Ooh good, positivity is a great thing to share! Let's bounce our way through today...

I have done goals 2, 3 and 4, which were the easy jobs. But still, it's good to tick them off. Now for the chapter rewriting!

Morning Lindalou, and Espresso, and Clementine and whoever else is around today!

Today is a dark wet day, but somehow I'm feeling very chipper and energetic, no idea why! Maybe it's the feeling that the work I have to do isn't as impossible as I thought - my supervisors have both commented that my presentation looks great as it is, and yesterday I planned out the work I need to do to get my thesis draft ready to send to my supervisors today and it's not as much work as I thought it would be. (Might still take me until tomorrow morning, but that's close enough to the deadline to make me happy...)

My goals for today:
1.) Make changes to chapter 5 as planned out yesterday
2.) Create small research summary and contact sheet and print out to take to conference
3.) Print accommodation details, maps, etc for conference
4.) Type up and print out notes for presentation
5.) Pull together all the chapters I have so far and send complete (hah) thesis to supervisors (this will probably happen tomorrow)

Hope you all have successful days and achieve as much as I'm hoping I do!

Phew, presentation finally done and sent to supervisors for comments! So glad to have that done. It still needs rehearsing and so on, but there's time for that.

Linda, I'm so envious of your huge chunk of written work! But you've worked hard on it, so well done. Hopefully I'll be at that point fairly soon!

Espresso, I used to start work later too, I think that's a thing of the past now until this thesis is done and submitted! But I find I get loads done really early in the morning - and there's something very satisfying about looking at the cloeck at 9 am and realising I've already done two good hours of work!

Right, time to have a shower and get dressed, and then I'll crack on with the work on the thesis.

======= Date Modified 21 Jun 2012 08:10:19 =======
Espresso - hope you're managing the early start today! And no more panicking, none of us need that!

Didn't get the presentation finished last night - I probably could have done, but I was very tired and the bits I had left were the conclusions/next steps, and I thought I'd do those better if I looked at them freshly this morning. Hopefully won't take too long though, and then I can get on with the thesis draft.

Good luck today everyone!

Still working. Boo hoo hoo. Hope to finish presentation in next hour or so. And then I can watch TV or something else equally satisfying!

I'm having a terrible day, my presentation is taking me all day and I desperately needed to have finished it yesterday. Ho hum. Not much I can do apart from keep on keeping on. But I do have some good observations to report in the presentation, so at least it should be okay at the conference! Will just have to tell supervisors I'm behind schedule on the thesis draft. Oh well!

It is endless. I'm really struggling at the moment. I didn't get my presentation finished yesterday, but I'm hoping I'll manage to blitz it this morning. If I don't I'll really be in trouble, I just don't have time to do everything by Friday. Oh well, small steps, break it down, keep going. And I'm determined to get out of the flat and go for a walk at some point today as well!

Hope everyone else's work is going better than mine!

Morning everyone!

I know what you all mean about time flashing by, it is very very frightening. I feel like I lurch from one deadline to the next and enever have time to pause or think about any of it, and every time I lift my head another month has passed. Scary stuff.

I was working in a cafe yesterday because I had to hang around between finishing cleaning my old flat, having the final inspection with the letting agents, and then going to an evening meeting of the voluntary group I chair, and there wasn't time to come home between each thing. So, I got some work done but it was quite bitty, and I was fairly frustrated with it all.

I have to send a draft of my thesis so far to my supervisors on Friday, and also get my presentation done for next week's conference (and my supervisors want a couple of days to comment on that too, so I really need to send it to them today). Way too much work to be humanly possible, but I'll just have to do what I can. Only one goal for today: get the powerpoint for my presentation done and send it to my supervisors.

Mmmmmmmm chocolate.... Sometimes it's all I can find that will get me through the day!

Hope the bad news wasn't anything too bad, Linda.

I'm failing to get much work done today. There are workmen sanding the windows and hammering and it's driving me crackers. I think I need to go for a walk in the sun to cheer myself up, and hopefully they'll have finished, or moved to another part of the building, when I get back!

Morning! And it is a beautifully sunny one too.

Today I want to sort out the content for my presentation. It probably will involve running little bits of analysis just so my presentation bears a passing resemblence to the abstract in the conference programme. So that's my goal for the day - work through my plan and pull it all together. We'll see how far I get.

