Finish Your Dissertation: My Two Favorite Tools

When I was writing my dissertation, I stumbled upon two tools that proved invaluable in helping me finish my dissertation. I want to share them with you today.

In brief, they are the:

• Time Diary

• Memo to Self

The Time Diary

There used to be a beautiful, old-fashioned stationery store in Harvard Square, and I would wander around in there and occasionally buy myself treats (who doesn’t love a good office supply store?). One day, I bought myself a hardbacked journal, with thick, cream-colored pages and a map of the world on the cover. It seemed too special to use as a regular notebook so, later that day, when I was working in the library, I pulled it out and I happened to try something new. I wrote “Time Diary” at the top of the first page, then that day’s date on the line below. Under the date, I wrote the current time on the lefthand side and the task I was about to begin on the right. Once I had recorded the start time and the task I was working on, my deal with myself was that I had to keep working on that task, or else close out the entry with an end time. Eventually, when I was finished with the task, or ready for a break, I’d note the end time and move on with my day.

I found that this simple ritual was a really powerful way to keep myself on task. Just writing down what I was supposed to be working on, and having logged in my start time, I was reluctant to get off-task. It was almost like keeping a punch card and “clocking in” to a certain job—I would think twice about clicking over to check my email or doing anything else that would force me to have to log an end time. Each entry looked something like this:

                                                            Time Diary

Saturday, August 10, 2024

Start 1:28 pm – 2:13 pm                                 Edit piece for M

Start 2:37 pm – 4:30 pm                                 Draft new blogs

Start 7:30 pm – 8:30 pm                                 Watch class on time management

As you can see, it’s really simple. There’s no need to add up the number of hours or minutes spent on a particular task (unless you want to), and you can log entries at any time—i.e., you don’t have to wait for an “even” minute to start or end a task, and it’s fine if a bunch of time lapses between one task and the next – just write down whatever time it actually is when you start and end working on something related to your dissertation.

Looking back over your day, you have a record of how you spent your time. Over time, you can see where your time goes—what you are working on, and if you’re privileging certain kinds of work (e.g., work that is “due” or expected by other people, perhaps) or projects over others.

Keeping a time diary keeps you accountable to yourself—in more ways than one.

The Memo to Self

There was a time in my graduate-student life when I had completed all of the prep work necessary for my dissertation—the research, the proposal, the decisions around what measures I would use and the gathering of all the required materials, etc., but I was waiting for the Institutional Review Board to give me their approval to actually collect data on real, human subjects, and I couldn’t actually start my study until I got that.

At first, I wasn’t really sure what I should work on, but I came up with this idea of writing a daily memo to myself. The memos were always about my dissertation topic in some way, but I varied their specific focus from day to day. The main thing that was helpful about doing the memos was less WHAT they were about than the fact that they got me writing on my topic, every day, in a very low-stakes, no-stress situation. I composed the memos exactly as I am writing here in this blog—in simple, no-frills language that was direct and to the point. I didn’t worry about how smart I sounded because I was only writing to myself. I didn’t agonize over word choice or spend 20 minutes editing one sentence, as I was wont to do with any writing that my faculty committee would see—I just wrote. One memo, every day.

When it came to choosing a topic for each memo, I tried to think about what would be useful to me in the future. There were some strands of literature that I knew I’d ultimately write about in my dissertation, so I’d spend the day reviewing those articles and writing them up, finding connections among them, pulling out particularly relevant points. I knew I’d have to summarize all of my measures in my Methods section, so I did that too. Basically, anything I could think of that was related to my dissertation topic, I read about it and wrote myself a memo on the topic. As a result, about a year later, after I had collected all of my data (and had forgotten about the existence of these memos—wasn't that a nice surprise!), I was able to populate entire sections of my dissertation by copying and pasting from my memos to create a first draft.

If you are in the throes of completing your dissertation, think about using these two tools: The Time Diary and the Memo to Self. The important thing is to start them—not to do them perfectly. Buy yourself a nice notebook that you’ll enjoy using and start keeping a time diary. Write a memo to yourself with your thoughts on your dissertation, or something you’ve read that you might be able to use. Write it like an email to a friend—the idea is to get your thoughts down, not to phrase them perfectly.

I hope these two tools help you as much as they helped me. Happy writing!

 Photo by Gabrielle Henderson via Unsplash.