by Katrien Pickles
Today our guest blogger is Katrien, a family studies researcher, picture book author and swimming teacher. She was raised on the Big Island of Hawai’i and now lives in Wagga Wagga, Australia. Katrien’s doctoral research is on family wellbeing and public playgrounds. Here she reflects on how to plan for the unexpected in research and writing.
When I began my PhD, I read a lot about being organised: how to set up an EndNote library; how to save the impossible amount of articles you will end up downloading; how to securely store your data; and, most importantly, how to manage your time. I created a Gantt chart, included clearly delineated writing time, and felt like a super-hero. Truly, you have no idea how big a deal that is. My husband was confused because the person he married had a deep hatred of Excel. I even colour-coded the months and tasks!
Throughout my experience in doing the PhD, two seemingly opposing themes have emerged: the planned ideal and the eventual reality. You can start out with high hopes, rooted in your ideal version of the research. Indeed, I feel you need to be optimistic – as optimistic as possible! But the stumbling ground is when you’re faced with the inevitable reality of doing the real work.
My first year was spent reviewing literature, designing the methodology, choosing the methods and drafting three chapters. The ideal plan was that I would engage with one stakeholder group at a time and write that data chapter before moving on to the next stakeholder group. I’d given myself about 3 months to conduct each research method, analyse the data and write a chapter draft. My supervisors would then give me feedback on these drafts and the final year would be spent polishing these drafts into a final thesis.
However, planning ahead gave me a false certainty. I spent hours upon hours in a theoretically ideal universe, applying for ethics and tidying up the four corners of my Excel world; yet I was still confronted with the mess of reality. Despite the ethics approvals and my prior relevant field experience, my chosen methods were not attracting the participant numbers I’d expected. The months I’d planned to be conducting research were spent chasing principals and teachers, then eventually chasing adult caregivers who needed to provide consent for their child/ren to participate. The writing sat on hold.
My impressively colour-coded Gantt chart had no answers to help me solve these problems that arose. It did, however, leave room to shimmy around my timeline, and those 3-month blocks were a breath of fresh air, where I submitted an ethics variation and hoped for the best. The summer school holidays of my second year, ideally dedicated to re-writing, were instead filled up with a research method I had to pursue when my original plans fell through. The following summer holidays, also ideally dedicated to writing, was spent recovering from emergency surgery. You adapt, because you have to, but I could adapt only because I’d left myself chunks of unplanned time: time where I could be creative, rethink my approach, rest, and process. Without these chunks of unscheduled time and a clear destination in mind, I do not think I could be at this stage of a final draft.
In a book about how to write a thesis (which, I am slowly coming to learn, is a lot like how to live a creative life), Umberto Eco writes that a student should create a road map of their thesis. A way forward for when moving seems impossible. He writes that a student could think of this road map in the very practical terms of planning for an actual road trip:
Imagine that you have a week to take a 600-mile car trip. Even if you are on vacation, you will not leave your house and indiscriminately begin driving in a random direction. You will make a rough plan. You may decide to take the Milan-Naples highway, with slight detours through Florence, Siena, Arezzo, possibly a longer stop in Rome, and also a visit to Montecassino. If you realize along the way that Siena takes you longer than anticipated, or that it is also worth visiting San Gimignano, you may decide to eliminate Montecassino. Once you arrive in Arezzo, you may have the sudden, irrational, last-minute idea to turn east and visit Urbino, Perugia, Assisi, and Gubbio. This means that – for substantial reasons – you may change your itinerary in the middle of the voyage. But you will modify that itinerary, and not no itinerary.
-How to write a thesis, Umberto Eco, p. 107
One of my supervisors would remind me that writing was about ‘rolling up the carpet’: you begin with a sentence, which eventually turns into a paragraph and grows into a chapter. In practical terms, I found the Pomodoro technique to be immensely useful to convince myself to pick up the carpet and keep rolling. I have found that you can set yourself writing deadlines, which are helpful in keeping up the momentum and avoiding falling into the trap of reading as procrastination, but your insights and creative processing cannot be scheduled. You can only make time for these moments by removing other tasks.
