2013 Summer Dissertation Boot Camp Days 4 - 6

At the mid-point of boot camp, we're all tired, but still writing. What keeps us going? The three most critical discoveries we made:

Learn the discipline of taking breaks. Ninety-minute blocks of writing with breaks in between really gets our writing moving. We get tired, but can sustain writing over a day or more because we use the discipline of taking a break. When we first begin, we feel fresh, and when break time comes around, we might be inclined to not stop writing. But in the long run, this is unproductive as we will get tired and lose energy. The discipline of taking breaks ensures that we rejuvenate and re-energize constantly and, so, can keep writing for longer.

Pay attention to your body. We live so much in our heads we forget how important the body is to supporting the energy we need for intellectual processes. Many of us discovered that taking a walk, doing some stretching, and most importantly, breathing, help keep us energized and alert for writing. When writing, we often sit still in the same position - just fingers moving. Breathing slows down. Our brains get less oxygen. Our muscles become stiff and tight. So, as above, the disciplin of breaks helps. Breaks ensure our bodies at least get to unfurl and our lungs get to expand.

Find a place where the dissertation is the only thing.  Find a space that works for us. This may not be our beautifully set up space at home because that space might come with distractions. A space where we can minimize distractions is key. This might be a coffee shop, the library, an empty office at our workplace (that is not our own workspace with work distractions around us). The important thing is to find a space in which only our dissertations exist for the time we dedicate to writing.

2013 Summer Dissertation Boot Camp - Day 3

Day 3. We're still writing .... still motivated

Staying Motivated Through the Process - Find Your Academic Community

An interesting point that came up in the session Kim Perkins led this morning on staying motivated through the dissertation writing process.

• COMMUNITY is important. Who do we connect with to build conversations about our work? Who are the scholars beyond our university we can begin talking to? Many different stories emerged from this discussion. Some of us have had positive responses when we reached out, while others met indifference, even hostility. Academia is a very strange place.
  
  But the bottom line is that connecting with other scholars is important. It builds our identity and presence as scholars. It creates networks for collaboration and resources. Nothing is so motivating to the writing process as feeling that this dissertation is just one part of a holistic existence as a scholar. Too often, the dissertation is something that seems to "interrupt" life - we want to get it done, get past it, leave it behind. And as a project that's true; we must complete it so we can move on to other things. But, the dissertation is also our scholarly creative output, an articulation of our curiosities and explorations. It's part of our expression of who we are. And connecting with others who might share our interests helps make this more real. 

Writing Goals

This afternoon's reflection session was about writing goals - an idea that is emotionally burdened.

• If I set a goal and then I don't hit it, I feel I failed.
• I never know if I am going to meet my goals
• I am the worst goal writer ever
• It's such a problem writing goals
• It bothers me  ... once it is written, it has to get done.

Setting goals, and hitting them ... sounds like target practice. If we don't "hit the mark", we're just not good shots. And then, we feel bad or guilty or ineffective. This is not a healthy way to work on anything, much less a dissertation.

Here are some alternative ways to think about goals.

Moving toward a horizon. (thanks to James Griffith). This takes the big picture perspective. We set an intention and a direction; there is a place on the horizon you're heading toward. This could be a whole chapter, or a section. And then, rather than set goals based on specific tasks, we just work to get there. So, smaller goals each day or hour do not really matter (although I suppose you can set those too), as long as you're moving in the general direction of your destination.

This might work well for those of us who have trouble setting accurate or realistic goals (we set them big and feel disappointed or too small and then it feels pointless). It also would work quite well when our work is still shaping itself and we have to work emergently, completing one thing in order to discover what the next task should be.

Be careful with this analogy though. If you constantly look at the horizon it can get frustrating. The horizon seems to forever recede as you move. Or, things on the horizon seem a lot closer than they actually are, and we feel that we're travelling and travelling but not getting there. It's important to be mindful that once we set our destination, discipline must kick in. We must just focus on the task at hand, where we are at each moment. Take stock at the end of the writing time, rather than constantly look up and out to the horizon; "that way madness lies".

Track milestones rather than hit targets. Extending from the idea of heading toward a destination, we can log our progress. What are the milestones we hope to reach each day or week? And then, keep a log of our progress. Sometimes we pass a milestone and move further than we thought we might. Other times, we don't travel so far, but we keep track of where we got to. And sometimes, we might have to make a detour, but, again, we keep track of where we went, and re-calibrate so that we're still heading toward that destination.

The focus in this kind of process is to make a list of what you did - like a travel log of progress. This can be highly motivating as well as clarifying. Instead of focusing on what we did not achieve, we acknowledge and make concrete/visible what we did do; this is highly motivating. And in logging what we did, we clarify what we need to do next. This can actually speed up your process.

Goal setting as self-discovery rather than task challenge. Change how you think about goals. Rather than see goals as challenges and targets you must meet and measure yourself against, think of them as a way to discover how you work best. So set goals, and then at the end of your writing period, look at them - with a curious, reflective mind. What kind of goals do you tend to be able to actually meet? What kind of goals do you tend to miss? Over time, you will find patterns that will help you adjust and improve the way you approach planning any kind of work.

2013 Summer Dissertation Boot Camp - Day 2

TAKING BREAKS

Today's question was about our practice of being made to take breaks. We write in 90 minute blocks and ask everyone to take a 30 minute break in between. No whips to enforce this "rule" - some people take the full 30 minutes, others cut it short, some continue to write and take just 15 minutes of break.

Breaks are good in a number of ways.

