Struggling to write your dissertation?
“Why am I struggling to write my dissertation?”
“I can’t motivate myself to do my dissertation!”
“I’m not as far along as I would like to be!”
Sound familiar?
If this is you, you are certainly not alone.
Everyone – and I mean everyone – experiences dissertation writer’s block! I still have it now, after 20 years of working in universities as an academic. However, I always manage to push through it, and in this blogpost, I’m going to share how I do that with you. We’ll be covering:
Deep work and surface work
Striking the right balance
Batching
Context switching
Deep work and surface work
A dissertation, just like any assignment or any project, involves deep work and surface work.
Deep work is the intensive, heavy concentration stuff that you really need to focus on. Deep work tasks include things like critically analysing a piece of academic literature, or writing your discussion chapter
To do the deep work, you need to be somewhere quiet, where you’re not going to be disturbed, without any distractions. These tasks are creative. They’re analytical. They aren’t things you can pick up and put down, or flit in and out of. You need to get into a flow state. In other words, be completely absorbed in what you’re doing, be in the zone.
Surface work - or ‘admin’ as I call it - involves simple, straightforward tasks. They’re systematized to-dos that you can rattle through. For example, scanning a chapter checking for typos, searching for literature, organising your notes into folders. Surface work doesn’t require the same level of creative or analytical thinking as deep work. You’ve still got to concentrate on it, but it doesn’t matter if there’s the odd distraction because these tasks are very easy to pick up and put down.
Whilst in a flow state with the deep work, you need to stay in that state with momentum to achieve the level of depth required for those tasks, but the surface work isn’t quite the same.
Striking the right balance
When you’re doing a dissertation, you need to strike a balance between deep work and surface work in order to keep pushing forwards and making progress.
Many students make the mistake of dedicating too much time to the deep work – or planning to do so. The deep work is heavy going stuff, it is exhausting. Whilst you do need some significant chunks of time on deep work, you shouldn’t do that for more than a few hours, because it’s tiring. If you hammer the deep work, after a couple of sessions you’re like, “Phew, I don’t know whether I can do that today”.
That leads to dissertation procrastination. You start to feel bad that you didn’t work on your dissertation when you’d planned to. You feel like you’re slipping behind. There’s an urgency and a pressure to ‘get back into it’, but mmm, not today, maybe tomorrow.
However, if you were to sprinkle the odd surface work session in between the deep work sessions, you will give yourself a break from the hard stuff but still feel like you’re making progress, because you’re getting those little administrative tasks done. You need to do those things, because they will contribute to a top quality dissertation. One where you’re not scrambling around at the end because you’ve got to sort out your page numbering, check your references, read through for typos etc.
You do not have to do deep work every time you sit down with your dissertation. You can do surface work sometimes instead.
If you do this, something magical happens. You start looking forward to these different types of work. You can see you’ve got a deep work day coming up later in the week. You’ve not done one for a few days, and you did some surface work yesterday. Your brain has had time to recover from the deep work session. Because you’ve freed up some bandwidth, your brain has generated great new ideas for your dissertation. For example, you might have thought of another theme for your literature review, or an alternative interpretation of your data. You’re like, “Ooh, I’m kind of looking forward to getting into that again. Wow. Never thought I’d hear myself say that!”. Then when you’ve had a session or two of deep work, you’ll find yourself looking forward to spending a couple of hours proof reading or checking your references or doing a literature search. It’s all about the balance. Everything in moderation!
Batching
Next, I want to share a practical way of doing both deep and surface work well. Batching is a technique that will save you lots of time and boost your productivity.
Batching is grouping similar tasks together and doing them in the same block of time without any interruptions.
You can batch deep work and you can batch surface work.
Examples of batching surface work include:
Searching for literature. Say you’re working on a particular section of your literature review, perhaps there’s a part of it exploring routine activity theory, so you need to find some stuff about that. But later in the literature review, one of your sections is about crime prevention, so you need some stuff to read on that too. Whilst you’re thinking about it, is there any literature you need to find relating to your methods chapter? Might as well look for all of this in one search session and be super efficient.
Organising your notes. If you’ve been making notes in different places (says the woman with about four notebooks on the go at the moment!), you could spend one of your surface work sessions getting them organised, into one folder, or looking for a notes app to dump them into.
Proof reading. If you’re doing this for one chapter, you might as well do it for any other stuff you’ve got written up too. Why not save up the proof reading until you’ve got a couple of chapters you’re happy with? You can crack through both of them in one session.
Referencing. Do this for multiple chapters in one session. Maybe save it all for the end as something you can blast through when you need a break from the deep work.
Examples of batching the deep work include:
Critically reviewing literature. If you’ve decided that today is the day you’re going to review that journal article you found last week, why not review a few other items of literature too? Once you get into the critical analysis zone, you need to make the most of it.
Writing up. If you’re in the writing up headspace and you’re working on your literature review, you might also consider writing up a few bits of your methods chapter or your introduction on the same day. The activity of writing up involves the same kinds of thinking, no matter what you’re actually writing up.
Structuring. Planning out the structure of your chapters by writing down the headings and subheadings. When you’re doing this type of task, you’re zooming out, stepping back from the detail and thinking about how you can organise your work into headings and subheadings. Whilst you’re in that headspace, make the most of it, and map out multiple chapters in the same session.
Cutting down your word count. If you’re going through and chopping down in one chapter, condensing and getting rid of the fluff and filler, do it across several of them.
Batching the deep work across different parts of your dissertation will help you see the bigger picture and will ultimately lead to you making connections that you wouldn’t have made otherwise. It will help you generate insights you wouldn’t have developed had you sectioned them all off and worked on them separately.
Context switching
Batching is a really great thing to do because it avoids the perils of something called context switching.
Context switching is when you try to do a whole host of different types of tasks in the same session. You might sit down to do some deep work like writing up your literature review for an hour, then you switch to a surface work task like referencing, then your emails start pinging and you go look at those for an hour. Then you try to do another 30 minutes of deep work on your literature review and you find it really hard to get back into it. It might take you half an hour to get back in the zone. You might not be able to get back into it that day.
That’s because you’ve been context switching. You’ve been turning different areas of your brain on and off every time you pick up a different task. Your brain is tired of being asked to move direction all the time. It’s kind of like a grumpy teenager, “Urgh, what now? Do I have to?”.
To avoid context switching, ensure that when you sit down to do dissertation work, you pick either deep work or surface work. Don’t try to jump between the two. Don’t throw anything else into the mix either – like emails, social media, updating your finances, cleaning your house (Is it just me, or does everyone’s house become really clean when there’s a task that they really don’t want to do?!).
Next steps
If this blogpost has inspired you to get super organised with your dissertation, check out my Dissertation Planner Shop. You might want to take a look at the Get Organised pack below, which will help supercharge your productivity as you balance the deep work and the surface work!
