"Productivity Strategies & Tools" by Professor Jessica Bolker, UNH Biological Sciences

Start with a writing plan. And get organized.

The first goal is quantity of writing: it doesn’t have to be good. If you write enough, you can afford to throw out most of it and you’ll still have a thesis (or a paper, or a grant proposal, or whatever). While writing my dissertation, I wrote 5 pages/day, 6 days/week. Most of it was garbage – that’s how I was able to crank out so much, so fast. But by the end of a month, I had roughly 150 pages of text, so I could throw out half of it and still have a lot of decent material.

For nearly everyone, writing steadily is a whole lot more sustainable – and, in the long term, productive – than binge-writing. Also, steady writing can be supported and strengthened by setting up routines and forming habits, which is a much more reliable way to work than hoping for inspiration or waiting until you’re up against a major deadline or feeling so miserably guilty you have to start working (being overwhelmed by guilt tends to make most of us run away from the work, anyway, rather than sit down and deal with it). It’s also less unpleasant. You don’t have to love writing, any more than you have to love washing the dishes – you just have to do it, and if you don’t love doing it, you should figure out the most efficient possible way to get it done rather than let it take over your life.

There are many schools of thought, and many books (see below for book rec) and blogs of advice, about how to get a lot of writing done. Many of them say similar things, but there’s also a lot of variety (you could spend the next year reading about how to write, which would be easier than actually writing, and might even feel kind of virtuous…don’t go there). The key thing to focus on is finding a strategy that will work for YOU. It’s like the big study comparing different weight-loss diets (I’m not going to go find the reference right now): the take-home message is that the “best” diet is whichever one YOU can stick to over the long haul, and which particular diet that is will be different for different people.

Scientists have an advantage here, because we are trained to set up experiments and collect data and test hypotheses. So start collecting data about your own writing habits and productivity, and testing and comparing different strategies, times of day, locations, …. This may be some of the most important data you collect en route to your degree. I’ve been doing this for years, and I’ve learned a lot about how I get writing done – and how I fail to get writing done. But what I can most usefully share with you is not the set of things that works for me, but rather the process by which I figured out what those things are.

Think about how you want to collect your data. I have a word document that’s called “writing log;” I know of very productive people who track their writing in spreadsheets that they can then use to do statistical analyses (works for them – would be a huge distraction for me). Silvia shows his template as Fig. 3.1 in How to Write A Lot.

Use software if it will help. One of my absolutely critical tools is an app called “Freedom” that I can set to lock me out of the internet for as long as I decide. There are lots of different apps like this, and many of them allow you to specify sites you should (Web of Science) or should not (facebook) be allowed to access during your set work time.

Use liveware – that is, other humans. Public accountability is a very powerful motivator.

- weekly check-in in this class (if I forget to do it, please remind me)

- writing buddies or groups (the UNH Grad School runs some groups; chapters in various books discuss how to set up and manage writing groups of various sorts)

- a writing coach: a sympathetic person whom you promise to email weekly to report your progress and your plans; discuss with them if you want feedback, and if so, what sort – or if you just need someone who’s expecting your report every Friday.

- advisor – use them well, and learn to manage them effectively (another topic).

LINKS:

Freedom website blocker: https://freedom.to - one of many; happens to be the one I use.

Here are a few books I particularly recommend, either because I find them useful, or because other people (e.g. my colleagues, your fellow graduate students) have recommended them.

Some Books