1. The discipline of taking breaks allows us to sustain a longer energy arc for writing. Rather then push for a few hours and get diminishing returns as our energy ebbs away, breaks allow us to renew and re-energize BEFORE we lose steam. The result - we are able to focus better for longer, which motivates us to write. Putting this into practice in real life, outside of boot camp, we will find that it's easier to write through the week, without getting discouraged.
2. The discipline of taking breaks is practice for sustaining writing in the midst of the other rhythms of life. For many of us, writing is going to be an important part of life. What will happen is that we will be interrupted and must stop writing, or we find opportunities in between things to write. The discipline of taking breaks helps us build the ability to switch our mental focus into and out of our writing efficiently.
3. Taking a break after about 90 minutes of writing allows us to mentally review and re-focus, so that we get some perspective on what we have just written. We can return to our writing with a clearer sense of how to move it along.
4. Taking breaks between chunks of writing helps us ensure we have a writing product at the end of the day. Sometimes we get drawn into revision and editing, or doing more research etc. The breaks give us a chance to disrupt these distractions; we can reflect and notice what we've been doing, take stock, and decide to cease and desist, and to move on. In the next writing block, we might, then, be more productive.

REVISE ... EDIT ... OR WRITE

This was a theme during reflections time. Quite a few of us took time to edit and revise work rather than produce new writing. Is this a good thing? 

Well, the answer, of course, is .... "it depends". 

But on the whole, the idea is to aim for forward movement. Write first, revise and edit later, outside of the writing sessions. The aim in a writing session is to create, to generate writing. This takes discipline. It is more satisfying to improve what exists. But this can be an insidious distraction from writing. Is our constant desire to revise and edit a way of avoiding writing?

Here are some good practices for developing the discipline of writing first. 

SET PRODUCT BASED GOALS. Set "product" oriented goals like a number of words or pages to aim for. Use the words "create", "generate", "produce" in setting goals. A goal like "Work on Chapter 2" allows you to revise what you've already written in chapter 2. Better to set goals like "Add 3 more pages to chapter 2", "Finish argument on paradigm shift, begin section 3 on theoretical framework". 

DO NOT EDIT. By editing, we mean going over your writing to proofread and fix grammatical and style issues. Really, leave this kind of work for non-writing time. During writing time, build the discipline to write. 

But what if our perfectionist tendencies are pushing us to edit? Someone I know appeases her perfectionist side by dedicating a specific time each week to editing. So every Friday, she knows she can look forward to the pleasure of sitting down with what she's written that week, and going over it to dot her "i"s and cross her "t"s. This also motivates her to produce something each week before Friday - just so she can have the pleasure of editing.

REVISE ONLY IF GOING BACK WILL MOVE YOU FORWARD. This takes discipline. If revising something just improves it, but you can write the next section whether or not you revise this section - DO NOT REVISE. Resist all your instincts to improve this section; leave it alone, move on to write the next section. If necessary, make a few notes on what to revise and ... move on! 

2013 Summer Dissertation Boot Camp - Day 1

Building Strategies as a Community
After breakfast, we began the process of building a set of shared experiences and strategies for writing.
On large sheets of paper, we listed:

• Challenges we faced in moving our dissertations ahead
• Strategies we use to keep ourselves working and motivated
• Best ever writing tips we've used or heard about

While it was not really surprising to discover that many of us shared similar challenges, it was nevertheless comforting to know this. We are, each of us, on unique journeys in this dissertation process and yet, the general shape of balancing work, life, and dissertating is similar. So are our uncertainties, and the habits that prevent us from moving ahead as fast as we'd like to.

The best ever writing tips list was, again, no surprise. Although, reading your writing to your dog was an unexpected tip! But if it works ....

This list of really good tips made me realize that we all do know so much about what we should be doing. But, it's that word - "SHOULD." Our aim this week is to turn that into CAN. What can we do to keep writing and keep motivated to write? How do we transform these great tips into our personal writing habits?

Reflections session at the end of Day 1

A good day of writing. We celebrate ...
... writing twice as much as set in a goal
         ......feeling energized to write

Grove House is a beautiful, open, expansive space in which to write. Physical spaces might be more important than we think. We often write  in the midst of the many other things we do. Our work spaces might be cluttered with other work. Here, there is dedicated space and time for writing our dissertation. Does clearing the physical space for writing also, in some way, clear a mental, emotional space for writing?

Challenge: A couple of people spoke about the challenge of distracting oneself from actually writing because of a sense of anxiety or fear of writing.

Some ideas that were shared in the group made me think about this some more. What one person said resonated with me. Our dissertations, at CGU at least, are less directed by our professors' interests. Our dissertations represent ideas very close to us, our interests, curiosities, and questions. So, emotional stakes are high. Will my idea work? What if this idea is a lame one? Will people fall about laughing ... or worse still, make polite noises, when I share my ideas? So what looks like distractions and difficulties in getting started could really be outcomes of an anxiety about our work.

Another kind of anxiety .... Katya recalled that at the last boot camp, someone spoke about being afraid to finish (she has since finished, and graduated this May!) We live with this project for so long that it becomes the thing we do; it is who we are. Finishing means finding something else that occupies us and defines us - and that is a scary thought.

Would recognizing and naming what makes us anxious or fearful help us move through/past it and write?

We also spoke about the importance of community, whether that is telling someone else about your work, or finding a group to meet and write with. The important thing is to put this work outside of our inner emotional life - in a semi-public space of a writing group. Even though you are not sharing your writing by having others read it, you are participating in a writing process. And then, there is the commitment and accountability a group process gives us that really helps move the work along.