100 Days- and the next 23 days

They tell me that is takes 2 months to write a dissertation. This seems strangely arbitrary, but since I imagine that my dissertation will be relatively straightforward to write, as far as these things go, I am going to use that as my meter. More on that process later, but for now, I have an always expanding list of things to do before that mark. That is actually 23 days from now.

It boggles the mind to imagine how this is all just going to come together in the next 23 days. I'd imagined a steady transition from doing experiments to reading more and thinking heavily about my results and their context in the literature and finally putting that down in words. This steady transition I thought would happen this month. Instead, this month I am scrambling to cram in some extra science before a variety of deadlines. This is tough actually, in your last few months of grad school, almost every experiment is very purposeful, every experiment gets published. So if you stop doing experiments too soon, you publish less. This is the time in my career I MOST want to be at the bench, it is finally gratifying, and I am about to be ripped away to tackle the painful task of writing about it.

I am going to try to give myself some hard deadlines, because I think I will need every minute of my 2 months to get this document written, so I won't have time to spend some extra hours at the bench everyday. Not sure how else to set myself up for success- any ideas? I am also not sure how I am going to manage writing towards deadlines, once that chapter of my life starts, but I figure the first step is to clear my calender of benchwork so I can focus on one undertaking at a time.

BTW- today marks 100 days until I defend this document. 100 days until you can call me Doctor (hopefully).