Last night I panicked. I worked on an abstract and the structure of my PhD thesis. By the time I finished I felt overwhelmed. Catastrophe thinking kicked in and within an hour I was ready to give up, doubting my ability to even start writing, doubting my ability to create a suitable structure, double-guessing versions of a dismal future.
I had looked at the elephant, and I was scared.
For those who haven't heard of elephants and ants, it's a handy way to categorise any undertaking.
How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.
How do you eat ants? You wait until you've gathered enough to make a decent mouthful.
My emails are ants.
My thesis is an elephant.
Now I've realised it's an elephant I have stopped panicking and started analysing. I know I've eaten an elephant before.
In Crossfit language, producing my thesis is just like doing a year-long chipper WOD [WOD = Workout Of the Day; chipper = keep chipping away because it's long and usually looks impossible]. Pretty terrifying unless you have a strategy together with focus, determination and enough common sense to set a sustainable pace. But with those ingredients, it's not easy but it's doable.
I have an abstract. I have a narrative flow. I even have a sketch of the mosaic I plan to make to illustrate both the journey and the destination of my PhD.
Tomorrow I revisit my work plan. I buckle up and knuckle down. I can visualise handing in my thesis on the last working day of 2019. It's going to be an awesome 15 months.
Wow! How fast things go. A very good friend of mine also used eating an elephant as the analogy for writing her PhD thesis, so you are in good company. It's a sound analogy!
ReplyDeleteYou're going to rock it.