of my work life, and some of it was stressful—the kind of piddly stuff that clutters my brain and annoys me. But in my absence, the piddly stuff had grown to a nose-high level. I could groan and moan and continue to push through that work, becoming increasingly cranky, or I could give myself permission to choose.

3) Take a moment.
I needed to give myself a moment to settle in and regroup. I needed to sit quietly.

4) Write whatever comes into your mind.
Usually ideas come to me as I write, and I need to write in order to remember this. I am often surprised as I start to write that ideas actually start coming to me, just as they usually do. I tell my clients to trust themselves. Likewise, I need to trust myself. And take a moment. And remember that I am free to choose.

See this and other similar tips at Successful Writing Tips

Getting Things Done in Academica

Check out this excellent website created by Dr. Mike Kaspari . This blog is dedicated to exploring the strategies and tactics of the academic life.

Dr Kaspari is Director of the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Oklahoma. When he is not teaching, he studies the evolutionary ecology of ants and the brown food web.

You will find the link to this site in my blog roll Dissertation Help Online in the left column on this page.

Trusting the Process

Today I worked about 4 hours on my dissertation and wrote about 2 pages. I'm please with that progress, but progress is feeling mighty slow right now! I had hoped to finish the first chapter by tomorrow but I'm far from done.

As I was reflecting on this situation this evening, I remembered the words of Dr. Mike Hartsfield, who was the Program Director of my PhD program when I started in 2003. In reference to becoming a doctor and being discouraged by one's perceived progress he said, "You've got to trust the process." I've always taken that to mean, if you keep working hard and doing what you need to do you can trust that through that process you will eventually become a doctor.

So, in the face of this slow going, I have to just keep working hard (and try to work smart) and keep doing what I know I need to do. As I trust that process, the dissertation will get done.

A little of this and a little of that - and a great little tip

Tonight I cleaned up the new database so that it works more efficiently. I imported a number of books from WorldCat into my Endnotes dissertation library.

Here's a great tip I learned from my boss and fellow doctoral student. You can search for a book in WorldCat and import the citation directly to Endnotes. This saves a lot of time if you have a several books you want to enter into your Endnotes library.

I also requested a book chapter from Regent Library.

Last but not least, I read Du Rand's article: An Apocalyptic Text, Different Contexts and an Applicable Ethos.

Reference

Du Rand, J. A. (1992). An apocalyptic text, different contexts and an applicable ethos. Journal of Theology for Southern Africa no 78 Mr 1992, 75-83.

Focus on Efficiency, Not Perfection

Source: Complete Your Dissertation

by Dr. Rachna D. Jain

If you're stuck at any point in the dissertation process, borrow my phrase: "focus on efficiency, not perfection." What this means is that you find the fastest way to get out of the quagmire and moving ahead on the path. This will mean different things to different people, but the focus needs to be on finding an efficient and effective way to move ahead, even when it's not perfect.

For example: let's say that you've been working on a particular chapter, writing it, rewriting it, re-rewriting it. You are using a lot of energy and making a lot of effort, but, somehow, it's just not quite right (yet.) So you have to ask yourself, do I need to be efficient? or do I need to be perfect? (Answer: you need to be efficient.) This means, you then ask yourself: how can I wrap this up as quickly and painlessly as possible? What is the most efficient method to get through this material and on to something else?

Just the act of asking yourself this question may free you up enough to finish whatever you've been working on. But, even if it doesn't, just complete what you can, and then do the next thing and so on. The dissertation writing is sometimes an iterative process, where you write some, then write on something else, then come back to the first concept and write some more. Allow yourself to have that iteration time, by focusing on being efficient, first, and drafting as much as you can- and then polishing/refining your writing later.

If you're feeling frustrated or stuck, it's time to go for efficient completion of this stage, and forget about getting it perfect.