Crunch!

I'm late, I'm late for a very important date.
No time to say hello, good-bye, I'm late, I'm late, I'm late
I'm late and when I wave, I lose the time I save.

- The White Rabbit, from Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll

*******

Obviously I've been a little busy doing the thesis dance, so here's an update.

I've turned in first drafts of two sections to TheBarb. I've got two more sections to go. Barb has been putting a little pressure on me, in a responsible mentor sort of way - not annoyingly so. One date that she refuses to budge on is May 19th, when the thesis absolutely must be in the hands of the second reader, Greg (university policy has two official readers from the thesis committee who pore over the document and sign off on it). That means that Barb absolutely must have gone through my drafts and made her revisions, and I must have the time to complete those revisions before the dissertation goes off to Greg.

Yes, I'm feeling the crunch.

I know I can do this, though. I have to.

I learned some things about thesis writing that I wish I'd known before I started.

1. You don't have to write the thesis in the order that it will be read. I made the mistake of forcing myself to work on the Introduction, and ran into a thick wall of writer's block. Instead of putting that section on the backburner and writing part of another section, I just kept banging my head against the wall. Finally, after talking to some friends, they pretty much told me stop doing that. So I did. And I was able to move ahead. But that cost me at least a week of writing. Maybe two weeks.
2. For me, writing is like exercising. I do okay in the exercise department once I get started, but getting to the gym is the hard part. Same with writing. The momentum will follow if I can just open the document in the word processor. Actually, I already knew this - I just wish that with knowing would come some increase in productivity. Doesn't work that way.
   
3. Clutter is a momentum killer. While staring at the words on the screen, the ever-growing pile of debris behind me was nagging at me to be dealt with. Unsorted mail, bills to be paid, junk mail to be scrapped - I finally took two hours to sort and put everything in its proper place. Not until then did I really pick up the writing pace.
4. Wearing headphones seems to increase writing efficiency. I think its a combination of reducing ambient noise (read: VideoGame Boy's techno party music) and limiting my own movement so my attention isn't so easily taken by household distractions.
5. Figures take a LONG time. I wish I'd thought ahead and estimated how long it would take me to create thesis figures, and then DOUBLE that amount of time. I'm really lagging here.
6. (Yes, an edit. I feel like the cardinals in Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch: "Our *three* weapons are fear, surprise, and ruthless efficiency...and an almost fanatical devotion to the Pope.... Our *four*...no... *Amongst* our weapons.... Amongst our weaponry...are such elements as fear, surprise.... I'll come in again.")
7. I don't write anything before 3 o'clock in the afternoon. I should just do my chores in the morning and then write afterwards. I should have figured this out from when I was studying for the boards. Not sure why, but getting up first thing in the morning trying to cram two years of medical school into my brain just wasn't efficient until later in the day.
   

My sleep cycle is pretty messed up right now. I think it started when I got on a roll and wrote until about 4am one night. Now I'm working until about 6am, getting to bed at 7am, and waking at 3pm. That wasn't so bad until Barb summoned me into her office this morning. So rather than risk missing the meeting, I've decided to stay up. If I can make it until 9pm tonight, maybe I'll get back on track with a more normal schedule.

Here's the latest word count graph:

To my surprise, this thesis could actually turn out to be a rather respectable size (although Barb assured me in the meeting that size doesn't matter. Hunh. I'm sure they all say that. Waitaminute. That didn't come out right...) Anyway, I've only been doing labwork in Barb's lab for two years, and much of that time my experiments didn't work. So I've had a little anxiety about the length of the dissertation, and how thin the final publication will be when I get the document bound at the printer. But, I'm at 6000 words with two more sections to go, plus an entire appendix that will consist of a publication that resulted from work in that other PI's lab. Actually, although I'm not that proud of the work (Why? That would be another blog itself), it's nice to have a first-author publication as a feather in one's cap. See here for proof.

That's about it. So, yeah, I'm stressed, but I'm also content. Weird, huh? Okay, enough fun writing for now. Back to the other writing.

*******

What I'm listening to right now: Protection, Massive Attack

Nice and mellow, but still engaging enough so that I don't fall asleep at the keyboard.