Of elephants and ants (Part 2)

My elephant (PhD thesis) is breaking down nicely into its parts.

I have a structure for the thesis, and a narrative thread that is probably strong enough to hold the weight of the thesis. I've done first drafts of parts of it. I'm knuckling under this week to tackle my first full scale chapter - The Ethics Divide - which means rounding of a chunk of data analysis, deciding where to draw the line on the literature work (and naturally doing more reading because more has been published since I did my last search), then creating a coherent chapter.

My current problem is that the ants keep crawling everywhere.

Give yourself a whole 14 days to work on Chapter 9, I said.
Clear the decks from family and work responsibilities, I said.
Start early in the morning and remain focused, I said.

When will I learn????

• Two non-negotiable, non-Chapter 9 deadlines have landed for this Friday.
• I've got decisions to make about family matters.
• My character means when I panic easily when I can't work out how the elephant fits together - which means I end up blogging, or tweeting, or on Facebook to distract myself [progress though, I'm not also compulsively eating sweet food]
• And the influx of emails, oh the emails.

The reality of life, especially as a mature student, is that there will never be a whole 14 days to focus on one thing. I don't even get that on holiday.

What I can do is set up barriers for the ants to shield the elephant while the ants accumulate and then go eat the lot of them - at a prearranged time each day.

And I can try to discourage the ants from crawling towards my elephant in the first place (things like telling everyone in my life that I won't be playing my usual roles for 14 days then negotiate with them what roles they will pick up and what will be left undone).

I can give myself procrastination time-limits when stuck. [five minutes and I'm off twitter and blogger and back to the grindstone]

I can use the range of techniques I've got for de-panicking so I can restart focused work on Chapter 9. And today that means ignoring the elephant and enjoying the simple, effective elegance of Quirkos to re-analyse the data before tomorrow tackling the literature.

Decision made = focus restored - for now.

"As an academic, you are known through your writings"

This was one of the many pearls of wisdom offered by Dr Inger Mewburn when she came to Bangor University a few years back to tell us how to write a paper in seven days. Yep, really. A paper in seven days. I haven't got to that stage yet, I'm not even through ethical approval. But her half-day of wisdom has given me the tools I will need when that first paper needs writing. And it has already helped me through the ins and outs of writing a taught Masters dissertation.

It dawned on me, belatedly, that I am using this blog as my first step into being known through my writings. It's a scary thought. In fact it's so scary that I'm tempted to run and hide in the relative anonymity of a postgraduate study room. Why is it so scary? Why don't I want people to know me through my writings?

Maybe it's because I rely so much on watching other people's body language to fine-tune how I communicate with them, and I don't have that luxury when I write. Maybe it's because I still fight insecurity and am scared rigid of being judged. Maybe it's because I have constructed this ridiculous image of The Perfect Academic peering over his or her glasses at me, and I feel like an imposter.

Or, maybe, it's because I don't like fixing anything in stone. I don't like trapping fleeting ideas in cold hard print. I know all too well that tomorrow I will think differently from today, and will express myself differently. But you won't see that. You will only see today's thinking trapped in the blog.

Maybe that's where the blog comes in. Blogging is a way to trap ideas as they pass through, fully or partly formed. There is no pressure to have a conclusion or make a statement. I don't feel the need to impress a peer reviewer and I don't need to comply with what's needed to get published.

So take me as you find me. Or ignore me. Or pull apart what I say. Or be in dialogue with me. Or criticise me. And, perhaps, this way, I will develop the thicker skin and greater self-assurance that I'm going to need for the day I finally tackle that paper in seven days.