Finding Perspective with Flashcards (and other bits of stationery)

It’s getting to that time of year when PhD students are frantically trying to prepare themselves for their various annual reviews.  I am one of these students who is frantically trying to quantify everything that has been written/planned/thought about over the past academic year.  As such, I’ve been looking for ways of organising my thesis work (extra-PhD work is an entirely different kettle of fish and will be dealt with at a later date) which will show clear areas of progress from last year and outline where I hope to go over the next few months.

Searching for perspective...
I thought I’d kept my thesis work in pretty good order.  A few months ago, my supervisor and I did a terrifying but ultimately very helpful ‘halfway’ review, and I have meticulous files, sub-files, and sub-sub files throughout my hard drive to break down the different areas of my research. PDF’s are kept separate from notes which are separated from drafts and all organised according to theme/topic and the state of the writing. The trouble is, once I start writing longer pieces and chapter sections, the divisions of this careful filing system tend to break down. 

So, I threw environmental concerns to the wind, and printed off every draft, set of notes, chapter, and page of random musings, organised them thematically, and noted the kind of work required in each area of each document. A time-consuming task, but a valuable one nonetheless.  Already, I felt a bit calmer.  I had actually done some useful bits and bobs on various sections of my thesis over the year and grouping my bits of writing this way helped me to see how my ideas were developing beyond the individual documents.

ALL OF THE NOTES

I decided to go one step further and employ some of the advice I was given at a recent grant-writing workshop: break your project down into its simplest component parts. This was achieved with a cheeky glance back at my initial PhD proposal (which I hadn’t actually looked at in… a rather long time) alongside notes from my supervision meetings over the past 18 months. I could identify where I had moved away from my original plan, how and why this had happened, and where I could see my writing going in the near future. I decided to break down my entire thesis, including both current and future chapters, into key points/areas which could be broken down further on individual flashcards. Now, I’m a big fan of stationery, so any chance to use flashcards and/or fancy pens is a happy occasion.

On each card, I listed a topic’s core components, detailing the different stages needed to explore my ideas, whether the groundwork had already been prepared in my current writing, and outlining how the ideas could feed into and support one another. I particularly like using flashcards for this sort of organisational exercise because you can move topics and sections around easily (I spent a long time doing this on my living room floor) to establish how your arguments and ideas may best flow into one another.  Already, this exercise has told me that my writing in the near future will take a bit of a different form than I had anticipated just a month ago.

Loving life with my flashcards (and newfound perspective 👌)


This little exercise may have taken the best part of an evening (and cost a few trees in the process), but I found it to be a straightforward way of gaining perspective on the state of my thesis and the direction my writing needs to take as I progress into my third (eek!) year.  I was able to identify some key thematic links in disparate parts of my writing (HOW did I not twig that poetic and political bodies have something very significant in common…) as such, have come up with a more solid working structure and framework for the next stage of my research.  PLUS, once I was finished making and organising my flashcards, I got to use one of my fancy ‘E’ paperclips to hold them all together. Simply delightful. 


E Over & Out
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