Workflow

Everyone is responsible for identifying potential constraints for his workflow, and to ask for help to overcome these constraints. If, for example, you do not know how to start writing, then you need to go to your supervisor and ask “how should I start?”.
If you get an answer that does not help you, you need to go to the supervisor again and say “your last advice did not help me, I need another one”.
If you feel a constraint but cannot identify it, you need to tell your supervisor “I cannot pin down my constraint, please help me”.

At no time should you use the silent excuse “I do not know what to do so I can’t work”. It is your responsibility to keep asking for advice until you know what to do.
For trivial questions such as “how should a citation look” or “how can I delete a column in Excel”, please ask a colleague student immediately. If no other student is available, then ask M. Clauss immediately. Do not waste time by being constrained by some lack of trivial knowledge.
For example, if you have the choice between “my room mate can explain this to me tonight” and “M. Clauss can explain this to me immediately”, then ask the latter.

Sometimes, it may be impossible to solve a constraint (such as the question for which paper you are preparing a manuscript, or whether a certain text structure can be finalized), and you may get the answer to just “carry on nevertheless”.

Writing
Use Endnote from day one on.

Sometimes your supervisor might tell you to “do such a table” or “write such a paragraph” or “calculate such a parameter” or “do such a graph”. You should be aware at any time that such an advice does not mean the table or paragraph or parameter or graph will finally be used. Very often this “trying out” of data presentation and text is just part of the process to arrive at the best solution.
Be prepared that you will have to revise a text repeatedly before you reach the final version.
For this reason, you should try to deliver text and data and ideas to your supervisor as often as possible. Do not think that you “just sit down for two weeks, write the whole thing, and be done with it”. Your supervisor will most likely demand changes.
This is particularly relevant for students who plan to finish their “writing up” while working in private practice – do not plan to “wrap up everything in one bout” but deliver text on a regular basis to your supervisor. Otherwise, you may become very disappointed and your doctoral thesis might become delayed – or, as we observed in several cases – you might not even finish. If you have to start working in practice before your thesis is finished, schedule regular meetings with your supervisor.

Practice writing
We encourage the following steps to practice writing and “get a feel” for handling texts

1. Write a fictitious email to a friend, in which you explain your project in layman’s terms, including hypothesis, methods, potential results, and their potential relevance. This should take no more than one hour. Send it to your supervisor (we do not correct this, any feedback – if wanted – will be oral).

2. Write a fictitious summary of your thesis (max. one page, copy the style of actual theses), in which you build in fictitious results and discuss their relevance. This means you have to “make a bet” what your actual results will be. Send it to your supervisor (we do not correct this, any feedback – if wanted – will be oral).

3. Write a structure for your thesis, including the different topics for the literature research section and the discussion. Discuss this with your supervisor.

4. In doing the literature review part, the following procedure is suggested: first, have a structure (which is flexible and might change over time), already in the thesis layout. Then, do not start reading and think that you will “write later”; with the very first paper you read, take notes – and directly type these notes into your structure, underneath the according headings. From one paper, you might use five different notes/ideas, and type them under five different headings. You need not write full sentences, it does not have to sound perfect or nice, just enough so that you know what you mean. But, most important: at the end of each of these notes, press the “insert citation” button of the Endnote program so that the reference is added to the note automatically. When doing so, a collection of notes will grow. Later, if you want to shift the position of notes, you can do this easily using copy-paste. Much later, you might only write out your notes into complete sentences, which is easy. Following this procedure will prevent you from wasting a lot of time “just reading” and then having to go through all the papers again when you actually write. We recommend that you mark the spots in the paper from which you copy your notes (either by text marker on the hard copy, or using the highlight function in the Adobe reader). Of course, you will have to go back to certain papers because in the beginning, you will not pick up everything that will be important to you later. But nevertheless, we highly recommend you overcome any reservations you have against this strategy, and just do it. It will save you a lot of time.

5. From now on, small text sections should be given to a colleague student, who shall make corrections or comments, and then to the supervisor. These versions should be in the layout of a real thesis right from the start, including proper use of Endnote reference layout.

