How to Research without Procrastinating

Research might be my favorite part of a new story. I'm one of those weirdos you knew in high school who didn't groan at the thought of writing a research paper. If you were that way then, high-five! and welcome to the club. If you didn't enjoy it, I don't know what to tell you. Maybe I'll have to write a post for you later.

I have this idea for a story forming in my head. The characters are slowly revealing themselves to me through their drink choices, and their chosen occupations. One of them is a waitress in a bar. The other is a psychology major. 

My biggest problems are that I have never actually been to a bar and I am not a psych major. I have a friend who is but I do not quite know where to start researching the life of a psychology major. The bar research was easy. I looked up different alcoholic drinks and what they said about that person. I have also seen many bar settings on TV shows and movies. I can definitely wing the setting for the first draft of this story. 

However, I want my characters to feel alive from the beginning so that the editing process is not painful. I hate trying to bring flat characters to life. CPR will not work on a person who was dead from the beginning. 

So I am feeling the need to research my psych major. He wants to go into behavioral analysis. I know nothing about behavioral analysis or what it takes to become one. I also have no idea what a psych major's train of thought is like or what they study in classes. I have a vague idea about what they study, because my creative writing major means I take a lot of English classes and somehow these overlap. I've heard of Zimbardo's Standford prison experiment as well as Milgram's electric shock experiment. Those two are the ones I have read about or watched videos for repeatedly. Others I am not as familiar with, such as Pavlov, whose name I know, but I don't really know why. 

With all of this overwhelming me, where do I start? How do I know when I've done enough research? How can I recognize when I am simply using research to procrastinate on writing?

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Here are tactics I've used to keep my research in check while still feeling like my characters are alive: 

• Limit yourself to three Google links. I cannot take credit for this tactic. This is something I read about in Nanowrimo Founder Chris Baty's book, No Plot? No Problem! He has three reason for this rule. 1) If you do too much research you may stumble across some brilliant idea for your story. This stunts your story's growth and puts too much pressure on the first draft. 2) Research can easily become a way to procrastinate from writing. 3) Research can take away from the momentum of your writing. This principle of limiting yourself to three Google links will also work with limiting yourself to a few pages in a book or some other form of research you use.
• Give yourself a Time Limit. If limiting yourself to three Google links does not work, try giving yourself a time limit. Find a timer somewhere, either on your phone, tablet, or online. Avoid using one online if possible. Especially if that timer is on the same device you are writing on. If you use a timer on the same device that you are typing on, you won't be able to watch the countdown and will be tempted to waste precious time, clicking over to see how many minutes or seconds you have left. If you have it, I suggest you use a good old fashioned kitchen timer that will tick away and ring a bell loudly when time is up. That way you can watch it's progression and be aware of it outside of your screeniverse. 
• Make a short list of questions. This will help focus your research. Keeping that list short will hopefully help you limit your research time while allowing you to compile the knowledge you will need to write your story. My list for my psych character would look something like this: 1) What schooling is necessary to become a behavioral psychologist? 2) What does the average behavioral psychologist make? 3) What are the required classes to become a behavioral psychologist? The key is to make these questions somewhat specific so that you can narrow down your search results and look at what is specific to your character. These answers might be dramatically different if my character wanted to become a sports psychologist, for example. 
• Copy and paste helpful research into a document. Any research you think might be helpful on a certain website or in a book should be pasted or typed into a word document along with all the other useful research you accumulate. This will help in two ways, it will keep unnecessary details out of your mind as well as organizing all your thoughts into one place for future reference. Once you have copied and pasted what you want from a website, close that website. Do not click on another link in that website. 

Those are my suggestions if you find yourself getting carried away in your research. I've used each of these and hope you find at least one of them helpful. They won't work for everybody all of the time, they don't even work for me all of the time. The biggest thing here is self-discipline. Ultimately you are the only one who has control over what you do, so you have to be disciplined enough to click on that little red x or listen to the ringing timer.

Do you have a hard time using research to avoid writing? What other ways do you have of limiting your research? 

I'd love to hear from you in the comment section. 
Kim Jairl