Your proposal was approved. That’s genuinely worth acknowledging — it’s a real hurdle, and you cleared it.
And now you sit down on Monday morning, open your laptop, and realise you don’t actually know what today’s task is.
This is one of the most common — and least discussed — stalling points in a dissertation. Not the beginning, which has a clear shape (motivation, gap, method, done), and not the end, which also has a clear shape (write up, defend, submit). It’s the middle, right after approval, where the shape disappears and “go and do the research” turns out to mean nothing concrete at all.
Why the Middle Feels Different From the Start
A proposal is a plan expressed in the future tense: “I will interview twelve participants,” “I will analyse using thematic analysis.” Plans in the future tense are comfortable to write because they don’t require you to do anything yet.
The middle of a dissertation requires the plan to become a series of present-tense actions, and that’s a much bigger jump than it looks. “I will conduct interviews” doesn’t tell you what to do at 9am on a Tuesday. There’s no task in that sentence — only an eventual outcome. Most students stall here not from laziness but from the absence of an actual next action small enough to start.
The Method: Task Decomposition, Not Motivation
The instinct, when stuck, is usually to look for more motivation, more discipline, or a bigger, clearer plan. In my experience, none of these actually work, because they’re solving the wrong problem. The problem isn’t willpower. It’s granularity.
Take your proposal’s next major activity — say, “conduct interviews” — and break it down until you reach a task you could finish in one sitting:
- Not “conduct interviews,” but “draft the exact wording of the first three interview questions.”
- Not “analyse findings,” but “read transcript one and highlight anything that genuinely surprises me.”
- Not “write the literature review,” but “write the one-paragraph argument connecting theme two to theme three.”
Notice what each of these has in common: it’s finishable in an afternoon, it produces something concrete you can look at afterwards, and it doesn’t require the whole plan to be clear before you start.
A Worked Example
One MBA student I coached had “collect and analyse survey data” sitting untouched on her plan for three weeks. Broken down, it became: finalise the exact wording of question 7, which had been bothering her; pilot the survey with two colleagues; adjust based on their confusion; send to the first ten respondents. Each of those took under two hours. The three-week stall dissolved once the task stopped being an abstract outcome and became a specific, boring, doable thing.
Why This Isn’t Just “Time Management” Advice
Generic productivity advice tends to say “break tasks down,” without addressing why dissertation tasks in particular resist breaking down. The reason is that a dissertation’s activities are genuinely more ambiguous than most work tasks — there’s no manager assigning the next ticket, and the proposal document was never designed to function as a to-do list. The decomposition step isn’t optional extra effort; it’s work the dissertation format doesn’t do for you, that a job with a task-tracking system usually would.
FAQ
How small should each task be? Small enough to finish in one sitting, ideally under two hours. If you’re not sure it’s small enough, it probably isn’t yet — break it down further.
What if I don’t know what the next major activity even is? Go back to your proposal’s methodology section and find the next verb — “collect,” “analyse,” “code,” “write” — and decompose that verb specifically, rather than trying to plan the whole remaining project at once.
Does this replace having an overall plan? No — you still need the big picture. This method is specifically for the moment where the big picture exists but doesn’t tell you what to do today.
Next Step
If you’re stuck in the fog between “proposal approved” and “actually writing,” a short conversation is often enough to find the next concrete step. I offer a free 15-minute introductory call for exactly this