Text revision
The worst part about writing a text is the moment when you have to face the corrections and comments of your supervisor.
A personal remark by M. Clauss: no matter who corrects my text – be it my boss, a co-author, a reviewer – I hate it. My mood drops, my ego is hurt, and I start to think about all the weak character traits of the corrector to convince myself that this person is immoral, incompetent, and downright mean. This might be a strategy to let off some steam and adrenaline, just as day-dreaming can be very gratifying. The important thing is to have these thoughts in silence, and not to share them with others. And then to move on.
In the very large majority of cases, corrections and comments improve the quality of the work. Hating being corrected should not prevent you from realizing this fact.
Especially in the beginning, when you are producing your first 1-4 manuscripts, you will get a lot of corrections. Going through 10 versions of a manuscript before the supervisor is finally satisfied should be considered normal. When doing corrections, separate correction steps may be necessary – for example, if there are a lot of orthographic and grammatical errors, the corrector might focus on these first and not correct the tables. Then, on the second version, the supervisor might correct the tables. Reacting by “last time you liked them” is not adequate – last time, the correction focus was on something else. Therefore, again, present your work to the supervisor regularly, in short intervals.
When preparing a manuscript, a supervisor might well change her/his opinion about a matter of wording or structure, leading to the re-correction of something back to its previous stage. This is not a sign of incompetence on the part of the supervisor but a normal procedure in the process of finding the best dramaturgy for the text and for data presentation.
The best way to deal with corrections is to briefly let your anger rise and subside and then start working on them RIGHT AWAY (best on the same day, at the latest on the next day). A page full of corrections looks like a lot of work, but actually most of them are often easy to do. You need the same attitude as you have towards mowing a lawn or doing the dishes: get it over with quickly.

Co-Authors
Writing a manuscript is mostly done with co-authors. This means that you know, in advance, that there will be a time when your manuscript will be with the co-author, and you can’t work on it yourself. You have to plan for this. It gives a bad impression if you complain about the delay due to a co-author (even if this might be problematic at times), because you should plan for this in advance. Three weeks is a very optimistic minimum for a reaction time of a co-author. Organise you work so that you have something else to do during the wait.
In our experience, deadlines are often not met because the first author prepares the manuscript just briefly before deadline, and then relies on co-authors to give their input within one or two days. This is very often (unless agreed on in advance) a big strain on the co-authors, and no professional conduct. If you have a deadline, talk with all potential co-authors well before you send them the manuscript, and plan ample time for them to give their input.

Parallel working
It is a good idea to work on at least two manuscripts / text sections at the same time. Thus, if a co-author or supervisor is working on one text, you can work on the other one.
If you have ‘writer’s block’ on the one text, fiddle around with the other one. Quite often, this is the experience of M. Clauss, you will get a good idea for one of the projects that are in your brain on ‘standby’ mode – the good ideas come to you when you are not trying to have them. This will also make literature research more efficient, because when looking for something on your main topic, you will often stumble across sources that are good for your other project

Don’t do a job – tell a story
Sometimes we observe students just ‘do a job’ – meet the formal criteria of a manuscript – write some text with a few quotes in the beginning (looking like an Introduction), and citing some different papers at the end (so it looks like a discussion). When you read the text, you get the distinctive feeling that whoever wrote it just fulfilled an obligation.
This is like a vet who, without thinking, does blood work and x-ray and ultrasound just because he thinks some action always looks good.
Your attitude towards a manuscript should be that you want to tell a good story, maybe a useful story (with a moral), and with every paragraph you should ask yourself: what does this contribute to the story? Is this a thrilling, mind-teasing introduction, or is this a boring, line-filling redundancy?
As for a good story, the beginning and the showdown are the most important sections, the most important parts of a paper are the Introduction and the Discussion. Most people manage a good Material & Methods and a reasonable Result section. It is the Introduction, and especially the Discussion where one can tell the difference between an un-inspired, obligation-fulfilling worker and an enthusiastic, committed, purpose-filled worker.

As a hint: most doctoral students underestimate the relevance of the discussion. The discussion is written mostly towards the end of the writing. Yet, the discussion is the most important part, just as the final showdown is the most important part of a movie. If the results are not put into a good and relevant context, then the work was – well, not in vain because others can still take the results and do that, but then others tell the story, not you.
For the discussion. quite often a new literature research is necessary, and many people are, at this stage of writing, not ready to do that – all they want to do is finish quickly.
Our advice to doctoral students therefore is to understand that the ultimate goal of their work is not the experiment, the generation of data, but the interpretation of this data, putting it into context. Therefore, plan ahead for a good discussion, allocate appropriate time for working on it (at least 6 weeks without interruption), and be prepared to start a whole new literature research for it.