Just get started?

I read a post on the Career Center’s blog about PhD candidates looking for non-academic jobs (for general interest – that’s neither a plan of mine nor something I’ll be dealing with for quite a few years), and they had an interesting post about conquering “job search apathy.” As I read it, it occurred to me that these three steps cover the best way to get going with just about anything:

1. Just start, just do something

2. Break it down into manageable pieces

3. Do something every day

This makes so much sense, and is something I’ve been doing (on and off) for a long time, but is something I think deserves constant reminding. My most recent need of a reminder was this:

A full draft of my prospectus!!! It’s been a crazy semester, with all of the teaching and travel, but I finally have at least a draft of what I’m proposing to do, which sounds like it should be written entirely in some sort of distant subjunctive tense, though I know that it will be “time to just start” on actually doing the work soon enough. And for those of you wondering, I did, in fact, take a photo (with my phone) of the finished draft printed and sitting in my advisor's mailbox...