The Queen’s Birthday, a good excuse for a public holiday but as I indicated in my last post, it has not really affected my schedule but yet it has. Although I wanted to treat it just like any other weekday, I did start work a bit later. Psychologically, knowing that the rest of the city (and country) is on holiday gave me a renewed impetus to work, and work I did. Except for the lunch break, I did work (mostly steadily) through the day and managed to make some progress in my writing.
Maybe its because that the building is empty (save some other isolated PhD students), I felt less distracted. I couldn’t make the excuse of running upstairs to the department office to ‘get some stationery’ or to drop by into the office of some of my colleagues or peers. Even my (recent) favourite coffee-stand is closed. Instead, I read a little and powered on with my writing. Ah, if only everyday is like today. The trick I think is that I felt relaxed and not pressured to get things done. How can I find such opportunities again?
And another thing that is starting to bug me is how to answer friends’ well-meaning queries about how my writing is going. What can I say beyond, “its going along…slowly”, or “fine,” and on some days, “its not going so well”. These curt but vague answers are all I can think of and muster. In some ways, it actually reflects the uncertainties that I face when I try and gauge my own progress. I can’t do much better than those short quips if I were to ask myself that question. How does PhD candidate know how well he/she is progressing when writing the thesis/dissertation? Some ‘how to write a PhD thesis’ books suggest that we give ourselves a target number of pages. It doesn’t feel quite right yet for me but perhaps that is how I have to do it.
