This is the Big Checklist I made to help me get to the end of draft 1 of my thesis, with all the things that remained to be done. It's about 1.5 metres long, mounted on a easel that was on rollers. Somehow making it big seemed to help. I know putting a big felt pen check mark felt good.
Something I've done better in this project, the writing of my thesis, than I ever have before is setting aside time to look ahead and try to define all the work that needs to be done, as distinct from doing the work. So I would read a printout of my draft and fix everything that was easy to fix right away, but keep a list of the other pieces of work that would take more thought. I would make myself not start worrying about them right then, but come back to them. Besides giving me a slightly less vague idea of how much time things were going to take, and helping to conceptualize my progress in small, concrete steps, keeping checklists like this helped me with perfectionism, since I would become aware that even though I had a tricky decision, or a tough paragraph, before me, there were more to come afterwards - it was just one of the jobs I had to get through.
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