Hi Teek

Sounds like you've been busy! Good for you for ploughing through the boring, repetitive tasks! You'll get the 10,000 words done by Xmas - once you start you'll get into it and be fine. And excellent you can see the end!! I still can't, progress is too slow and patchy...ahh well, consistent work will get us there.

Found a new way to procrastinate today, rearranged my study. Completely necessary of course!;-). Not such a productive day today, will be better tomorrow.

Everyone knows that clutter inhibits the mind (she says as piles of mis-stacked papers threaten to cascade down on her head) so it's a perfectly legitimate, and think how much better you'll work tomorrow in your nice streamlined study! :D
And don't worry, I don't mean that I can see HOW I'll get to the end, just that time enough time has been lost for me to truly know it's coming.

Nice to hear from you Teek. Have you had that firm talk with your supervisor yet about when you'll get onto just writing? Good idea to have a goal for the word count written by Christmas.

As for me making progress, yes, it's in very small portions now, but it's progress! I couldn't have managed my main writing up phase like this though: that needed more good hours in the week, and luckily I was stronger then. But now I'm nearing the end (doing final polishing and rewriting) I can get by on a ridiculously small number of hours a week.

This sounds like the holy grail to me just now Bilbo! Well done for getting so far :-) Hope you get to a better place again soon and can enjoy those extra hours, whether you need them for PhD work or not.

Must admit I haven't had "that" talk with my supervisor yet, he seems to have backed off so I'm letting things lie until the joint supervisory meeting in December, then I can put my thesis plans to the other sups and hopefully they'll back my more *cautious* approach to timescales.

Hi all, good to hear you're all doing ok, Sue you should speak to your sup and get her to sit and go through the article with you and why she changed things? my sup used to always change things and I asked him to explain why to me, even if to him its obvious not always to us! and to me its difficult to see exact changes they've made whereas take in more for not making same mistakes again when do next ones! although also should remember that just cos that's their style doesn't mean its the best, I think sometimes we see our sup as THE person, but remember you are highly qualified too and there may really be nothing wrong wtih your style??

I know the feeling Bilbo, had little freak too, especially since at the mo i'm not doing anything! I feel very guilty as do have some free evenings, but just want to enjoy it for a while before I get stuck back in! and really don't think my brain can handle it, have a funding report to do over next month and opened doc last night and had to close it again - just looking at it made my head hurt!! :$ but as you say Sue we can only do what we can, just little by little, it will come together eventually!
Glad to hear your plodding along Bilbo, you're doing so well and will get there soon!

I feel for you on the repetitive lab work Teek, I had to go back and do some in my last few months and its horrible, but you'll feel a sense of great achievement when you can score through the list! :) I'm sure you'll be fine for 10,000 words, once it starts to flow and you sit down to it i'm sure it will come.

Hi AL

Yes, will talk to my sup - she just mentions things like my writing needing a better flow, and being more 'discursive' - things which are hard to learn! Then she rewrites a par of mine, and it's just lovely!! I know it's practice, and I also have a style book which I'll probably need to use. Eska was talking about this on a thread - maybe I'll start a new thread and see what people say.

Yes, don't work AL, get to it when you can. You need to have a break and get used to your new jobs, thesis can wait, altho you probably do need to write your funding report!

So sounds like we're all going well. New day here, in a lovely clean study, have almost finished the article I'm working on apart from refs which I'll do tonite - am going to crack on with some brain work! Once I take my sweet dog out...

ooh, hope you get a lovely walk Sue, some nice fresh morning air, fresh clean and tidy study too, sounds perfect! I bought some gorgeous yellow crysanths yesterday, they're sat on my desk and really brightening up my mood! :) I bet you're glad the brighter weather has reached you, its yucky and grey here and I can already feel my SAD hitting in.

I hope the post finds some great advice, i'm afraid I have none, my writing style isn't the best but its passable I think? my boss does make changes but nothng too major these days, although I think alot of it has just been practice of writing and re writing and trying to write as many articles as possible. like you say I think its one of those things taht just over time you fall into. I used to be told my writing was like 'spaghetti on a plate' so hopefully i have improved from there :$

yes, funding report does need doing this month, luckily i've been doing them 6monthly so matter of taking template and just reporting on what i've managed to complete over last months. I think what scared me is that there are somethings I havent done either due to technical issues or major time constraints, so going to have to explain all this to them :(

Right, off to sort my washing out, and get a hot water bottle. Good luck for your day or night hours! (up)

Anyone ploughing through tonite? I have been away from night slaving for a while.... back to it seeing I only have 3 months left!
Warm greetings to all fellow labourers(up)

I will be here all night,:(

I, too, will be gracing the carriages of the Midnight Express tonight - still trying to write a paper and, my God, it's awful. It just seems what I am writing is rubbish and I fear that it will be rejected when finished.

How is the paper going? I am about 2/3 of the way through mine and will keep going!

Good morning Chrisrolinski. It's still going poo, but I have done the best I can tonight and have to get some sleep. Just time to start a new thread... Good luck with yours matey!

Anyone out there working tonight? I'm sitting with 200 pages of thesis printout with supervisor scribbles all over them. I've dealt with most of the feedback so far, colouring in done bits with a highlighter pen. I'm now going through all the pages seeing which ones need remaining work. So far my nasty still-to-be-dealt-with pile is very small compared to the I-would-like-to-burn-you (!) processed pile.

Going to be a long night anyway. Want to get this task out of the way now I feel up for it. So keeping going as long as can. Up to page 91 now ...

Hi Bilbo, I'm afraid I'm just about to go to bed (actually am in bed already, just about to turn the computer off), early start tomorrow...

I hope your still-to-be-dealth-with pile is shrinking rapidly!

Good night. :-)

Afraid not! It's just getting bigger as I add more things to it: my aim tonight is just to distinguish between what doesn't need doing, and what does. I'll actually deal with the still-to-be-dealt-with pile on another day.

And sometimes it gets bigger in a big chunk. It's a very vivid guide to the remaining problematic areas of the thesis.

But then at other times I chuck lots of pages on the other pile and all is well 8-)

Nice to hear from you. Sleep well.