Monday, October 30, 2006

Gearing up for InaDwriMo

You may notice a prominent addition to the sidebar: a cryptic list of all the things I have left to do on my thesis before I will have a complete first draft that I can think about showing my committee (plus some other bits of academic writing I want to get around to). I want to get everything in the "from scratch" list completed by the end of November, and the rest done by the end of the year. I plan to cross items off as they are completed, so you can all be avid spectators at the See StyleyGeek Procrastinate Motor Through Her Dissertation Olympics (I know you're excited).

Below that is my word-o-meter, stolen straight from the Zokutou website. I don't like the fact that it's set to zero right now, but I plan to do something about that starting Wednesday. In fact, I've been practising! I wrote 2100 words today. Are you all proud of me?

Because it's all about the gadgets here, I also heartily recommend Zokutou's spreadsheet for keeping track of your writing progress. Oh, the statistics! It's almost enough to make me want to get up in the morning.*

________

* No, wait, that's Geekman with his spray bottle full of water. (I've been getting up right on time since we started using that strategy.)

5 Comments:

Nicola said...

I first learned how to use spreadsheets when working on my master's thesis. Words. Footnotes. Word-to-footnote ratio. And so on. Excel and the extras-count-words function in Word can be marvellous motivators

Jenny said...

Sounds like your alarm clock is a lot more effective than mine. Good luck with the diss!

Twirly said...

ok I'm set - I'm not doing words I'm doing pages - I estimate I have 113 pages to write - that's 3.8 pages per day!!

StyleyGeek said...

Word-to-footnote ratio? I think you might just have made it onto my list of people who are bigger geeks than I am :)

Miss M., your project, should you choose to accept, is to create a robotic alarm clock that sprays you with water until you get out of bed. It has to be able to scoot out of reach when you try to disable it, too. You'd make millions.

Twirly, yay! You can do it! I calculate 3.8 pages to be close to 1500 words (unless you're using LaTeX or double-spacing or something), so our goals are pretty much the same.

Jenny said...

hmm... could be a challenge... Possibly too much for me, but I have a lot of friends in mechatronics who could probably come up with something.