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Posts Tagged ‘procrastination’

A caller asked if I had ever coached someone who had become stalled on a house renovation project.  My answer was no, but what came to mind was how similar all big projects are.   How difficult it can be to keep going.  How crushing the project can become.  But it doesn’t have to be this [...]

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Perfectionism gives you a perfect excuse never to write. Perfectionism not only slows productivity, but it also makes sure that your dissertation will never meet your expectations.   Put up with the messiness of writing You have to go through the stage of writing “abominably repetitive, colloquial sentences,” as a dissertation client once described the [...]

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Are you the person in the cartoon who in setting a date for a committee meeting says, “How about never?  Would that work for you?”  Is that the attitude you have toward your dissertation? When you have a big project—whether it’s writing a dissertation or a book or planning a big event—do you throw all [...]

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An ABD student wrote to me about her advisor’s generous rewriting of the dissertation text.  According to the student, the advisor doesn’t change the thought, only the language.   The ABD student recognizes that the advisor’s writing is superior to her own, Her question is if the advisor has rewritten a lot of the language of [...]

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Even though you may have a stated intention of working on your dissertation and making steady progress, you do everything and anything to sabotage yourself.  Could this be you? If  this sounds familiar, read on. A dissertation client is having great trouble moving forward.  Every week when we talk, there’s been another obstacle which has [...]

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You’ve been working hard on your dissertation this summer, honing your process, becoming surer of your argument, and thinking about the end. And the end is definitely in sight.  Yay!! A couple of clients who have just gone through an unexpectedly bumpy patch right toward the end of their work made a suggestion to pass [...]

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This morning as I was reading a paragraph here and there in Newsweek, I swear I saw the words “put off finishing his dissertation” rise off the page in 3-inch-tall block letters, or so it seemed.  Procrastinating on one’s dissertation isn’t unusual, but to get your name in Newsweek because what you’re doing to procrastinate [...]

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If you’re like me, you don’t have uninterrupted time for writing. Maybe you work full time in a demanding job or work two demanding part-time jobs or you take care of your children. And when you get to the point when you do have time to write, you’re exhausted.  Just brain dead. And that, of [...]

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When you’re going nowhere fast on your dissertation, it’s time to try something different. In a blog post a few months ago I asked what bold action you would take for the sake of your writing (“What Bold Step Would You Take to Gain 2 Good Writing Days?”).  In today’s blog I want to share [...]

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When my writing starts to come together, I am relieved, but I’m also anxious about what comes next.  My first response to those feelings of relief and a fluttering of anxiety almost always is to flee and to eat.  Be grateful if you don’t feel these urges.  Or pat yourself on the back if once [...]

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