With no meetings this week, I used my time to work on rewriting my research proposal and trying to figure out some sort of plan, at least for this term:

• How am I going to plan my days/weeks?
• When do I do my best work/have the most focus?
• What do I need to know?
• Why do I need to know it?
• Whose work should I read first?
• Where on earth do I begin?

I started the week feeling like I was swimming in alphabet soup with no order to anything. But I’ve actually made it to Friday with the sense that a path is starting to form ahead of me. Of course, there are still plenty of side roads and strange little lanes that may or may not lead anywhere, but there is at least a main road now, with some end far off on the horizon.

As for how I’m going to plan my days and weeks, and when I do my best work, I’ve come to the conclusion that I write best at my desk at home, where I can talk out loud and have oddly intense conversations with myself, the kind that make anyone else in the house start to worry about my sanity. I can also spread my papers out across the floor once I run out of room on the desk. Believe it or not, there’s actually a system to the mess.

So although I have a great workspace at the university, I think I’m going to try spending one or two days a week working from home. Hopefully that will help me strike a balance between being productive with my writing at home, while still showing up in person, where there are often interesting discussions happening, and a wonderfully supportive network of others who’ve been through — or are currently going through — the PhD process.

As for what I need to know, I’ve made a list of the most important scholars in my area of interest and plan to focus on their work this term. There’s a mountain of other books and articles that would be interesting to read, but right now I’m trying to hold myself to one question before I start anything: “Why am I reading this article?” Is it because it’s of general interest, or because it’s actually relevant to my topic? If it’s the former, I file it away for another time.

One of the other PhD students, who’s much further along in her journey, recommended a book: Finish on Time — The Doctoral Student Handbook, by Åsa Burman. It’s full of strategies and hands-on techniques for making the PhD process run smoother, and calmer, from start to finish.

I took the book to a café to read, and worked through the first couple of exercises. I was particularly interested in the section on reference management, so today I downloaded EndNote, put on an instructional video, and set to work trying to learn how it worked. When that failed, I signed up for a workshop on EndNote at the university instead. Ah well, can’t win them all.

Overall, it’s been a good week. I rewrote my research proposal (which somehow grew from four pages to fifteen. Oops), fit in my gym sessions, made a plan for the coming weeks, and even found some courses that might be worth taking next term. I even managed a short walk in the sunshine on my lunch break on Thursday. So even though I started the week feeling scattered and unsure where to start, I’m heading into the weekend with an imperfect, but at least clearer, plan for the weeks ahead.