It's 3:50 pm on Saturday afternoon. I've been working for about 2 hours. I just went upstairs to change from my jeans into my shorts and to get a handful of candy. I got a Reese's, 3 hard candies, and 3 lollipops. I also got a quart of chocolate soy milk. I'm a vegetarian and avoid dairy when I can. The chocolate soy milk gives me the chocolate flavor I crave and fills my stomach when I am feeling hungry, but know that I don't need to eat. Lollipops give my mouth smething to fiddle with so I don't bite my nails or eat lots of chips. I suppose they also give me a relatively continuous sugar supply.

I am still working on summarizing the same article I was working on last night. It's been three years since I first read it and I have to go back over a lot of it to make sense of it all. There are a lot of details about ANOVA, covariance, MSE, and Tukey tests. I haven't had a statistics class for 4 years and I don't remember much of it. I didn't understand it all that well at the time, either. I can find and understand the main finding of the experiment, but I don't know enough about the methodology to evaluate the quality of the experiment or the reliability of the conclusions.

Ok, it's time to get to work. More of the background story later.

I've spent about a total of two hours of disciplined work today. My goal is to spend four hours everyday. That was the deal I made with a counselor in the counseling center on campus. For about three years, from 1999-2002, I participated in a graduate student support group for people with procrastination issues. In the past five years, I have been to six different counselors and two psychiatrists to help me with my problems, both academic and personal. I've been told I have ADHD, procrastination problems, and depression. I have been prescribed Adderall and Paxil. The pills give me a bit of a high, but don't make me do my work.

This morning, I was excited to get back to work. At 8:30, I set up my daughters in the kitchen with breakfast and "Clifford" on PBS. Sarah is 8 and Anna is 1. Sarah was a great help babysitting today. But, I wasted nearly two hours this morning because I lost the PowerPoint file I had created with my notecards of about 5 articles. I tried opening the file with various programs. Then I downloaded and installed two other programs I thought might help. I ended up where I began two hours earlier and just opened the file in MS Word and copied the text over into a new PowerPoint file. It took only about 10 minutes and I was back where I was when I lost the file.

Then, about 11:00, instead of getting back to work, I showed Sarah some pictures of the War in Iraq. I actually spent about an hour yesterday finding the pictures and creating a PP slide show. Yes, I like PowerPoint. I've often said that I think in PowerPoint. Then, around noon, it was obvious that Anna was not going to fall asleep for her nap, so I got her up and we all went to have lunch in the kitchen. Then after lunch, we went to the library and the grocery store. Finally, at 3:00 Anna went down for a nap and I went back to work and summarized two mor articles.

Rebecca came home around 4:00 from school. She is a teacher. We cuddled for a bit and then she got Anna up from her nap and took her for a doctor appointment. I went back to work but didn't get much done because I was listening to the news about the war. About 5:45, Rebecca came home and I went for a walk on the bike trail. I went a little over 3 miles in about 50 minutes and I was home by 7:00. Then, Rebecca took Sarah out for dinner and a trip to the mall and I started dinner with Anna while I watched The Screen Savers on Tech TV. Now here it is, 8:54 pm. Anna is in her playpen and I writing this log instead of summarizing journal articles. I promised my advisor I would have these done yesterday. Rebecca will be home soon and we will put the girls to bed and watch TV for an hour, an episode of L&O:Criminal Intent that I have on tape. Then, at 10:00 I am going to sit in front of the tupe with a big bowl of Chinese food and watch the Maryland - UNC-Wilmington game in the NCAA tournament.

Will I get some work done after that? I doubt it.

Well, since Tuesday, I've wasted too much time figuring out how to get this blog posted online. I've finally got it working.

My assignment for the past few days has been to write note cards of all the journal articles that I am using for my lit review chapter. I've had some of these articles for 4 years and I just keep rewriting drafts of a summary. But, in the past few days, I have written real notecards as PowerPoint slides. I've included the citation, the content, questions, conditions of the experiments, and the conclusions. I've had to do this because the draft of my lit review was scattered, inclomplete and incoherent in places. I have written enough to explain what I know that I mean, but it's not enough to explain it to the academic community as a formal literature review.

I should explain why I have a deadline. I've been a graduate student in the School of Education at the University of Delaware since 1996. I'm nearing the end of my 7th year. Because I entered with a Mater's Degree already, I had a 5 year time limit to finish. During my first year, I was so excited that I thought I would finish in 3 or maybe 4 years. I was a full time student for the first three years with a full course load of 3 or 4 doctoral seminars each semester. For my fourth year, the fall of 1999, I went on sustaining status to take a full time position as the computer teacher at a Catholic elementary school here in my hometown. I was at the school for two years, and 4 semesters on sustaining status. During this time, I made almost no progress on my dissertation.

Then in June 2001, I left the elementary school and got a new computer and set up a home office with the belief that I had a new committment to finishing. In the fall of 2001 I was assigned to teach a course for the department as an adjunt faculty instructor. I did the same in the spring of 2002. My family was growing, while I was still making little progress. My wife gave birth to our second daughter on September 12, 2001. Yes, the day after. She is a school teacher and the stress of being at her school on 9-11 probably sent her into labor. While she was on maternity leave, she helped me make significant progress on my research project, but it was personally stressful for her because I am not nice to be around when I don't want to work on my disseratation. But, but by Christmas break, I had enough to convince my advisor, and myself that I was close to finishing. In reality, I still had a long way to go. I taught another class in the spring of 2002, but made little progress on my dissertation. In the summer of 2001, at the end of my 5 year time limit, I was granted an extention by the graduate studies office. But, in the Spring of 2002, my advisor told me that if I didn't successfully defend my proposal by the end of the semester, that he would not support another extension. I put together a decent draft that was enough to get another one year extension. But, there was still no proposal defense. For those of you familiar with doctoral programs, you may be wondering how I was on sustaining status without having passed my proposal defense. Well, the first semester I was allowed to do it because when I asked for sustaining status it was approved and it just continued for two years. Nobody realized that I wasn't supposed to be allowed to do it. At first, I didn't know either, but after I found out, I just didn't ask questions about it.

Today is Day One of The Deadline.

The Deadline is a personal archive of my final push to finish my dissertation. It is 3:12 p.m., Tuesday afternoon, March 18, 2003. I just returned home from a meeting with my advisor.

You are reading my blog. Blog is short for web log, which is simply an online journal. At this point, my intent is to add to this everyday. We’ll see how I do.

I am writing this web log, or blog, for myself as a record of my thoughts, feelings, frustrations and accomplishments as I work on finishing my dissertation. One of the problems I have is the solitary nature of academic research. The necessary hours and hours of reading and writing make me feel lonely. So, instead of doing that solitary work, I go to my computer to write email to my family and friends on a variety of topics. It helps me to connect to others. By writing this blog, I can make that connection as I also organize my thoughts and think about my fears and frustrations. Writing is form of therapy for me.

Another problem I have with working on my dissertation is that I want to write the best dissertation ever and have it published and read by everyone. I know that it will not happen that way but I pressure myself to be great anyway. I end up doing nothing because I get blocked by the pressure of being great and I give up. By keeping this account of my work, I hope that even if my dissertation is not that great, then maybe this story of my efforts will be interesting enough for somebody to publish.

I hope you enjoy reading this. And, if you would like to, write back to me. But, please keep it short. Just a few words of encouragement would be great.

Daniel