I have 23 voice memos on my phone right now. Some are untranscribed, unlistened-to, slowly accumulating like particles of digital dust.
There’s one from last October where I’m apparently making a to-do list while walking to the cafe down my street.
Another from last week, recorded at a stoplight, where I’m working through a literary argument for the noir novel I’m working on.
Why clutter up my phone with half-baked thoughts?
We’ve all been taught that writing happens at a desk. That serious academic work requires quietude, a laptop and good posture. This is nonsense, particularly for the mid-career students I work with-people whose best thinking often happens while driving between meetings or folding laundry or during that precious first quiet moment after the kids are finally asleep.
The problem isn’t that you’re not thinking about your dissertation. You are. Constantly.
The problem is you’re losing most of those thoughts because you’ve been conditioned to believe they don’t count unless they’re immediately transformed into full sentences on a proper screen.
But here’s the thing about modern technology: we can capture thinking now, not just through writing.
I started experimenting with this workflow six months ago and it’s seriously changed how I approach my own writing projects and how I coach dissertation students through theirs.
The workflow process is almost embarrassingly simple: Record voice memos whenever ideas arise—in the car, during walks, while doing dishes, waiting in line. Don’t worry about your thoughts being articulate or fully formed. Just capture the thinking in broad strokes.
Then dump those recordings into a transcription tool. I use the dictation function built into Google Docs, but there are dozens of transcription options. Yes, the transcript will be messy. Which is fine.
Feed the messy transcript to ChatGPT or Claude or your favorite AI tool with a simple prompt: “Extract the main arguments from this transcript and organize them.”
And voila, suddenly you have usable draft material. Not polished prose, but actual brass-tacks content you created and can work with.
What makes this particularly effective for dissertation writing is that, for some students, oral composition can help break a pattern of procrastination and get things flowing again.
Remember: you’re not asking the AI to write your dissertation. You’re asking it to help you recognize the coherent arguments already present in your own verbal ideas. You then refine the written text from the transcript further.
My student Rebecca tried this last month. She’s a mid-career student working full-time and December was looking impossible.
But she started recording 5-minute voice memos during her commute—just talking through whatever section she was stuck on and discussing points from some of the key scholars she had been reading. After a week, she had multiple transcripts.
She fed them into ChatGPT, asked it to identify recurring themes and organize the material and boom…she extracted three pages of draft content that she then built out and refined.
That’s three pages she didn’t have to stare at a blank screen to produce.
Here’s what I tell my students: your dissertation doesn’t care how the words got onto the page. It only matters that they’re your ideas and that they’re worth refining.
So try this.
For one week, capture your dissertation thinking wherever it happens. Stop waiting for the perfect writing conditions (they don’t exist anyway). Start documenting the thinking that’s already in process.
Your phone is holding a portion of your dissertation. It’s time to let it out.
I work with dissertation students who are ready to move forward with their projects and graduate. My Ph.D. coaching could be the support you need.