Hi,

I am in the final funded year of my PhD and I am about 4 months behind. I have all of my data but I have done virtually no analysis on it. My supervisor is very helpful but has been away due to personal reasons and, after this semester will be away on sabbatical until well after I am supposed to submit. My second supervisor is no specialist in my field, and my third supervisor is in a different country. I am also the only person in my lab working on this topic, and few are doing anything even remotely similar. My field is very small and highly multidisciplinary so it is difficult to find others to advise me specifically, those who could help are either overseas, or may become my external examiners so it would be difficult to ask for help.

The work should not be hard... but I am finding concentration impossible and procrastination intense. Just writing fifty, a hundred words is a huge strain, and just analysing one block of data and producing one single graph takes days, if not weeks.

My fear of making a mistake is intense, and I have so many ideas I don't know which to focus on. It takes me so long to do anything and I see so many mistakes in what I do.

I love my topic and want to complete but this paralysis has taken over. I have even been referred to counsellors, but talking about my childhood hasn't helped my PhD! I am supposed to have a full results chapter (50 pages) finished by the end of this month. At the moment I've written less than a page of it.

It would be easy to write a to-do list if I knew what to do. Has anyone been in a similar situation? Do you have any advice for me?

Hi

First, you have to admit that we are all human, and we makes mistake. Don't take it too hard when you make mistakes, because we do too.

I don't intend to do any advertisement here, I once found it very difficult to write, until I read this book "How to write a lot" by Paul Silvia, it basically addresses the writing problem of ALL researches. He then suggest that we should set ourselves a target and a time to write every (working) day. It's normal that sometimes you will don't feel like writing etc, but it's good to keep it as a routine, and you will be surprise how much you have written by the end of the week.

Suggest to you have a read of that book (it's thin and small), or you can search online for time management advice, I believe those help too!

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I support Human's advice. Haven't read the book recommended but my supervisor has been talking about the latest postgrad group in my faculty, a writer's group for researchers, and it follows similar lines. This group, which is for journal article writiing, suggests setting aside 15 minutes or 30 minutes -where you just write-the idea being this quickly builds to a draft article.

Though with your particular deadline- you might need to aim for a section a day. Have you broken up your chapter into sections based on what you need to say yet? You could write down all of your ideas just in dot point form and then either prioritise or categorise them according to significance or relationship to previous findings or reseach in the field. Once you have either a conceptual map of your data and where it fits, or a list of priorities-it might help you with creating sections and subheadings for your chapter. Then tackle each section or subheading bit at a time-one per day for example-giving yourself a reward at the end of each draft section. Don't be too picky about the writing-just get the conceptual map, and draft sections in a basic form, because you can edit (and edit and edit) later for clarity and cohesion.

People here swear by the Pomodoros site (My tomatoes) which provides incentives and online companionship for writing in chunks-lots of threads include it. Finally, there is a huge wealth of knowledge and experience in a diversity of areas on this forum, possibly if people knew your subject and were studying in a similar area, they might be able to provide more focused advice or assistance and many are happy to do this through private message so your topic doesn't become a forum topic if you don't want it to. (My field is social sciences and education, learning, underachievement and motivation especially for younger teens- so I'm no help here for your science topic, good luck though and best wishes.