Sounds like you're making good progress, Espresso!

The unpacking is nowhere near done, but not too bad, thanks! I blitzed through the unpacking on a load of easy things (like books) just to get stuff on shelves and get rid of boxes. And his (sorry, my) office is fabulous - he's a computer programmer so had all the desks etc set up perfectly for computer work, so all I had to do was plug in my laptop and stick my folders on a shelf! It's a good place to work, but it is taking some getting used to!

By the way, I'm really glad people found the journal article stuff useful - I really do think it's a good method.

Anyway, I've printed out a load of stuff and written up notes from my meeting, and I've got a good idea of what I need to work on tomorrow. I also booked my flights and accommodation to attend a conference, good to have that all sorted. So I think it's time to catch my train home!

======= Date Modified 13 Jun 2012 12:33:50 =======
Oh well done Button on reaching your goals. And the internet thing sounds horrendous - these companies really do just cause so much unnecesary stress!

Good luck everyone else with your goals!

I had a meeting with my supervisors this morning where they gave me lots of really useful feedback on the chapter I sent them last week. They really are good. Now I've got a clearer idea what I need to do with my other chapters too. And they gave me some good hints about my conference presentation, so all in all, it was a very useful meeting.

Goals for this afternoon:
1.) Write up notes from this morning's meeting
2.) Look again at content of presentation following our discussion
3.) Plan out what I need to do on chapter rewrite
4.) Print lots of documents to enable me to work from home!

Heh, I know that feeling! But I went on a really good training course about writing journal articles, and then used the method they taught us to restructure a journal article I wrote with one of my supervisors and a post-doc in my department. We've sent the article off but haven't heard back yet so don't know if the method actually worked, but it read loads better once we'd made my changes (even if I do say so myself).

It's actually a really useful method - you find four or five already-published articles in the journal you're targeting that are similar types of articles to yours (e.g. review articles, or articles following a lit-methods-experiment-results-discussion pattern, or whatever yours is likely to be). Then you build up a matrix of what a typical article of that type looks like by analysing the structure of each of th examples under different headings, e.g. format of title; number of sections; number of paragraphs in introduction, main body and discussion/conclusion; number of sentences in a paragraph; number of figures/tables/images; number of references, and so on. Looking across the four or five examples you get a feel for what's typical for that exact journal, and can create a basic structure for your own paper, even knowing how many paragraphs will be in each section.

Then you identify what the central thrust of your article is (its core message), and start filling in the structure with the details that you need to explain that central thrust - that bit is easier done as a mind-map with offshoots for each section and paragraph. You can get quite detailed on that, right down to bullet points describing the content of each paragraph. Sounds like a very proscriptive method, but it really seems to work, for me at least. My supervisor and the other co-author really liked the method when I applied it to the joint article, too.

Anyway, enough about that.

I've started planning out my presentation and identifying the analysis that needs to be included. There's quite a lot I still need to do, but I want to think it all throrugh properly before diving back into number-crunching.

======= Date Modified 12 Jun 2012 08:55:19 =======
Morning everyone!

Button - don't envy you moving yourself! We decided to pay people because I was on the second floor with no lift (fun getting that washing machine down the stairs!) and the place I've moved to is on the fourth floor with a dodgy lift - if the lift had broken they'd have had to lug everything up the stairs, and there's no chance I'd have managed that myself (I've got arthritis). I hope your move isn't as mammoth!

Sounds like there are a few good plans for beginning the day already, that's great.

I didn't get as far with things as I planned yesterday, so today I really need to get to grips with my work. I did start planning both my presentation and the thesis structure, though. First goals for today:
1.) Plan content for presentation and identify missing data
2.) Make detailed plan of what's written and what's still needed in thesis

Thanks Lindalou, yes the move did go well, but I ache all over now from rushed packing and unpacking - so relieved we paid people to do the actual moving for us, I think that would have wiped me out!

The diagram of findings sounds very exciting! Hope you can find a way to translate what you picture!

I've not got very far with my goals yet today, but I've been following up on emails and stuff and it's all been important and useful, so it's all good. Next task is to dig out the abstract that was accepted for the conference all those months ago and see what I promised to talk about!

Good luck everyone.