How do you approach a huge pedantic writing project like a thesis or a review paper? Despite reading some self help on the on the subject, I feel completely stuck, overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin each day. If I manage to do some part of the project I do it way too thoroughly and waste time. I don’t seem to have terrible problems with akrasia with other kinds of projects, it’s just that I’ve never done anything this big that requires intense self monitoring from the beginning to the end.
Examples of how you approach different kinds of big projects like programming an application are welcome too.
I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.
For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under “Confession” that said “Tam Lin” probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone else!).
So, when I worked on the book, I wasn’t working on the whole book. I just needed to turn “Confession → Tam Lin” from notation into text.
I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like “Human Flesh Search” “Gov’t Using Collective Score-Settling” etc, and then worked on individual sections.
I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.
I think the other benefit of the “break it down” approach is that you don’t wind up with a blank document thinking “What will I do?” You sit down saying “Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin.” Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.
I do this sort of thing by starting as broadly as possible. Assuming you already have the majority of the information you need (ie, the research phase is more or less over), you should be able to sit for 15 minutes or so and make an albeit disorganised list of broad themes that you want to include in the paper. Concentrate during this phase on making the list, not evaluating what you put on it (some things will turn out to be irrelevant, some will be duplicates or link closely with each other or spark new interesting ideas—but make an effort to ignore all this at this point).
Once you’ve got your list, you can spend some time ordering it (so that closely linked items follow each other), discarding items that turn out not to fit in, and so on. Try and stay broad at this point (though you can jot down elsewhere more detailed points that you might want to make, if they occur to you; and it’s fine to add new items that get sparked). This process should help you figure out what your “narrative arc” might be, what conclusion you’re working towards, and so on. If something seems important but confusing, it might mean you need to do more research for that section.
Now you’ve got an outline that essentially consists of chapter or section headings, and some ideas for what’s going in your introduction and conclusion. Depending on the length of the paper, you might want to do another outlining step in greater detail (listing your points in each section, but still not actually filling out the writing), or you could start writing now. I tend to work on writing the sections that seem easiest first, and then join up the more difficult bits afterwards.
Inevitably, it turns out during this phase that some of the links are weak or disjointed, some of the arguments I originally intended to make are poor, and the conclusion I thought I was heading for is actually not quite where I end up going. So lots of adjustments to the outline take place and the whole thing needs a good rejig at the end. But editing is straightforward enough when you have an already extant text to work on!
That’s the sort of process that works (usually, well enough) for me: I’m sure others do it completely differently. Maybe you can pick out some stuff that seems useful in there, though.
On the akrasia level, I find that the harder the task seems, the more frequent “reward” hits I need for working on it. For me, these hits mainly consist of getting to cross an item off my to-do list. So if I’m really struggling with a paragraph, my to-do list can contain such fine-grained items as “Think about the structure of [paragraph x]”, and “Write a sentence explaining how RelevantAuthor (2012) is relevant here”. Even a poor effort at doing these things gets the item crossed off (though if it still needs re-doing or more work, it will of course get put on again).
How do you approach a huge pedantic writing project like a thesis or a review paper? Despite reading some self help on the on the subject, I feel completely stuck, overwhelmed and don’t know where to begin each day. If I manage to do some part of the project I do it way too thoroughly and waste time. I don’t seem to have terrible problems with akrasia with other kinds of projects, it’s just that I’ve never done anything this big that requires intense self monitoring from the beginning to the end.
Examples of how you approach different kinds of big projects like programming an application are welcome too.
I break the project down into small sections (I hate writing long things, and if I had written my book as a book, rather than as chapters, each divided into ~1k word sections, I would not have written it). So, the first question is how it makes sense to start divvying up.
For the book, I knew what the different chapters would be (Rosary, Divine Office, Examen, etc), so I made a Freemind diagram of all the points/ideas/etc I expected to use in each of those sections. (And that just needed to be enough of a handle for me to remember what I was talking about. Seeing a sub-bullet under “Confession” that said “Tam Lin” probably wouldn’t be much help to anyone else!).
So, when I worked on the book, I wasn’t working on the whole book. I just needed to turn “Confession → Tam Lin” from notation into text.
I did a similar thing with my college thesis, where I started by grabbing references, dumped them all into a doc, moved them around so they were grouped together in categories like “Human Flesh Search” “Gov’t Using Collective Score-Settling” etc, and then worked on individual sections.
I thought of what I was doing as a very small task, just filling in connective tissue between citations and examples. This tends to help me a lot.
I think the other benefit of the “break it down” approach is that you don’t wind up with a blank document thinking “What will I do?” You sit down saying “Ok, today, I need to explain why we should approach Confession in the same spirit as Janet did her rescue of Tam Lin.” Writing and choosing what to write work better for me if they are two separate tasks.
I do this sort of thing by starting as broadly as possible. Assuming you already have the majority of the information you need (ie, the research phase is more or less over), you should be able to sit for 15 minutes or so and make an albeit disorganised list of broad themes that you want to include in the paper. Concentrate during this phase on making the list, not evaluating what you put on it (some things will turn out to be irrelevant, some will be duplicates or link closely with each other or spark new interesting ideas—but make an effort to ignore all this at this point).
Once you’ve got your list, you can spend some time ordering it (so that closely linked items follow each other), discarding items that turn out not to fit in, and so on. Try and stay broad at this point (though you can jot down elsewhere more detailed points that you might want to make, if they occur to you; and it’s fine to add new items that get sparked). This process should help you figure out what your “narrative arc” might be, what conclusion you’re working towards, and so on. If something seems important but confusing, it might mean you need to do more research for that section.
Now you’ve got an outline that essentially consists of chapter or section headings, and some ideas for what’s going in your introduction and conclusion. Depending on the length of the paper, you might want to do another outlining step in greater detail (listing your points in each section, but still not actually filling out the writing), or you could start writing now. I tend to work on writing the sections that seem easiest first, and then join up the more difficult bits afterwards.
Inevitably, it turns out during this phase that some of the links are weak or disjointed, some of the arguments I originally intended to make are poor, and the conclusion I thought I was heading for is actually not quite where I end up going. So lots of adjustments to the outline take place and the whole thing needs a good rejig at the end. But editing is straightforward enough when you have an already extant text to work on!
That’s the sort of process that works (usually, well enough) for me: I’m sure others do it completely differently. Maybe you can pick out some stuff that seems useful in there, though.
On the akrasia level, I find that the harder the task seems, the more frequent “reward” hits I need for working on it. For me, these hits mainly consist of getting to cross an item off my to-do list. So if I’m really struggling with a paragraph, my to-do list can contain such fine-grained items as “Think about the structure of [paragraph x]”, and “Write a sentence explaining how RelevantAuthor (2012) is relevant here”. Even a poor effort at doing these things gets the item crossed off (though if it still needs re-doing or more work, it will of course get put on again).
Have you found any good solutions besides the ones already mentioned?