Completing your PhD with Beeminder

[strickvl]

@chipmanaged

If you’re at the point of doing a proofreading kind of editing, it could be a “Number of pages completed” goal (odometer type), and then you could just work your way through it. Otherwise, if it requires a lot of major editing (moving sections around, etc.) which isn’t very linear, I’m not really sure what I would suggest for progress tracking. Maybe something like the one-must-do-task-per-day goal, but just for your PhD. Or perhaps have one document with the original version, and another blank document with a new, edited version, and you can move all edited pieces into the new document as they’re completed, and keep track of the word count as you move it over. And you can do an odom-reset each time you start a new rewrite. I’m just spit-balling, but I’m sure there’s something like that that could work for whatever your preferred editing method is.

A few years back I tried reverse-engineering it by chapter (i.e. I have a certain amount of time, so each chapter must be done in y days), but that didn’t work and the moment I got behind there was no way to recover. So I need goals that keep me working to start with, and only later when I have a better idea of how far on I am can I start doing chapter-by-chapter goals.