If I can offer some advice from where I sit in this journey, I would strongly urge you to give yourself the gift of time by leaving space for moments of messiness because this is where the deep thought and joy is found. A road map, or methodology, can help to scaffold your curiosity, and to adjust to the inevitable issues that will arise. But if you don’t leave time to get lost, you may not ever arrive at your destination.
Most of my best writing insights and ideas for how to bridge together paragraphs or chapters have been away from the desk. They’ve been in the shower, while walking my dog, while driving to work or while making dinner. They’ve been in the moments in-between – the moments that can easily feel harried because you feel you have ‘no time’. But they are really the golden moments, where your brain can string ideas together and connect the dots. Where you can playfully engage with your topic and imagine possibilities.
In planning your PhD, I highly recommend that you set yourself up to live affordably for at least three years, so there are pockets of time in between the Excel cells where you can daydream, where you can read (and even write) for pleasure, where you can rest and recover from the things life will inevitably throw your way. My advice then, is that if you can live on less, and you can afford the time to be curious and follow that curiosity, then you have just given yourself a truly valuable gift.
DoctoralWriting 
I’m glad I read what you posted because I am so down; I need a roadmap and continue with the journey I started some years back. I have heard you share everything; it’s not easy.
Hi Nontsikelelo,
It’s a tricky dance between creating structure and leaving space to be creative and play. Hope you can find your own sense of balance soon! Take care.
Thanks for the insights. I agree, often the brain connects the dots (paragraphs/ideas) when we do tasks not directly related to the research. It feels like the unconscious mind processes data … and spits out results. Somewhat connected to meditation I think. Cheers, k
Hi Krisztian,
Thanks! It’s nice to hear the article resonated with you.
I am stuck. After the first two years where I read and prepared everything for my field research, I spent last year working and doing nothing for the thesis. This year I tried to do something more and I am analyzing data but it’s like starting from the beginning again because I don’t remember anything of what I read (and I didn’t wrote anything down when I was reading) and I can’t force myself to write something. I need to write an historical chapter but no, I can’t… I feel like I don’t have anything to say and I don’t know anything and the other studies are all better than mine.
Oh that sounds so hard! I would try and start by making a skeleton of the chapter you’re wanting to write. When you did your preparation a few years ago, did you save the articles into folders by theme? If not, I would probably start there– do a quick read of each abstract and save them into folders based on their broad themes. From those themes you could build a skeleton of the chapter headings. Don’t feel it has to be perfect or ‘correct’ in any way — these headings and their order may change as you get deeper into the literature and start making sense of things in your own voice. And the only way to find your own voice is by writing… the more reading you do, the harder it is to get started with writing… something I definitely struggled with as well!
For example, in my literature review chapter, I had a big chunk of historical literature on the history of playgrounds as well as family ideals and play. In this chapter, I have three sections: 1. A review of historical literature shaping the provision of playgrounds in contemporary Australia, 2. A review of child and family ideals in Australian society, 3. A discussion of continuity and change in how parenting is conceptualised and supported in Australian society. Under each of these sections, I have 5 or 6 headings, to group the literature around their main messages. For example, in Section 1 on the provision of playgrounds, I have headings such as: 1.1 Conceptualisations of play and planning to meet play needs, 1.2. Adult caregivers as gatekeepers of children’s play….
You sound overwhelmed and like you’re doubting your ability, which is totally normal when you look at the big picture of what you need to do. I think when you break the themes down into a skeleton of sections and header titles, you can start to find the patterns and repeating messages from the articles you’ve saved. You are actually the best person to do this — a more experienced researcher in your field may miss the patterns and emerging trends from the literature review because they may be biased by their existing opinions. There is a lot of evidence showing how valuable novice researchers are in conducting literature reviews because they start with very few assumptions and stay curious through the process.
My last suggestion is that you need to be immersed in the task for a few hours at a time and then step away to process what you’ve been doing. Fitting a literature review around a full-time job is do-able, but difficult. If you can find 3-4 full days a week at least to dedicate to this, I found that to be the best. My process was to start after breakfast and work with small 5 minute breaks for 4 hours. Then have the afternoon to run errands or exercise (or nap!) and then do an hour or two after dinner. But you find the times that work for you.
You can do it!
Warm wishes,
Katrien