Dr. Steve Tippins, who has served on over 300 dissertation committees, shares seven strategies to finish faster without burning out: plan ahead, use downtime wisely, set a defense date with your committee, accept good enough, write daily, count words not hours, and find an accountability partner.
I want to talk to you today about 7 tips or ideas to write your dissertation faster. My name is Dr. Steve Tippins Ph.D. I've been in academia for 35 years and served on over 300 dissertation committees. The first tip for moving forward faster is know what's coming. Understand the process that's out in front of you. Many people do a task and then wait to be told what's next. If you do tasks knowing what's coming, you're going to be ready to move ahead much faster. If you have, for example, finished your prospectus and you have turned it into your committee to get approval on your idea, many people will just wait to be told what's next. But if you know what's next is your proposal, your first 3 chapters, start working on that. That helps you move forward faster. And that works in well with our second tip, and that's using downtime to your advantage. So for example, when you submit things to your committee, there is time when you're in theory not doing anything, just waiting for their comments back. So be doing literature searches, start thinking about your data collection, start preparing your IRB application. Doing things that you can do while you're waiting takes huge amounts of time off of the process. The third point, and this one I see rarely used, When you do make submissions to your committee, suggest timelines. For example, you've submitted your proposal to your committee. You can say, "Would it be possible to defend on April 18th?" or something. Pick a date 3 weeks out, something like that. And that gets them thinking about, well, when would they be ready to defend, as opposed to, "I'm just going to concentrate on this document.", and then when we get it all set, then we'll think about setting a defense date, which could be May 15th. So just subliminally giving your committee some ideas can help you move forward faster. The fourth point I'm going to phrase in two ways: good enough is good enough, or don't try for perfection. I've seen too many people use up too much time trying to write what they think is the perfect document or the perfect chapter. And the problem is your committee is the keeper of perfect, not you. So you want to get it to a point where it's good enough that it then gets submitted to your committee where you get feedback and move forward. Waiting for perfection might be totally different than what your committee was thinking of, and you've just wasted a lot of time writing and thinking about it, and you may have to go backwards in order to get to where they're ready to approve things. And the fifth point about moving forward faster is consistency. Keep showing up. Do not think that you can write every 2 weeks and get things done, because when you wait a week or 2 weeks to write again, there's startup time every single time. Where was I? What was I working on? What is this point I was making? But if you keep coming back very consistently, even daily, then you lose those startup times. You keep continuity, and you move faster. The sixth point I've heard expressed as track words, not hours. And that means sitting down at your computer for 5 to 6 hours and accomplishing very little to nothing is not writing and it doesn't move you forward faster. But when you write words, you're actually moving forward. So don't think about it as just the time you put down. Think about the progress you make. That's what moves you forward quicker. And if you're ever looking for help along the way, join our free dissertation help group by clicking the link below. So the seventh point I wanna make is accountability. Accountability is important for a lot of reasons, but one is when there's somebody outside that I'm reporting to, I really don't like saying I didn't do anything. When I can say I've done this, then it's easier to report to someone, and that builds momentum for you. And you wanna keep having those positive interactions with your accountability partner or group or team that you're working with. So by building in accountability to your process, you're building in a little outside pressure, support to move you forward.
