Since hearing this podcast episode several weeks ago, Derek Thompson’s comparison has stuck in my mind as an encapsulation of how I feel writing this thesis. Here’s the quote, lightly edited:

One thing I learned writing my first book [...] is that writing changes so much as the length of the work changes; that in a way, blogging is pure writing and by the time you get to a book, writing a book is actually not entirely writing, it's almost more organizing, than it is writing. One way that I thought of it is like if you're writing an article, it's almost like shopping for one shirt. I'm just looking for one data set about Americans hanging out less. And once I find that data set, I've found my shirt, I can write the article. Writing a column sometimes, like a 3000 word column, is more like buying furniture for a room. It's a lot of buying stuff and when you buy it, you have to lay it out and once you've laid it out, you're like ok, now the room is together. Writing a book is like buying a new house and outfitting it with furniture. I mean, yes, it is about buying stuff, but the biggest job for a new house is figuring out where all the damn stuff goes. And that's the major challenge with a book, so that's how I think about it at a conceptual level.