Writing a draft of my PhD

From Monday I am going to endeavour to write up the whole of my PhD in draft form. Am I ready for this? When is anyone ready?

The aim is to complete my PhD by the end of the first week in January or thereabouts.

I am going to allow myself 50 days for this process. This will also coincide with an intended period of abstinence from alcohol (this for a variety of reasons including getting my weight down).

At a 80 000 words (80 to 100 thousand being allowed for a PhD) this represents 1600 words a day.

I will also need to read during this period and expect this reading to take between 1.5 and 2 hours a day. I envisage the total number hours required to be of the order of 5 hours a day…giving a total of 250 hours, although more may be needed.

As part of my reading I wish to finish off Where Mathematics Comes From (Lakoff, Nunez, 2000) and Women Fire and Dangerous Things (Lakoff, 1987). In order to complete these within the first 30 days I would have to read 10 and 17 pages per day from each of these books respectively. I have another Lakoff book that I wish to read – Philosophy in the Flesh, or some such title….cannot remember.

The important thing about this process is that the PhD draft does not have to be good…it is a draft but something on which to work and build. Essentially there will be:

Reading
Analysis
Writing

At least I have already made a rough draft of the P chapter.