celebrations/frustrations

[kaberett]

Every chunk of this PhD that I get Done I learn a whole bunch of new Organisational Skills that would have made it much easier if I'd been implementing them from the start.

At this stage, I've got two principal spreadsheets per project, one for I Think I Want This Table In The Chapter and one for I'm Pissing Around, Let's See What Falls Out. I have one veusz file, with multiple pages and one figure per page. (I keep contemplating splitting it out into "this is the figures for the paper" and "this is me messing about" but even at this late stage with the current paper that keeps shifting enough that I haven't bothered.)

... only I've also got all the intermediate spreadsheets & figure files that accumulated before I consolidated on this schema, and I'm loathe to either delete any of them (WHAT if they come in USEFUL) or to clutter up my Nice Tidy Definitely Useful files with them.

(We don't talk about text. I would prefer to work in LaTeX and use version control; my supervisor would prefer to work in Word with _v$X_$INITIALS. This means that at any one time I have (1) a LaTeX file I'm dumping thoughts into and attempting to wrangle all my references in, (2) a main Word document I'm sending back and forth to said supervisor, (3) a subsidiary Word document in which I dump words that aren't useful yet, or were once useful and might be again and aren't currently, (4) probably also just a neat .txt file containing meeting notes I haven't written up properly yet and also a rough todo and also brief notes on whichever papers I've read recently but not incorporated yet, and (5) a Scrivener file I'm extremely desultorily poking at in the interests of maybe putting the thesis together in that, eventually, that is absolutely running off some Stranger On The Internet's labour-of-love updating-the-abandoned-beta-to-keep-working-on-Linux. It's a mess. Whether I'll work it out before I actually submit is... as yet unclear.)

Comments

[kaberett]

for the avoidance of doubt, I am wildly oversimplifying the spreadsheet situation. I also have:

• my master document listing all the digestions I've ever made, and the masses, and (in theory) whether or not I've ever analysed them (but like fuck do I keep that up to date)
  
• at least one for each individual analytical session
  
• one for modelling of melting (well, if I'm doing modelling)
  
• one for spiders
  
• yes that is deliberately phrased in a fashion that is opaque to people who aren't geoscientists, For Humour Value
  
• I... should go to bed I have columns tomorrow
  

[hilarita]

Yes well I decided that my boss' preference for Word did not in any way justify the hassle of using Word for me. So I'm using Overleaf, which is mostly working. (Also, my second supervisor (unofficial) is A-OK with Overleaf, so hurrah.) I have written a thesis in Word. It was sheer hell. This time, I want version control, and by god, I'm going to use it.

[silveradept]

Which is to say, by the time you've completed the thesis, you will have had to work out from first principles how to begin writing it?

Because this certainly seems like the kind of thing that has been taught so far.

[sebenikela]

Every chunk of this PhD that I get Done I learn a whole bunch of new Organisational Skills that would have made it much easier if I'd been implementing them from the start.

ye gods THIS I FEEL IT

[halojedha]

SAME. I haven't done a PhD but I feel this every time I do my taxes, for instance - each year I refine my system and I'm like oh my god, if I'd done it this way last year I'd have saved SO MUCH TIME. And I *am* currently writing an 80k non fiction book so that's... Kinda like a PhD? And oh boy, the spreadsheets. They multiply.