Thinking a little more deeply about scheduling and managing time for writing my doctoral thesis, as a continuation of my post yesterday about The Clockwork Muse, I am wondering how to also build in the time for reading and doing the research / transcription itself. While there is a great amount of time that is needed for the writing of the thesis, there is also a lot of time that needs to be allocated for the other elements of the research, and I am trying to organize my life for the next year overall.
Let me explain what I am thinking. As per Zerubavel’s suggested writing outline (pg. 76-77), these are the column headings for the time estimates for writing:
| Section | Length (pages) |
Pace (pages per day) |
Time (days) |
Deadline |
I think this is very helpful; as writing is clearly a tremendous time commitment. However, I think that considering writing alone may be a bit decieving for the amount of work involved in the next year or so. Thus, this is how I am thinking about creating a master time commitment list, including both writing as well as the research itself that proceeds and happens throughout the writing:
| Section | Literature (search and read) |
Research (specify) |
Transcription | Length (pages) |
Pace (pages per day) |
Time (days) |
Deadline |
I welcome some thoughts about this . . .
Well, now we’re talking project management! One of my fav subjects!
So thinking outloud here…
Does “search and read” literature and “research” include note-taking/processing/mindmapping time?
For me, searching for articles is very different than reading/processing them. I might be tempted to have another column.
I took the milestones for program and put them in project plan on ManyMoon. However, I have NOT broken down the milestone that equals Ch 1-3. You are inspiring me to do so. 🙂 Thank you!
Christiana, this is quite helpful. I am also quite engaged (professionally) in project management as well, so simply love trying to create a process / container for the process, and appreciate your thoughts. I tend to obsess over process elements, often before I actually “begin” the work itself.
I was including them both together for research, but am thinking about breaking these out a bit more. Will post in a new post for some more feedback.
Thank you for helping to push this a bit, as I struggle to move forward without a process in place.
Jeffrey
I agree with Christiana about reading being different from searching. During my thesis writing I even allocated different moments during workdays for these activities.
Each of us has a different method for writing, I guess. My method includes a lot of re-writing. Being a non-native English speaker, I start off writing rapidly (often in a combination of Dutch and English) and then go through endless cycles of grammar and spell-checking and refining each and every sentence.
So, I would add another column: re-writing.
Great point about this, Antoine. Thank you for sharing it and helping to move this along.
I agree with the re-writing, and as I have never done a long piece of writing such as this before, I am not clear how much re-writing will be needed. Zerubavel speaks about re-writing being part of the writing process, with his concept of “writing” including 4 full versions, with re-writing and writing so linked they are not distinguished much. With this in mind, I tended to lump them together.
I suppose until I actually begin that formal part of the process, I may not know how I work to see if I should separate.
Let me play with this a bit today, and see where the revision leads me . . .
Thanks for pushing my thinking along!
Jeffrey