(a work in progress post, will get updated occasionally, I expect.)
1. You can't leave it all until the last 3 weeks, as you reach a point where you just collapse very easily. Slowly but surely approach is the only option available.
2. Realise at any point you might have a week out due to hospital stay/recovering from a hospital stay.
3. Accept some days you'll get to the office to work and the lights will trigger a migraine, so you leave again by 9am.
4. Have targets such as "4000 words every 10 days, as a minimum, if nothing goes majorly wrong". Daily targets won't work, see point 3.
5. Days with outpatient appointments become "editing days". You'll probably spend a good hour in a waiting room so have a printout of the dissertation and a red pen to hand. Once you are next able to work (either that day, or the next) you'll need an easy task to get settled again, making the silly little changes found on the hard copy is perfect.
6. Some days you'll need to make your drinks when you get to work, rather than take in your own - 4 litres of diluted squash makes bag too heavy, but the neat squash necessary to make 4 litres of diluted squash probably isn't.
7. You'll eye up all your books, wondering if they are needed today. Sadly, they probably are.
8. You'll mildly sprain your wrist about twice a week from misjudging picking up a pile of books. Seemingly you'll never learn, as this frequency stays constant.
9. Occasionally the office rubbish bin will get upturned and used as a foot rest, for those days when having your legs down means your poor heart works far too hard.
10. Salty crisps become clinically indicated.
11. Some days your body will just need to sleep. You'll consider putting all the books under your pillow in case some sort of osmosis will take place.
12. Every target has a buffer zone of a few days. Putting on the pressure tends to result in incapacitating yourself.
13. You try to meet your supervisor at 11am, because that's become a point of the day when you are fairly lucid. After the early morning slurring, before the post-lunch slump.
14. It becomes a toss up between expending energy on doing ironing, or wearing crumpled clothes and getting work done.
15. Some days the brain fog will win. That's ok.
16. Some times, two days in a row, the brain fog will win. That's ok.
17. Cake. Always cake. And occasionally chips. With salt, naturally.
