Work, work, work

It's been another day of work over here. Grading got finished off, but even after that was done, I spent a significant chink of the afternoon plugging away at my dissertation proposal.

This proposal's been giving me grief for a few reasons. First, a lot of my literature review and theoretical frameworks were overlapping, which made the whole thing feel super-redundant, and therefore neither useful nor good. In addition, I do research that is different from a lot of my department in that I deal with people - I survey them, interact with them, watch them, talk to them, and ask for their thoughts and experiences and stories. Setting up a methodology without a lot of guidance, especially in terms of a lot of the nitty gritty detail stuff is intimidating me quite a bit.

Finally, the biggest issue is that that the whole thing just feels so...well...big. There needs to be a lot in there, and there's a lot that could and should go in there, as well as a lot that I want to get in there. Just sorting it all out in my head and then on the page is proving to be difficult, especially since everything works together in multiple ways, could be organized in multiple sequences, and just generally presents an awful lot of options to deal with at once.

Now, none of this is insurmountable, and it'll all get done eventually, but I'm finding the work process to be especially painful. Every time I do this, I have a few hours of frustration with little writing, and then little breakthroughs that let me get a bit of writing down. I'm grateful for these periods of productivity, but they just feel so few and far between when I'm sitting down to it. And all the frustration in between? It doesn't leave me feeling all that confident or productive,

I can see the possibilities in my topic, and I think there are some really great ideas in there that I'm looking forward to investigating further? But getting to the point where I can actually do some work? That's going to take...well...some work.

And now, back to it...