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 services such as DropBox or Google Drive. Whatever you do to backup, make sure you have a consistent and sound strategy for ensuring that your work is protected.

This article was written by Alison Miller, PhD, owner of The Dissertation Coach, a business dedicated to helping doctoral and master’s students successfully earn their graduate degrees.

Copyright August 2007 by Alison Miller, Ph.D., The Dissertation Coach