My office is in a converted attic loft. My roof is being reshingled. Mmmmmm.

But, no excuses not to write, right? I’m sorta working up to some kind of early morning routine, because between parasites and medicine, and not being a particularly early morning person anyway, I haven’t been that keen about leaping out of bed every morning for an hour of writing first thing. But I’m going to start working on it as of next week (because Saturday I’m heading off to a cottage for four days, so of course I should wait until I get back).

So the work schedule for August is going to go something like this: get up and write from 8-9:30. Exercise, eat, and get dinner started from 9:30 to 12ish. Work from 12:30 to 5:30.

I’ve been reviewing the “mindful waiting” and the “starting early” that Boice advocates (I’ve skimmed the book, now I’m starting back at the beginning of the writing section with more detail). One of the things that I think is not well discussed in his book is the relationship between research/data accumulation, prewriting, and writing. I am not sure how much note reviewing, for instance, should happen in “writing sessions” and whether writing a lot of notes during other types of work is likely to count as a brief daily session (BDS) in terms of one’s own relationship with one’s process.

I think I’m going to have to do more writing than he seems to advocate in order to get my research in order. So, I’m going to interpret BDS and one of his other important points (stopping in time) as being a useful way of dividing up extended work periods. That is, my morning session will be focused on prewriting and conceptual outlining, whereas I will break up my afternoon work into different sections where the focus is more on note-reviewing (but of course allowing note writing and editing), and on specific analysis tasks related to my field data (again, potentially with writing, but where the focus is on the data, not on producing prose or even necessarily outlining how the analysis fits into the bigger projects). Probably there will also be some reading at some point.

I’m hoping that by breaking these tasks up, and by focusing on writing for only part of the day, I will avoid burn out and what I am now calling the multiple personality thesis sock puppets (more on those later. Can’t wait, can you?).

Filed under: writing thesis