David Allen’s Getting Things Done is filled with ideas which have helped me, both with the PhD and outside of it. One of them has been a relatively simple concept (as, truthfully, is all of GTD — simple but not easy): next action. No matter what project you’re working on, from cooking dinner to running for Congress to writing a dissertation, it always boils down to answering “what’s the next physical action?” When it comes to the dissertation, this has meant a couple of things.
At the macro level, the “next action” view dovetails nicely with the advice Joan Bolker gives in Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day. She says that you don’t “write a dissertation”, you write the next paragraph. It made a big difference in reducing my anxiety when I finally accepted it. That’s a GTD way of addressing the problem.
More concretely, thinking about next actions has helped guide setting daily milestones for creeping closer to the finish line. My daily (six days a week) goal is simple: five pages. I’m not writing chapter six right now, I’m crunching out five pages. If that gets me to the end of the chapter (unlikely), fine, if not, then I’ll get there soon enough.
Sometimes, if I’m staring at the blank screen, and I can’t churn out the next paragraph it means that there’s something else that should be the “next action”. I may need to look for a particular note, or skim a chapter in a book, or even take a trip to the University library. What’s important in that case is realizing that the next thing to do may not be writing.
“What’s next?” is hardly a profound idea, but it’s been essential to staying on track.
After The Near Life Experience 
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