Late last year I was finally able to be diagnosed with ADHD. Which also meant being able to start taking medication for it. Yay! Seriously, I’ve known that I’ve needed outside chemical assistance for my brain. And this medication is helping. It’s also helping me see where I still need to work on things.
One of those things is my dissertation.
I’m not going into detail here (I’ll leave that over at the room where it happens), but I did want to talk broadly about some recent struggles and the things I’ve come up with to help me get through them. If they help me, hopefully they’ll help someone else!
One thing that has been a struggle for me over the years I have been working on this is how to keep track of information I run across for a chapter I’m not currently work on. For a while, I was trying to just go ahead and work on all the chapters, writing based on the notes I took. But it just made things more confusing, and I made little progress.
Last week I decided that I need to simply focus on one chapter at a time. Get the draft for one chapter written, send it to my chair, and move on to the next. That’s when the “But what if I find something for another chapter?” though returned. At first, I wrote in the note to myself to go ahead and write the note down and then type it into notes so I can find it later. Then I realized I had an even simpler option: flag tabs!
I’ve assigned each chapter a color. When I write down something for that chapter when I’m working on another, I’ll use the flag on that note. That way I can easily find things later and come back to them easily!
Yes, this far into things I am still doing research. That’s because I recently realized something important that I need to bring into chapter 1. Also, I know I am going to be going over my notes more, so those flags are going to be really useful!
Another thing that I am working on is finding my focus again and making a quick outline of the chapter before I get to working on it as a whole. I’ve kind of lost my way a bit along the way. Jumping around did not help with that. I’ve just finished getting chapter 1 into better shape with a quick outline. It helped me realize a better order for things and were to address something else.
I’m going to keep sharing the things that help me in my research as a neurospicy aca-fan. I realize these things aren’t going to work for everyone–everyone’s brain works differently–but it might help or it might inspire something that does.
Deviate from the Norm 