Maybe you know the feeling. You've long waited for your advisor to give you feedback on your manuscript. You've worked hard on it and when you sent it to them you thought it was in pretty good shape. You even allowed yourself to dream of submission.
And then you got it back. All marked up. The structure you've crafted so carefully messed up. And you want to just close the doc and never look at it again, ever.
Well, that sucks. And your desire to just dump the whole thing is totally valid.
But, chances are, you have to go back at it and deal with those comments and changes at some point. So, when you do, you might as well make it a little easier for yourself using one little trick:
Forbid yourself to edit!
Yes, you've read that right. When you first open the document you are only allowed to do two things:
Read. And group all the comments in three buckets:
Easy to fix.
Harder but can be fixed without consulting advisor (or whoever messed up your draft ;) )
Can only be fixed in collaboration with your advisor.
This approach does three things:
It'll "detox" the experience. No heavy lifting to be done, all you need to do is read.
As you read, you'll probably find that things are not as catastrophic as you first thought.
With the comments grouped into buckets you get a bird eye's view and what needs to be done AND you get to choose what to do first, depending on your level of energy and motivation.
How does that feel?
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