Virtually Priceless Thoughts

This is a follow up to my earlier post on the challenge of writing my dissertation.

For 25 days this summer, I counted my days by the word. I set myself the task of writing 1,000 words per day on my dissertation.

That was the minimum I could write. I could write more, but not less — and no banking of words. And contrary to my earlier post on pictures being worth 1,000 words, they didn’t count.

I had to write at least 1,000 words a day.

Every. Day.

My idea was to set up a chain of accomplishments so that even when I was waning, I would not want to break the chain by missing a day. I had to reach 1,000, then I could stop and rest. Or edit. Or revise a picture. Or re-review my findings. Or do something else. Anything, as long as I wrote my 1,000 words.

25 days later and I was at the end of my 1,000 word days. The body of my dissertation was drafted. 228 pages, over 66,000 words.(1)

This proved to be a successful approach for me to get through my draft and one I will likely use again in future projects.

I think the trick to find the right metric that is an accomplishment that is significant for a day without being overwhelming that cannot be achieved. For me, last month, 1,000 words a day worked.

Since then I have started the editing process. I have shifted metrics to a set of tasks, determined based on a review cycle and laid out over a week. Not as clean as the 1,000 word metric, but that’s the nature of editing.

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1. Yes, 66,000 / 25 is more than 1,000 words a day. I was working on my draft prior to July 30th, so I had several chunks completed before I started (that I didn’t count in my 1,000).

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