Writer's guilt: Dissertation edition

Somehow I forgot (at least I think i forgot to write) to write about getting a draft of Chapter II to my advisor. That was last Friday. I'm still waiting to hear back and I am anxious to get started on it. It is odd that I have this strange desire to tackle it head on. I may feel differently after I see the comments, however :-/

I've been reading up as much as I can about policy-capturing and how to analyze policy capturing. I'd tell y'all what it is, but I can't seem to explain it in a way where non-stats people would understand (not that you'd be interested anyway). Hell, I barely understand it. I understand the basic process, but applying it to my study I'm finding really difficult. And analysis - sheesh! There are several ways to analyze the data (once I collect it) but I'm not well-versed in any of them.

I've had 7 graduate statistics classes, yet I don't know how to do this. Awesome, I had to pick a study in which I'm unfamiliar with the methodology. So this has turned the section that is usually easiest to write for me into the hardest. Chapter III is kicking my ass. My way of dealing with this is reading every article and book chapter that has the slightest reference to policy-capturing and the analysis of policy-capturing data. I am doing work, but I have what I call "writer's guilt"

Writer's guilt as how it pertains to the dissertation is the immense amount of guilt that you feel when your dissertation itself - the document - is not being improved or written in for a few days while you figure out how the hell you are going to explain this crap. Even though I am actively working on my dissertation and reading my butt off, I still don't feel like it is real progress because it is not on paper yet. Also, I've been reading things that are only tangentially related to what I'm doing. This very well might be a waste of time, but I've read (and re-read) all of the major articles that deal with policy-capturing in the I/O literature. I've also read a few that are of different disciplines.

So the name of the game is reading, reading and more reading, all whilst feeling incredibly guilty that I'm not producing anything that can be turned in at this point. I *could* take a picture of all of the articles I've read lately, but that would take up a lot of data on an email attachment.

I know I need to give up the writer's guilt and really feel like I'm being productive even though there is no output to show for it. I need to believe that reading is really making progress. I'm certainly spending enough time doing it.