I have started to write my dissertation now and I did that after I established a title, chapter headings and some key questions to ask in each chapter.

I still have lots of books I want to read and include but if I didn’t start writing soon I would have forgotten what I found so interesting about the first books I’d read. From my writing the research I do in the future will be much easier to shape and fit into the narrative of my dissertation.

Living in late networked capitalism has literally altered our psychological physiognomy. The onslaught of notifications and the sugar-rush of Vines, tweets and YouTube videos has changed our ability to work in the way that people thirty years ago were able to.

I often feel phantom vibrations in my leg or get anxious if I haven’t recently checked my phone. I puncture my writing time with updates on Twitter or news websites, I read in small chunks or when I’m travelling so as not to be constantly distracted.

If you are really struggling then a long, concerted effort may yield rewards. I went to live in a Franciscan friary, deleted Facebook and turned notifications off on my phone in order to try and readjust to a slower, more focused way of thought and action. It had an effect on me but gradually I have let the short-term hits from social media return and I have found my ability to concentrate ebb away as a result. 

There are numerous extensions, apps and programmes which have been designed to counter the oversaturation and overstimulation that comes with life today. Meditation, mindfulness, blocking software, the Pomodoro method, long-reads, brain training, writing challenges. These are all responses which work for some people. 

I’ve written a few hundred words about the moral dimension of liberal arts education and I’m feeling good.

I’m one of those people who just dives in. The hardest part is always starting, I always feel overwhelmed and under-prepared but once I’ve written a paragraph or two everything seems better. Half of the time I end up deleting or butchering the first paragraphs I write but it’s always worth it just to get started. 

This is what the University of Oxford expects to see from the essays you submit when you apply for their BPhil degree.

This is what my essays need to be next year. 

I can hear birds singing and the trees opposite being swayed about by the wind, the tap-tap-tap of rain on my window, the clock in the corner of my room and the distant sound of traffic on wet roads.

Looking up into the trees I just spotted a squirrel running from one canopy and leaping into another. The streetlights aren’t on but the lights in the flats opposite are.