This evening, while having dinner with an old friend, I recounted one of the most valuable -- and memorable -- pieces of advice I have ever received was from Dorothy Duff Brown in her disseration writing workshop. I wrote about my debt to her on my blog in 2013, specifically:

Decide as a matter of personal discipline (and sanity) when to stop working each day, rather than on when to begin. After all, writing a dissertation is a process of guilt management.

Dr. Jim Miller (Michigan State University) very helpfully expanded on Dorothy Duff Brown's advice about being rigorous about when to stop:

Examine your life situation and establish a realistic daily work schedule to which you can be faithful. Once you have drawn up this schedule, try to be faithful to it. One strategy that will help you in this is to carefully regulate what hour daily you will stop working on “the big project”. It is easier to control the stopping time each day than the starting time. As anyone soon learns who begins writing a dissertation, getting started each day requires considerable dithering, self-negotiation, and other mental gymnastics—all of which take time. The Muse, it seems, is easier going than coming. For this reason it is surprisingly true for most people that getting a firm control over the stopping time establishes much better control over the starting time. If you know, for instance, that you must stop at a certain hour, you are more likely to get cracking on the work in order to accomplish what must be done by quitting time. Many people make a serious mistake by viewing their quitting times as flexible, usually well into the night. In such cases, time wasted during the day comes out of other time slots, like family interactions and sleep. A steady diet of this abuse usually leads to serious problems—in self image, if nothing else. Try quantifying how you spend your time, at least by periodic samplings. Adjust your pattern according to what you discover from the data. If you are scientific about how you manage your time, you will do much better in the long run.

An astute reader can surmise that I'm better at quoting than applying this advice, given how I'm posting at such a late hour today. But I like to think that remembering good advice is the first step to living it.