Woo, that's fantastic news, huge congratulations! Hope you enjoyed your celebrations!

I'm exactly the same too - I have to keep going to the news websites, and to Facebook for rumours/local stories. I achieved almost nothing ysterday and it's only fear of my deadline that it making me do a tiny bit of work today.

Hope you're all okay too. I'm in Nottingham and they were firebombing police stations here, it got a bit scary for some of my friends but luckily nothing too bad happened. Where I am was all very quiet though.

Morning everyone. I was awake til 2am watching the news and keeping an eye on whether friends etc were okay, so didn't get going at all this morning. I'm starting to feel pressure about the paper I'm writing - I have to send it to my co-author on Monday and have barely made a start on it, so that's today's task.

Morning!

I've been up and working since 5.30 am. I have to email my draft second year report to my supervisors by 12 o'clock, and my parents are coming to visit today as well so I can't overrun at all. I had to make them promise not to arrive before 12, they're terrible for setting off from home really early and being on the doorstep before I'm ready for them!

So, goal for today: get the report done by 12. Better get back to it!

Hi there

I so recognise what you describe! I went through a bad period of similar frustration with all my work a few weeks ago, when I was writing a journal article. Nothing I did seemed to work, or come out the way I wanted it to. In the end, I bumped into one of my supervisors in the department and admitted how much I was struggling with this, and he sat down with me and talked it all through. I realised that I wasn't able to write the paper because I hadn't got a clear enough idea of what I wanted to achieve - what the thrust of the paper was. This was really denting my confidence in the writing I was doing, and making it difficult to find a way through. In the end I got the paper written by starting with a blank piece of paper, doing a mind-map of all the things I wanted to include, and then working out a structure that mae logical sense of all the pieces. Once I'd done that, the writing wasn't so bad - I cut and pasted bits I'd already written in other papers into the relevant sections, then went through and added bullet notes on the missing bits, then went back to the beginning (well, just after the introduction) and started writing from there.

I don't know if your frustration is caused by a similar issue, but I do think there probably is a deeper issue that's blocking the writing at the moment. If you can identify what that is and work in small steps to address that and then slowly fill in the report, it might be easier to manage. Probably the thought of the looming deadline isn't helping much either - try breaking it down into manageable steps and targets, rather than getting transfixed by the big deadline further into the distance.

Hope that helps!

One of my supervisors is really keen on including these sorts of tables in lit reviews. He's previously suggested to me that I should put a brief caveat in the table label, eg 'Table x: Selected literature covering y' and a line explaining the limitation in the text itself where the table is first referred to. Don't know if that would work for you?

Woo, congratulations!! And it's fantastic to hear some good news on the job front, there's hope for us all!

Heh, oh dear. We haven't had any rain here today. Though I can't see any windows from my desk so for all I know it could be pelting it down outside right now!

Goal 1 done. I think I need a break doing something else to clear my head before goal 2, so will do some admin type jobs for a while.

Went swimming first thing, and then had to walk to my department instead of getting the bus because they're digging up the roads across campus, so I got to the department late. But I'm still going to achieve lots today!

Goals for today:
1.) Finish looking at structure of articles in journal I want to be published in
2.) Identify central message for journal article I'm writing
3.) Start to plan journal article

That sounds like a really good day, sneaks, enjoy the evening off!

I haven't achieved everything I wanted to do today either, but I've made good progress anyway so I feel good. Now I'm going to do some cooking and maybe some cleaning before watching a documentary that everyone in my department has been advised to watch this evening. It had better be interesting!

Woo, that's brilliant, congratulations!

Thanks everyone for the comments - they've all been really helpful. I've gone back and thought about the key questions I'm trying to answer, and I think I have a rough structure now. Like this:

Introduction (with background to the topic and overarching question)
Lit review (discussing the state of applied knowledge in this field)
Methodology (discussing current theoretical/methodological approaches and why I chose the approach I'm taking)
Background to study (the 2 organisations and their broader context)
Methods (what, why, how they were developed)
Study 1 in org 1 (discussing qual and quant results)
Study 2 in org 2 (discussing qual and quant results, and results of question only asked in this org)
Research question 1 (which naturally requires comparing org 1 and org 2)
Research question 2
Methodological/theoretical question (which seems to fit the flow here)
Research question 3 (which takes the work in a slightly different direction so naturally comes last)
Discussion and conclusions

I hope that seems a sensible structure. It seems to fit my study, anyway, and potentially could flow well. So, thanks for the input!

argh. Okay, more thought needed...

Yes, you're right about needing the one story running through, thanks for that. Where I've said I'm discussing the methods I meant the results really (sorry, I wasn't clear). I'd have the intro, lit review and methodology chapters before these. But you're probably right about option 3. darnit! :p