After ten years in industry, I've become a grad student myself, and boy
howdy I can relate. Getting started is 90% of the battle. Maybe more.

I'm up at 4:30 because that's part of my solution. I get up long before
anyone else and spend these first few hours working. Nothing else. I do
not clean. I do not surf the web. I do not do anything besides work.
(OK, work and check my email and respond only when it's really, really
important and intriguing. After I send this message, I'm setting my
Apple Menu > location to "no connections.")

Honestly, the web is the absolute worst possible thing which ever
happened to grad studies. I wasted three hours reading old threads on
Crooked Timber last night. What a stinking wasteland of blowhard
intellectualism. And I read check it multiple times everyday.

Anyway: starting work? The bigger picture for me includes a few
techniques from Fiore's _The Now Habit_ (eg unschedule). But in the
immediate sense I have two suggestions, both of which are modifications
from Joan Bolker's excellent (and surprisingly relevant for those
outside of graduate studies) _Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen
Minutes a Day_. My process is:

1) Spend fifteen minutes freewriting
2) Park on a downhill slope

OK, so it's not much of a process. I shall explain.

The fifteen minutes of freewriting is a dual purpose exercise. First,
it loosens up my intellectual muscles and puts some positive progress
on whatever project I'm working on. In that fifteen minutes of writing
(uncorrected, non-stop, spew) there is always at least one idea worth
pursuing, or integrating into a current project. It just comes.
Sometimes my freewrites are on the computer, sometimes they're by hand
on a yellow legal pad. (Added bonus: I teach composition and assign it
to my students, and doing it myself gives me the moral high ground:
"Yes, I do it too. Every damn day. Shut up and write.")

The other benefit is that it signals my brain that I'm getting into
work mode. Since my work is largely intellectual/theoretical (as
opposed to experimental) the thinking that occurs in the freewrite is
like playing scales on a piano, or jogging around the track a few
times, or [your favorite warm-up ritual here]. Yes, it's mostly empty
blather, and frequently the good ideas are dead-end ideas. But it works
for me.

Parking on a downhill slope is actually a practice which takes place
when I end work the day before. Each day, when I wrap up whatever I'm
doing, I jot down (on paper when I remember, otherwise I do it mentally
with lesser effect) exactly where I need to start. And that is usually
a question I'm still pondering/researching. Last night's question, for
instance, was: "Does Allan Woodcourt's presence at Jo's death as doctor
and priest say anything about his relationship with Esther?" (What I
actually have is "Woodcourt {Priest Doctor} @ Jo's death -> Esther" but
that doesn't  make any sense to anyone but me. Since it wasn't for
anyone but me, it was plenty effective.)

At first, the practice was disconcerting. I'd have a question to answer
and then walk away, and I really wanted to sit back down and wrestle
with the issue. I wanted closure. However, having a rich issue upon
which to start makes starting so much easier, the discipline came easy.
(OK, came somewhat easy. Well, not really all that easy at all, but it
did come and that's what matters.)

Parking on a downhill slope eases the transition into work because
you're not starting your session with a dreaded task, but an
interesting one. It's easy to start your work. You want to start. Yes,
you will still have to grade those papers (I have 120 of them waiting
for me right now), but they're what I do later, after I've completed
more interesting stuff.

Honestly, quite a bit of planning falls away when I'm doing my
studying. The processes are so intertwined that reading, writing,
research all take place almost simultaneously. How do I plan that?
Undoubtedly, I'll read a few of the articles I've found, which will
open up new questions for which I'll have to go back to the text and
then find new articles to consider, and revise, revise, revise. And
then research some more. It sounds like a great life to me. Beats the
hell outta software development (for me at least).

That's my system: freewrites and be parked on a downhill slope. It
ain't pretty, but it works.

--jw

On Apr 18, 2005, at 3:39 AM, david meadows wrote: