Confessions of a Dissertation Procrastinator

Being housebound this weekend with walking pneumonia (self-inflected house bound since I need to get well so I can go to the beach next weekend) I actually had an epiphany about my struggle with completing my dissertation...I am a procrastinator, and a very good one. I remember in third year residency our instructor said, "who do you think has the cleanest house, those working on their dissertation or those who are not"? Of course, you know that the majority of us said that it was those who are not. Why? Because we were in residency, we were excited, we were getting close to putting our proposal together...essentially we were still in the "honeymoon" phase of our dissertations. We love our topics, we were with our peers who were at the same stage...it was EXCITING! Anyway, I almost lost my story here...the truth, those who are working on their dissertations have the cleanest house. Why? I can tell you why, I've lost that *loving feeling*.

Why have I lost it? Well, I finished all of my coursework in early 2010, so here I am two years later, right about the same time that I finished two years ago, and I haven't submitted my IRB draft. If you all knew how close I am to finishing final edits and the IRB application ready to submit, particularly those who know me, would be shocked that I can't seem to find time to sit down and just DO IT!

Well, the epiphany I had yesterday was not about being a procrastinator, I've known that for a very long time. The epiphany I had yesterday was why it is so hard to finish the few hours of work to have it ready to submit to IRB. Now, the story of my dissertation journey is not dissimilar to many folks that I know. Some of my cohort finished exactly on time, about six months after their coursework was complete. Others came behind in about a year or so after. Some probably will never finish or didn't finish all of their coursework. For a doctoral students, this is about par for the course.

I am earning my doctorate from an online university (the epiphany part is coming soon), therefore now that I have completed my coursework, I don't have anyone to collaborate with. No more papers to write, no more eight week 1:1 courses with my dissertation mentor. Here I am, all alone, trying to complete this. Don't get me wrong, I LOVE my topic. It is something that I am still passionate about. And, according to this blog on ZDnet, item #3 is what I'm writing about. I committed this topic in late 2006 and the fact that it is predicted to be adopted in 2-3 years, well, it's time to get your dissertation published, I told myself.

So...here's what I've learned this weekend on my self-imposed housebound time to finally just get it done --- Inspiration is definitely needed!

1. Find something that re-inspires you about your topic! Make yourself re-research your topic. When I first started on the dissertation journey, there were very few articles that were written about the value of online gaming for educational purposes, whether it's corporate training or teaching students. There were some pretty good books, but quite honestly most of what I was finding was on blogs, etc., research I cannot use in my dissertation. Spending time researching now, many more articles can be found on the topic, which is inspiring!
2. Read! I bought the book, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day written by Joan Bolker, EdD when I started my journey. Of course, I skimmed it, took away some tips and put it on my bookshelf. The book is now sitting on my desk and I did way more than skim it yesterday. Definitely worth the read and I have this weird "thing", if a book is on my desk, whatever the topic is about, it helps me focus on that topic. A little nuts, but for me it actually works. I have four books sitting on my desk to specific pages...three are for my "day job" and this one is for me.
3. Start writing! I used to blog almost daily about my retail store. Of course, that was a marketing tool but I was still writing. I was writing up some tips to share with a class I teach for my "Twitter Project Challenge" so that they would use Twitter right to learn about the role that technology plays in creating a marketing plan using social media. What happened as I wrote this down in a blog?! You got it, I got INSPIRED to write (this is the epiphany!). Since my job deals, for the most part, solely with data, analytics and reporting, I work with numbers day in and day out...very little writing. After I wrote in the blog yesterday, I spent time researching and making notes last night. Today, I'm writing another blog entry and when I'm finished writing this...you got it! The final, final, final, final edit is next.
4. Reach out! You have colleagues that have finished or close to finishing or maybe even struggling as you are. Reach out to them and have a chat. Talking about an area that you are struggling with can be so helpful to someone who understands your *pain*. I'm telling you, I put my dissertation away for about nine months because I was struggling with one area. I did reach out but it was to the wrong people, therefore, I didn't make any progress. In year four residency, all it took was 10 minutes of the instructor's time with me and I whipped out a four page section for the part that was keeping me from resubmitting. So, get yourself a peer support group, you'll be glad you did.
5. Make everyone in your house leave you alone! You must have time to do this so you aren't distracted. I cannot tell you how often I have gotten up while working on my dissertation only to come back hours later to click the save button and close it. Set a schedule that your family knows or if you are like me and live in a house where there are no walls between the kitchen, family room, den and my office, I'm thinking about buying one of those hats that Michelle Pfeiffer wore in The Story of Us (1999) that had the blinking red light on it. They know not to interrupt me while I'm typing but since I'm re-working through edits, I'm not typing away at 100+ words per minute, so they think it's alright to talk to me. Shut your door, hang up an "appointment with mom, sister, wife, etc" sign-up sheet on your office so that your family knows you aren't ignoring them but that you need to not be disturbed.

