There are two major slumps to look out for with motivation. First, the day after a productive day you usually feel pretty good about yourself and it's harder to motivate that extra effort. Second, there always a slump in the middle of a time period when you doubt your entire direction and think you have too much to finish. One of the main things you use to avoid these slumps are schedules that have detailed focus and scope.
My research has often had a focus problem. This is very evident in reading my PhD prospectus/proposal. A prospectus to those unfamiliar with PhD work is where you state what you've done already and what you're planning to include in your dissertation. It's usually done fairly soon before you actually write the document so it's mostly there to sort of sign off on the dissertation before you put a lot of work into it. My prospectus has a future works section that includes the following:
- Run a sampling survey of the entire Web and produce another set of technology statistics akin to the first paper I ever published as a followup
- Write a feature extraction framework, including a formal methodology and UI-driven application
- Create a demo of a genre-annotated web search index and then perform a user study on how genre affects web searching
Yeah. And I wonder why I haven't gotten anywhere yet. Each one of those items is at least a single paper in itself if not a PhD, not to mention the programming work that is sort of mentioned offhand and ended up being the black hole of time over the last several years. This is a good example of how not to write a prospectus. It was written this way because I was unsure of the scope of a prospectus, afraid it would not look impressive enough and so I just included everything I could think of that I wanted to do.
So my new plan for my dissertation is to focus on focus. I have a body of work already that I could probably stretch into a dissertation, without any extra programming/data effort. The goal is to do that with the bulk of my time and then have a single targeted goal to give a little extra juice to the dissertation. It will be worked on in the evening time, as an optional more fun thing. Not gating the bulk of your work on a potential black hole of effort is utterly crucial and the one thing I wish I could go back in time and convince myself of.
