4.5 Establishing Daily and Weekly Performance Goals

You need a system of progress monitoring to avoid picking-up delays without being aware of it.

During the orientation and research phases, the daily goal has to be expressed in hours, for example 2 1/2 hours per day for no less than 12 hours per week.

From the start, you have to be honest with yourself.

• administrative or managerial work does not count, for example photocopying or searching online for material that you may or may not read later
• phone calls, coffee breaks, even bathroom breaks, have to be deducted
• write the start time and the end time of each session into your calendar, then deduct the minutes that do not count; leave only time actually spent on research, reading, and writing
• be sure to mute your phone and shut down the e-mail app on your laptop; if you are constantly hearing "ding" or other sounds whenever a message comes in, you will not be able to focus on your research and you may actually end up checking your e-mail and losing your line of thinking
• as a rule of thumb, a session is useless if it does not contain at least 1 hour of totally uninterrupted work and unless you spend at least 2 to 3 hours on your research every day for at least 6 days per week, your research is not efficient because you will waste too much time to get back into the material after a break of several days, instead of making actual progress.

Once you have identified the bulk of the sources you need to analyze, break down the number of pages you have to read and spread them out over the number of days you have in Phase 2. For example, if you have to read 40 articles with an average length of 25 pages in print, that adds up to 1,000 pages. If you have two months to read them, that gives you about 50 days plus some reserve or breaks. Consequently, you need to read about 20 pages per day. Ideally, you will aim for a full article per day because some will be longer or more difficult to understand and will take more time than others.

Remember also that reading does not always mean reading cover to cover or from the first to the last line. In some materials, there will be parts that are not relevant to your work. Skip those. In other materials, certain passages will be introductory or of minor importance. Read those only diagonally or superficially. We will come back to the concept of Active Reading and the difference between Deep and Shallow Reading below.

During the writing phase, set yourself daily and weekly goals expressed in words. For example, if a 3 credit paper needs to have 75 pages of text, and if a page averages 500 words, you need 37,500 words. If your writing phase has 16 weeks, first deduct one day per week to rest and another day per week as a flex-day for other work. Then divide 37,500 by 80 days and come out at 470 words/day, roughly one page. That should be quite doable.

Finally: Try to enjoy the work. If you are happy about your progress, you will be better at what you do! Reward yourself for achieving your goals! If you have done your hours or written your words, take an evening off, go to the movies, have a free Saturday or Sunday… Keep it sustainable, however (binge driking on your night off rarely bodes well for the work on the day after!).