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.

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.

No Progress Today - Revised timeline

I did not work on my dissertation today, because I had to do some edits for an article that Dail Fields and I co-authored: Exploring Servant Leadership across Cultures: A Study of Followers

in Ghana and the USA . It will appear in the Nov. 2007 issue of Leadership (Sage Publications).

Dail is presenting our paper at the Academy of Management meeting in Philadelphia this week.

Due to my travel schedule at work I had to revise my timeline to complete my proposal. Here's the new one

• August 22 - Chapter 1 finished
• September 7 - Chapter 2 finished
• October 1 - Chapter 3 finished.

60 days to write my Proposal

I have revised my timeline. I want to defend my proposal in October. So, I want to submit it by October 1. That gives me exactly 60 days. Three chapters in 60 days! That's 20 days a chapter. So here are my targets:

• Chapter 1: Aug 22
• Chapter 2: Sep 11
• Chapter 3: Oct 1

I expect each chapter to average 40 pages that equals 120 pages. So, I need to write 2 pages of usable material a day. So, I am going to set myself a goal of writing 4 pages a day, with the expectation that 2 pages of that content will be usable somewhere in the work.

First Steps - Creating a Timeline

One of the first things that I did was to create a timeline. I used a trial version of Microsoft project to do this. Now the trail version is expired and I need to make some changes. So, what to do: buy the student version of Project or do it in Excel or Word?

I was only a few days off my target for finishing the prospectus which turned out to be about 13 pages. I found that having the target date to work toward was very helpful.

Next task is to revise my target dates and produce a new timeline.