The end of productivity...

...well hopefully not, but it is the end of Productive June today. At least I'm ending it on a somewhat productive note, as I am in fact at uni today (yes Saturday) working on my thesis - well besides this quick break I'm obviously taking! As it is so quiet in the PhD office on the weekend (usually only 1-2 other people come in, but I'm often alone) I find it less distracting, but also since I know I'm depriving myself of relaxing/having fun I think I may as well use the time properly and actually do work. 

My writing is going reasonably too. Many people gave me the advice "just write 500 words a day", and I have to say, now that I have finally taken that advice it actually works. I've been (nerdishly) plotting my word count in an excel spreadsheet graph, and I find it encouraging to see the progress. It also spurs me on to at least get to 500, and once I do that I usually end up writing more. It's also helped me to worry a bit less about the looming deadline of November 12 (to be henceforth known as "arrgh no more scholarship must hand in dreaded thesis day" ...too long?), as I (also nerdishly) calculated exactly how many words I could have written by then if I write around the same amount most days. It seems feasible I could have a thesis by then! The other cool thing (well cool to me anyway) is that since I'm doing so much thinking/reading/writing about my topic, I'm really starting to enjoy it again. Additionally it's encouraging to re-read things I first read in my first year and barely understood, and find that now not only do I understand it, but I can critique it.

One downside however is the increasing pile of papers and mess my desk is accumulating. I think this PHD comic sums it up pretty well:

from here

Well sorry if this was totally boring but hey this is pretty much my life at the moment - so thanks for calling my life boring :P