You know the feeling. It usually hits post-lunch. You’re tired and irritable and your focus evaporates. Or, you feel scattered: you have a lot of ideas and items to tackle, but you cannot prioritize or follow (much less develop!) complex plans. Welcome to your afternoon slump–what Daniel Pink calls the “trough.” As I illustrate in […]
When the semester hits its peak, the amount of things you must mentally juggle seems to multiply exponentially. What if you could take 15 minutes now to not only do work your future self will thank you for, but also mean you never have to remember to add routine items to your to-do list in
Over the years, my schedule and responsibilities have led me to experiment with various writing schedules and productivity strategies. I’ve always wondered what variables really matter in publishing more academic writing. I dutifully tracked my writing–every session!–for four years. But I never returned to them to crunch the numbers until recently. Until I crunched the numbers, I had
Most academic writing projects take months, if not years. Put your eggs all in one basket (like the book), or work only on projects from start to completion and you might not have much to show for your work in the end. But split your attention too much bouncing from project to project and you
One of my mentees put it better than I could have: Writing an academic book is really no different from any other project. It’s just about sitting down and putting in consistent work. In Professors as Writers (ebook), Robert Boice concludes that the single best thing faculty can do to boost their output is to
Every academic writer gets stuck at some point in her life. Before continuing to spin your wheels, first identify: have you lost your writing path, or are you stalled? (Not sure? Read Joli Jensen’s Write no Matter What, chapters 19 and 22, respectively). If you’ve lost your path, try these three tips.
Your choice of what to wear, what and when to eat, and whether to buy the grapes or cherries seem completely unrelated to writing your academic book. And yet they are related.
If you’re following along with my “Finding the Time To Write Your Academic Book Series,” you’ve now had a few weeks to develop and practice implementing your Container Routine. (Don’t know what a Container Routine is? Read my article on why you should use a Container Routine. Then read Container Routine 101, which helps you put
If you’re like many of the junior scholars I coach, you desperately want to find time to write your academic book. But during the semester, it doesn’t feel possible. You might have developed your first container routine. And you’ve taken to trying to implement it each week. You set product-focused weekly goals. But then it’s
In previous posts, I’ve shown you how I use Excel to track my own writing sessions, and discussed why opening and closing routines are crucial to sustained writing. In this post, I put all three pieces together by showing you how to make an “opening routine” Google Form you will use to check in to