Some Expert Advice

This week I worked 13 hours on my dissertation. Although, according to Joan Bolker's book Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, which I just re-read, it's better to measure your progress by number of pages written. It says,

If you fix an amount of time...it's possible to spend all or most of that time staring at the wall, and then you've both wasted time and produced nothing....The advantage to the many pages method is that it rewards fast writing....with a goal of five pages, the faster you can do them, the sooner your time is your own; this method rewards learning to write faster, and from what I've seen, fast writing produces no worse results than slow writing does.

She also recommends writing first, before doing anything else in the day.

This all sounds great, except my next few weeks are crowded with various appointments and out-of-town trips. I can't believe it, but I scheduled two trips for the remainder of July: one four days, and the other eight days. Argh. What about my momentum? I'm going to have to bring my computer and some books along and try to be disciplined.

One positive thing to report is that I was able to work every day this past week on my dissertation except today. It felt good. I think that's what Bolker means by her title: it's not the "fifteen minutes" that will get you done, it's the "a day" part—if you work every day, even for a short time, you can build from there.