Dissertation Coach

How to Be A Productive & Motivated Graduate Student

Strategy #20

Back Up Your Work

While it is not exactly a motivation or productivity strategy, I want to remind you to back up your dissertation files on your computer. Backing up your work is an important way to protect yourself from losing your hours of hard work and all of the effort you have made to be motivated and productive. Even if you have never lost a hard drive, had a serious computer virus, or experienced some other terrible computer mishap, losing electronic versions of your dissertation can happen at any point. I have witnessed too many clients lose their work and need to spend long hours recreating previous writing or data sets. A simple backup strategy is to email your work to an online email account on a regular basis that exists independent of your computer. You can also backup to online backup services, external drives, or CDs. Whatever you do to backup, make sure you have a consistent and sound strategy for ensuring that your work is protected.

This article is written by Alison Miller, Ph.D., owner of The Dissertation Coach, a business dedicated to helping doctoral and master’s students earn their graduate degrees once and for all.

Please visit www.thedissertationcoach.com for more information.