Research
Research projects differ in many ways, but most of them have at least two important things in common. One of them is the pressure of time. The other is the tendency to forget, in your natural concern to produce a final product, what you have done day to day on the project.
Calendar: Keeping Track of Your Time
What you can't be sure of before you start your project, of course, is exactly how you are going to spend your research time. You can only guess and make some plans. The calendar you draft in your proposal is a record of your guess. Set up some tentative intermediate deadlines that will remind you day to day and week to week how much you have left to do. You will probably have to adjust these intermediate deadlines as you go along, but even the process of adjusting them will help you know where you are and how far you have to go.
One way to help keep track of time is to use a monthly box-calendar. It should include major research work points during the term, major deadlines in your other courses, and any important events in your personal, family, and work life.
The way to stay on schedule is to watch your calendar and keep looking ahead as you work. If you see the project getting too large or too complex for the time you have left, ask your research advisor to help you subdivide it and subordinate pieces that you cannot treat in depth during the time you have left.
Research Log: Keeping Track of Your Work
Often what keeps you going when you are doing independent study research is the pressure of time: making it to a deadline in one piece. Because of the pressure of time, you are likely to forget what you did, how you did it, and what you thought and felt about it. The urge to move on to the next thing is all but irrepressible. That is the reason many researchers and scholars keep research logs. A research log is a long-term memory bank and a creativity tool. With a complete record of what you did and thought, you can go back over your work from time to time to see how your ideas have developed and discover new ideas or new directions for research. You may want to make use of a double-entry process log. Use the left-hand pages for work notes. Use the right-hand pages for personal responses to your work.
The work notes that you write on left-hand pages are dated descriptions of what you did, when and where you did it, and why. You can quote passages from your reading that seem interesting, useful, or suggestive. You can draft some sentences or paragraphs that may find a place in your proposal or final thesis. You can list books and articles you have consulted or plan to consult.
The reflection notes that you write on the right-hand pages are an on-the-spot informal record of your personal experience doing the project. This is the place to carry on a running conversation with yourself about what you are doing. Part of your personal experience is your thinking: your hunches and guesses, however wild; your off-the-wall ideas; questions that arise in your mind, however relevant or irrelevant; your plans; your doubts; your hopes; and your reflections on passages you have read or on passages you have quoted on the left-hand page.
A double-entry process log of this sort takes only a few minutes a day. But its value, as the material accumulates, soars far beyond that small investment of time.
