Everybody's goals sound like they are being met - brill!
Dunni, you are finger-tip close to submission, keep going(up)

My goal for tonight is catch up on lost work from this afternoon due to, eh hem, eh two and a half hour catch-up lunch with friend :$ Still we 'sorted' everybody in our department out!!!

I've exceeded my writing goal and just printed off some papers at work so my next goal is to read at least one of them today, then that will be it.

Managed to annotate and add in ch 4 excel graphs into the Word thesis. Not too much trouble with the layout of the chapter, fantastic!

As I am taking the 'tortoise' approach to this, I am finishing this now and will resume tomorrow with ch 5 graphs, oh yippee!

OK guys, I'm here to invoke the power of the almighty One Goal thread - may its blessings be upon me in my hour of need :-(

*skip this, it's just me whining and snivelling, afraid I have nowhere else to take my pity party*
Everyone I know has finished and now it's just me, once so far ahead, now back of the pack, bit of a loser. Every time I see another damn viva/submission/PhD status update on f***book my heart sinks a little lower. Churlish as hell, but there we are. I'm really trying to be positive and motivated, but I just see the thesis as a never-ending task that makes me lose my health. I don't want to do it, I just want to focus on the masters I've started (and love!), and maybe, you know, have a life and stuff! I feel such a failure next to all the friends I know who churned the damn thing out in two months flat. But without plans for a career in that field/academia, it all feels rather pointless. I know I can make the time really, and I know the thesis-phobia can be overcome - I just hate the damn thing so much, and care so little. If I could send it off now, half-arsed and unformatted, I would.
*end pity party*

Ok, having allowed myself that bit of utterly feeble drivel, I shall now make the goals!

Goal one: Revise chapter 1: Do a tomato and see how many edits I can clock up.

I did it!!

Only revised a few pages but they are massively improved and I actually almost liked doing it :-x
Thnk God for this forum. Now I just have to figure out a way to keep this motivation going for the next few months.....

Heh, Teek, sounds like you got back some of your mojo - long may it continue!

Only three goals for me today, but one's a biggie:
1.) Do some tasks for the voluntary group I chair
2.) Phone up about doing a tour of one of the places I'm studying
3.) Get as much as I can done on the first draft of a journal article I'm writing

Morning all!

After an accidental late get up my goals are...

- email supervisor meeting minutes
- code 3 interviews in Nvivo
- Read paper about methodological approach

Have a good day! :-)

Morning everyone. It sounds like everyone is doing well, keep it up!

I should have got up earlier to travel onto campus for a data session with my research group but I only got up at 8.45. Damn. I am going to stay put and try for my 1000 words again. So my first goal is 500 by lunch.

Morning everyone :)

my goals today are: write up study 3, write up study 2.

Teek: well done for coming back! I've just got back to writing my thesis a month ago. The first two weeks were really hard because I was so out of shape in terms of churning out writing. I struggled to write 1000 words a day. The mind is an amazing thing though, and it soon got used to churning out words again, and more importantly, my brain now WANTS to write the thesis. So just keep at it for couple of weeks and I promise it'll become fun again!

Good afternoon every body

2 days ago I sent 54 pages to my Supervisor, they are most of the first two chapters. I am very happy and waiting her feedback. I want to start a new topic, but I do not feel that I have enough rest. However, I should start!!!

Good luck for all

Good luck getting back into it Emaa. It's nice to have a bit of a break!

I hsve written 650 words so far. Some of it is starting to get really sloppy though. I think after lunch rather than trying to bang out more I will start to think more about quality. Rather than thinking about word count my goal is to do a good job of writing one small section.

Ugh, I have completely hit a brick wall with this chapter. A change is as good as a break so I am going to move on to my methodology chapter. I have a 1,200 word document and my next goal is to get it up to 1500.

I've realised the journal article I had planned to write is rubbish and if I'd only looked at my MSc research results properly in the first place I'd have seen a much better article was just crying out to be written. Gah. (How did I not notice this when writing up my MSc dissertation?! Just shows how much I've learnt since then!) It's good, in that it will be a much better journal article, but bad, in that all the planning I did for the previous version was a waste of time. But I probably should trust my feelings a bit more about these sorts of things - I've been really struggling with the other version, and deep down doubted it was good enough. Hopefully this newer version won't be such a struggle to get going with!

Also took time out of realising all of this to send lots of emails to different people at one of the organisations hosting my study, and now have nearly sorted out some site visits, an initial interview and access to some useful data. Yay! Progress!

Oh well, back to the main goal of today - making good progress on my journal article.

I got my word count up to 2000. This brings my total for the day up to 1600, with about 600 copied and pasted from past work. My brain is now feeling frazzled so I am going to the gym.

My goal for tomorrow is to get up at 8 and start work earlier than I have been doing, as I find working earlier easier than I do working later.

another one joining in the bad-afternoon thing.

I *think* I just spent the last two hours trying to do the wrong statistical tests. Would you guys mind double checking my choice of stat tests for me please?

Right, so same as before, two different format of questionnaire. within-subject design. half did mode A then B, the other half did B then A. Everyone did both modes at some point.

I don't think the variables are parametric. (well, one or two are, but most are not).

If I want to first prove that there were no difference between the different order of delivery (mode A then B, and mode B then A) then I think I am suppose to be using the Mann-Whitney Test? I came to this conclusion since it is independent samples and not parametric.

Secondly, if I then want to prove that there was no difference between mode A and B, am I right in thinking I use the Wilcoxon Matched-Pairs Test? I was thinking this because everyone did both modes (matched pair) and is not parametric.

Is there like a big no-no rule about assuming that the data is not parametric even if it is? I have one or two variables that sort of fit into a normal distribution in a histogram, but obviously would be easier to report the data if I just carry out the tests assuming if variables are not parametric.

Thank you for your time in advance :)