So, the real epiphany I had was about writing. If you are tired of looking at your dissertation, put it away and start reading new articles on your topic that are not included in your dissertation, start a blog do anything you can do to get you back to the inspiration of writing. You'll be glad you did!

How to make Twitter Work For You, When You Think it's Not Valuable!.

I teach a technology course and in the fourth week of the course, we delve into marketing and social media and what role IT plays with online marketing. Since I was preparing this little "lecturette" to share with my students next week, I figured I would write it down here first. Every time I teach this course, I challenge the students to set up a Twitter account and use it for seven straight days. I then ask them to summarize what they found beneficial and what they didn't find beneficial with using Twitter. In almost every class, the majority of the students have not used Twitter. After the "Twitter Project" as I call it ended, 9/10 students always come back saying they will never use it again, they didn't find it useful.

So, I'm writing down these tips for them to use as a guideline on their 7-day Twitter journey so I can see if it raises the rate of "will use it" responses.

Personal Use

1.      Choosing the Right Application: I strongly recommend using a Twitter application that gives you the ability to use it on your desktop or phone to give you control over the way information comes to you via Twitter. My personal favorite is TweetDeck (http://www.tweetdeck.com/). There are plenty of other applications to use and I will share those in the business use section of tips. The reason that I personally like TweetDeck is that it gives me the opportunity to search "key words" and create a column in the application based on those keywords. That way I can read posts that are about certain topics that I am interested in reading. This gives me control so I am not wading through tons of postings trying to find a topic of interest.
2.      Who to Follow: Okay, there are some of us who love certain celebrities, so it is not uncommon to choose celebs to follow. I will admit I jumped on the Ashton Kutcher bandwagon and started following him when he had the bet CNN that he could get to 1 million followers than they did. I do follow a few celebrities but I'm picky about what I want to see. Yes, that's just me. You may have sports players that you like, or personalities that you like, etc. That's the cool thing about Twitter, you control who you follow. I also find people to follow based on my topics of interest. I also LOVE Mashable (@mashable). Their stories and blogs are about leveraging social media. You can also follow companies like Apple, Motorola, and many, many other companies. When you set up your Twitter account for the first time, use the web application to get a listing of categories to choose from.
3.      Your Followers: When you are notified that someone is following you, check out their postings in their bio, you might find that they tweet about topics that interest you.
4.      What Do I Say: To me, this is almost like the dilemma I had with friends on Facebook. I could care less if you had spaghetti tonight. I mean, that's all "I had spaghetti tonight". BORING! Now, if you had capellini pomodora tonight at the new restaurant in town, you are giving that business a boost. You can tweet about stories you have read that are interesting, you can retweet someone else's post that you are following to share with your group of followers. Just make sure it's not drivel. If you blog, tweet your blog if you want people to read it.

Business Use (Small Businesses)

1.      Choosing the Right Application: My viewpoint on this is from a small business perspective and how small businesses can compete with the "big boys" with lots of money in their advertising budget. SEO has a great list of the top 10 Twitter application (http://www.seo-smo.net/2011/09/29/10-best-twitter-applications-tools/). You have to decide which tool is best for you. Do you need to track metrics of who are mentioning your products? As a business using Twitter, I would recommend an application that does track and trend so you know if you are reaching your target audience. I would also recommend that you use an application that allows you to schedule tweets so you don't have to log in certain times a day. If you are featuring a sale on products, you can create tweets that will be delivered at the time you want with that sale. This is invaluable since you need to be working instead of watching Twitter or remembering that you wanted to post at 3PM.
2.      Getting People to Follow You: If you are in business, chances are if you are using Twitter you are using it to drive traffic to your website. It's important to choose keywords, just like search engine optimization, for those people who use keywords to find topics of interest to them. Using Twitter for my business meant that I wanted to choose very specific words for people to find me.
3.      Linkbacks: Not only do you want people who use Twitter to find you, you also want to use Twitter so that your profile comes up in the search engines. This really good blog has some great tips for linkbacks: (http://blogdesignstudio.com/blogging-tips/17-simplest-ways-of-building-the-easy-and-free-link-backs/). I cannot stress how important it is to leverage linkbacks to your website your blog, etc.
4.      Create a Blog: Since you are limited on Twitter to how much you say, use a blog to post pictures and write up information about products, sales, etc. Then post your blog link to Twitter using a few keywords. People then linkback to your blog and they get to read the whole "shebang" about what you are doing.
5.      Strategy: Last and definitely the first thing is to define your strategy to determine how social media marketing is going to work for your business. That should be your first step in this whole process.

This information barely scratches the surface of using Twitter for your business. As with any business strategy you embark on, it's important to do your research so that you set up your social media strategy that will work best for you. Start with reputable journals and blogs on leveraging social media to wade through the mire to find the information that best suits your business needs.

Happy Tweeting!