There's just so many ways of doing Phd theses out there. Some would do their data collection, then start writing, some start writing right from the start, some would write a bit then collect data and continue on writing.

My style would be the third one. At least that was how I design my research. So now is the phase where I must write...write...and write. Well, that's easy said than done, actually. Do you know how many hours you must spent to write a solid paragraph or two? Give the claim a reason, evidence and when necessary a warrant. On top of that, I have over 2oo++ references in my Bibliography, and I have to meddle through all of them to find the evidence to my claim, so that my reason for making such claim would sound plausible. No wonder procrastination is a favourite past time of PhD Candidates.

Anyway, I've discovered that I can no longer do note taking everytime I read an article. I think note taking for the first few months when you are still contemplating your research topic would be a good practice. It keeps a chronological overview of what you are trying to do. But once you have pass that phase, discard the note book and start typing in whatever points that is relevant from the articles you read.

Design a mechanism of where you type them in, perhaps based on themes, the table of contents, the outlines and so on. It saves you a lot of time and headache later on. If you don't know how to paraphrase them yet, then just type in a direct quote and identify them as such clearly. You can always come back to edit them later. It also gives you a motivational boost, seeing how you work is being assembled systematically in front of your eyes instead of seeing a pile of articles on your workstation that has nowhere to go...yet!.

Other than that I think, we'll just have to pray that Allah gives us Ilham and makes us Istiqamah in this PhD journey and life in general.;-)