#TIME MANAGEMENT AND MANUSCRIPT WRITING HOW TO#

Designate a physical space (in your home and/or office) for keeping your thesis together, so it doesn’t feel like the thesis is creeping into all areas of your life. Keep a notebook by your bed for those middle-of-the-night inspirations. (A priority list is a list of three to five things that must be completed today.) Can you read comfortably off a computer screen? If not, print journal articles and bind them together. If ‘to do’ lists overwhelm you, consider making a priority list instead.

#TIME MANAGEMENT AND MANUSCRIPT WRITING HOW TO#

The key to completing a thesis is to draw on your strengths and learn how to navigate your weaknesses.įind out when and where you work most productively. The most important thing is that you can meet with them regularly. It will be useful if they are an expert in the field, but this is not strictly necessary. While it’s important for this person to be affirmative and encouraging, you also want to know they can give you a nudge in the right direction if you’re lacking motivation. Ensure you share your research time line with your accountability buddy. Whether it’s your supervisor or a fellow student, find someone with whom you can be completely honest and who will know if you’re being dishonest about the progress of your thesis. Be Held Accountableīeing held accountable is crucial to success! The Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘accountable’ as being ‘responsible to a person, for an act’. Because she didn’t leave all the writing to the end, she had a month to edit and redraft her thesis.īeing aware of the big picture is necessary to maintain focus it prevents you from getting bogged down in the daily grind. Having completed this, for the next two months the researcher returned to the literature to write her Discussion and Conclusion chapters. She spent three months after that analysing her data sets and writing her Introduction and Findings chapters. The next three months she dedicated exclusively to field work. A yearly wall calendar or planner is useful for mapping this out and providing a visual reminder.įor an Honours Education thesis completed over one year, a student dedicated the first three months to research, writing the Literature Review and Methodology chapters, organising the field work and honing her research aims. This is necessary to ensure you effectively progress through these stages. In addition to working towards daily goals, loosely set targets for stages of your thesis. Tony Schwartz (2010), writing for the Harvard Business Review, says ‘human beings perform best and are most productive when they alternate between periods of intense focus and intermittent renewal’.

As often as you are able, give yourself the earmarked time without interruption.Īdditionally, it is so important that you allocate guilt-free time away from your thesis and research. Turn off your phone, log out of your social media accounts and refrain from checking email. Dedicate a set amount of time to reading and taking notes. Daily (or regular) training is more important than a once-per-week binge.Īscertain the most productive time of the day for you. Similarly, you need to consider writing your thesis as a training exercise. No one wakes up one morning with the spontaneous ability to run a marathon. So, here are our top time management tips to help you break down that elephant-sized thesis into manageable bite-sized chunks. American motivational speaker Zig Ziglar suggests ‘Lack of direction, not lack of time, is the problem. In order to complete your thesis, time management skills are necessary. Whether you prefer the elephant metaphor (or perhaps the notion of conquering your own personal Everest), a thesis is a huge undertaking. You may have heard the joke, ‘How do you eat an elephant?’ The punchline, ‘One bite at a time’, is useful in the context of discussing a mammoth research task: a thesis. Many people fail in life, not for lack of ability or brains or even courage, but simply because they have never organised their energies around a goal. Time Management Tips for Research and Academic Writing

Time management and manuscript writing