Chop chop

Today I switched my focus to chapter revising. It was so refreshing! I thought I preferred doing the objective tasks, but that had become so tedious that it was nice to step back and look at the big picture again.

I'm looking particularly at my pilot studies and hypotheses today. I had written all this up for my original prospectus, but of course am unhappy now with how that looks. I've realized that my second pilot study is only marginally related to my present research and the conclusions actually prompt me to look at entirely different things. So chop chop! and it's gone. Now I just have one pilot study that is clearly relevant and impacts my current methodology. Much nicer.

I should note that I am not usually able to delete large chunks of what I have previously written. It's a psychological hangup of sorts. I want to hang on to it, just in case, and do so by leaving it in and just putting a line through it or changing font color or some other method. However, after awhile that gets really cluttered and you're so distracted by thinking whether or not you should include that stuff that you can't move forward. So I have taken to just creating a new document every time I plan to do some major revision, making sure to include the date. That way, I can always go back and review what I've chopped. This really frees me from the fear of deleting something brilliant. And most of the time, it wasn't brilliant and I don't miss it at all.