Taking Charge of your Summer: Goal-Setting Strategies to Move Your Dissertation Forward

Part One: Setting Effective Goals
At long last summer is finally here.  For three months your time is your own, no grading, no office hours, no meetings, no classes to teach or attend.
As wonderful as this moment always is, summer’s greatest gift, time, can also be it’s greatest challenge.  While the relaxed pace of the summer months always comes as a welcome relief, it also makes us completely responsible for managing and structuring our time, which most of us find to be difficult.  It is for this reason that so many of the best intentions for making progress on the dissertation never come to fruition.  And the best time to take charge of that situation is now, before you get too used to hanging out at your favorite coffeehouse, or reading those gardening books that have been sitting on your shelf since last fall.  In the first part of this article, I will talk about how to set good, effective goals that will keep you moving forward.  In the second, I will offer a few strategies to help you stick with those goals through the next three months, so that you will have real progress to show your advisor come September.
Setting Effective Goals
The first important step is to create the structures that will empower you to succeed.  This includes things like creating a schedule, choosing a work environment that facilitates productivity, and the removal of distractions that will side-track you.  Decide ahead of time what your writing hours will be.  Consider your work style, i.e. do you prefer to have one long work period, or several shorter ones?  Select a physical work location that is conducive to productivity and that eliminates external distractions.    If there are external factors that you need to take into account, such as child-care or other family or work responsibilities, take them into account now, so that they are less likely to take you by surprise, or provide you with an easy avoidance tactic later on.
Once you have your basic structures in place, you need to set specific, measurable goals for what you want to accomplish this summer.  Rather than using words like “a few”, “a while”, “some”, use specific language, two chapters, finish data collection and analysis.  Simply saying, I want to get a lot of writing done this summer”, will put you on a fast road to nowhere.  If you want to get to a specific destination by summer’s end, then the first step is to know where you’re going. 
Once you’ve identified your destination, the next step is to figure out how to get there.  To create a road-map to that larger goal, you must identify the smaller tasks, or subgoals, that you will have to complete along the way.  If, for example your goal is to write two chapters, think about what is involved in achieving that goal.  What do you have to read?  How long do you expect those chapters to be, i.e. how much writing do you need to do each day, each week, each month?  Do you need to do additional research?  Make a detailed, organized list containing each of the tasks involved in writing those two chapters of your dissertation.  Now take that list and create a daily, weekly, and monthly schedule for completion of each of those tasks. 
Having a written work-plan has many benefits.  One principal benefit is that it will help you to set realistic, attainable goals.  Breaking your goals into smaller tasks and setting yourself a schedule, will give you a more concrete sense of what you can actually accomplish.  It will also allow you to monitor your progress, which will help you to be aware of problems before they become so big as to be insurmountable. And there’s nothing like being able to look back at how far we’ve come, to motivate us to keep pushing on to the finish-line.  As you check off each completed task, you give yourself a concrete, visible record of your progress as you complete your to-dos for one week and move on to the next week’s work. 
Don’t be afraid to set challenging goals.  While setting unattainable goals can increase anxiety and frustration, setting goals that are not demanding enough can lull you into a false sense of security.  This can mislead you into underestimating the work ahead of you, which can lead to procrastination, and ultimately failure to meet your goal.  So set goals that will stretch you, and force you to stay on task.  And remember, if you’ve over- or under-estimated yourself, it’s fine to adjust.  Just make sure that any adjustments you make are deliberate, rather than allowing yourself to slide into unproductivity.
So set yourself up for success!  If you follow these guidelines, you will lay a foundation for a productive and rewarding summer.  In my next post, I will provide tips to help you maintain the structures you have put in place and stick with your goals so that come fall, you’ll find you’ve made significant progress toward a done dissertation.