Starting Your Dissertation? Rethink Your Lifestyle

By Noelle Sterne, PhD

You’re ready to begin your dissertation, and you deserve congratulations! But realize, though, that your current lifestyle must change.

No Structure

Doctoral students beginning this coveted stage are often shocked at the lack of external structure. No prescheduled class meetings, specific assignments, or grades to goad you on. No classmates to remind you to tackle the next assignment. You’ve got to make your own schedule and follow through.

If you work away from home, you’ve already got some structure. You can easily figure out your dissertation time: evenings, weekends, and an occasional call-in-sick day.

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Why Dissertation Writing is So Hard and How to Master It

It’s undeniable: writing your dissertation is hard. All that time you devote to research is a worthy endeavor but, no matter how many brilliant analyses you’ve collected, at some point you know you’re stalling. In my longtime dissertation coaching and editing practice, I have witnessed, cautioned, and counseled many dissertation writers on the difficulties of the actual writing. A new doctoral candidate who came from the corporate world confided, “I struggle daily with understanding the shift from business and occupational writing to writing as a researcher according to certain expectations and standards.”

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Overcome Stalling and Start Writing Your Dissertation

You’ve reached the first dissertation milestone—approval of your prospectus. Great! You couldn’t wait to plunge into the next step, writing the proposal. But now that you’re here, somehow it’s not working. With all the best intentions and surrounded by all your scholarly materials, you’re spending long fruitless hours in your study or the library. The days are slipping away, your friends are out eating pizza, and your family wonders what you’re really doing for all those solitary hours. You feel paralyzed.

To cheer yourself up, remember that the proposal becomes the first three chapters of the real dissertation. But this fact probably offers little consolation. Your completed proposal seems like a sky-high wall with not even a step stool in sight. Where is that danged first step?

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My Day Off

This piece follows directly from last month’s on taking time off. The author explores why taking a day off is so hard and describes her attempt.

Finally, I decided to take a day off. I work at home and, as anyone knows who does, that means all the time. No boundaries, no borders, no warning bell blaring at 9:00 at night or security guard barking “Closing!” When you quit is dictated only by hunger, exhaustion, or an occasional family emergency.

Ironically, I’ve often published advice to others to stop work and smell the rest of life. And yet, the doctor can’t comply with her own prescription.

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Take A Little Time Off From Writing! Refuting Your ‘Mountain of Reasons’ Why You Don’t

Especially as holidays approach, instead of editing your manuscript, you may be dreaming of sitting on the sofa with your feet up, watching the leaves swirling outside (or your current tv binge). Do you feel on the edge of burnout? Are you sighing, staring into the distance, wishing you could let yourself just stop?

Maybe, like companies that close temporarily for renovation or universities that close for a holiday break, you need to shut down your writing shop for some needed renewal.

In our age of doing, doing (and overdoing), and the pressures, expectations, and inexplicable righteousness to keep doing, it’s hard to think of quitting, much less do it. A mountain of “reasons” loom.

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Want to Finish? Make Your Dissertation Your Priority

As you probably already know, writing a dissertation is different from anything you’ve ever done. This undertaking requires you to adjust, if not radically change, your lifestyle. If you ever really want to complete the dissertation, and in a timely manner (if that isn’t an oxymoron), you need to rethink your priorities.

You may have been used to putting family first (possibly after your full-time job). But rethink this priority. Heartless and psychologically suspect as this statement may sound, you can make it up to your family in many other ways—later (that’s another article). Or you may say “yes” to all kinds of non-school activities. Learn to say “not now” (also another article).

At this point in your graduate school life, you’re supposed to make the dissertation your major priority. In my longtime dissertation coaching of struggling doctoral candidates and dissertation writers, I’ve learned several techniques and related perspectives that will nudge you into making your dissertation a priority.

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