#1 Write Everyday
Welcome to the Productive Writer. To help you start and complete any writing project – manuscript, proposal, thesis, dissertation, book, fellowship application, grant proposal – here are strategies to help you more effectively manage your work, deadlines, schedule, energy, and anxiety, regardless of your project.
This tip will work for EVERYONE:
Write every day. Write something. Every day.
Commit to writing at least 90 minutes every day. Why 90 minutes? That’s about the maximum time you can endure physically and mentally before needing a break. Write for 90 minutes without getting up from your chair. Seriously. No breaks, no interruptions. ESPECIALLY no checking email or social media during your 90 minutes of writing each day. (I promise, you will survive this strategy.)
Write every day for two weeks. For most of us, that is enough to make writing become a habit and you will be much more productive. Start today. Do a word count before and then once you finish your scheduled writing. (In Word, go to File, Info, Properties.)
What should you do when you have holidays to observe? Or when you are ill? Or when you can’t possibly find even 90 minutes in a 24-hour day? This is when you must write for at least 15 minutes each day. No matter how busy or how tired or sick you are, write for 15 minutes. Here’s why this work:
For some of us the hardest part of writing is getting started. We amateurs procrastinate minutes, hours, and day. (The pros – some of the best and most prolific writers you know – report procrastinating for weeks and even years.) We delay because we’re afraid we won’t have anything to write. We’re afraid that what we write will be terrible. We’re afraid we’re not up to the real pain that good writing requires. It’s only when the pain of what we would lose by not writing – fellowships, advisors, degree completion, book contracts, jobs – feels more real than the pain of actually writing that we begin to write.
Get started, and you’ve overcome the biggest hurdle. I’ve never known anyone with the goal of writing for 15 minutes to be ready to stop when that brief time is up. The trick is that you tell yourself you have to write for only 15 minutes and that you can endure anything for that long. Once you start to write, the anxiety will begin to disappear, and you’ll write for much longer.
Writing every day contributes to continuity in your thinking and generating the ideas you need to write. Your mind functions differently when you write every day. We all think about our writing every day. But the cognitive processes involved in writing about your ideas are different from those involved in just thinking about your work. Your mind makes connections among disparate information when you write than you just think (or worry or fret or obsess) about your ideas. Your project moves forward when you write…even when you write a gosh-awful first draft.
Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird, 1994) suggests this: Place a 1-inch by 1-inch picture frame next to your computer. Then write enough each day to fill the picture frame. I promise you will finish a thesis or dissertation with this method. (You’ll finish faster with an 8 x 12 picture frame.) But you must write every day, and the picture frame reminds you to do so.
So commit to writing every day. If you are without access to a computer one day, then use pencil and paper. But write every day. If you never have trouble getting started, if you never delay your writing until you’ve fallen days and weeks behind schedule (or fallen into despair), if you never sit at your computer for hours on end with nothing much to show for it, then don’t try this strategy. But if you have not written for 90 minutes (or 15 minutes) yet today, then start right now. You can do this!
Lamott, A. (1994). Bird by bird: Some instructions on writing and life. New York: Anchor Books.
Some of the information in the Productive Writer is drawn from previously published work, and I have tried to properly attribute the ideas and work of others. If I fail to do so, please let me know so I can clarify and correct.