1. Finding time to write - Part one: Behavioral habits

How successful academics write - Helen Sword 2017

1. Finding time to write
Part one: Behavioral habits

I like work: it fascinates me. I can sit and look at it for hours.

—JEROME K. JEROME, Three Men in a Boat

Ten years ago, I read a book that changed the way I write. In Professors as Writers: A Self-Help Guide to Productive Writing, behavioral psychologist Robert Boice describes an intervention study in which he worked closely with three groups of struggling academic writers.1 Participants in the first group behaved as they always had, “saving up” their research writing for large blocks of uninterrupted time that seldom actually materialized; those in the second group agreed to write in brief daily sessions of around thirty minutes each and to keep a log of their writing time; and those in the third group did the same, with the variation that Boice checked up on them twice weekly at unannounced intervals. The results of the study were astounding: by the end of the year, the participants in the third group had produced, on average, more than twice as many pages of publishable writing as those in the second group and more than nine times as many as those in the control group.

Impressed by Boice’s findings, I immediately resolved to develop a regimen similar to that of the most productive academics in his study: I would write every day, log my writing time, and share my time logs in weekly meetings with a colleague. The first part of my experiment was a resounding success. I had already recently taken up the “morning pages” routine prescribed by Julia Cameron in her book The Artist’s Way:

Every morning, set your clock one-half hour early; get up and write three pages of longhand, stream-of-consciousness morning writing. Do not reread these pages or allow anyone else to read them. Ideally, stick these pages in a large manila envelope, or hide them somewhere.2

It was a relatively easy transition for me to switch from daily personal writing to daily scholarly writing and to extend my scheduled time from thirty to sixty minutes. That early-morning hour quickly became—and remains a decade later—a precious and productive time for me. Typically I roll out of bed around six a.m., plant myself in front of my computer with a cup of tea, and plunge straight into my writing wherever I left off the day before: no prereading, no obsessive editing of the previous day’s work, no email check (well, maybe just a brief glance at my inbox …). Working at a slow but steady pace, editing and polishing individual sentences as I go but leaving major structural changes for later, I can often lay down a new paragraph before breakfast. Even during periods when teaching and administrative duties devour nearly all my time, those early-morning paragraphs build up one by one, gradually accruing into draft chapters and articles. What’s more, my research remains always present in my mind, a faithful companion throughout my working week.

The second part of my experiment—logging my daily research time—also proved worthwhile. After several months, I was able to calculate how many publishable pages I had drafted and edited during my early-morning writing hours; from there, I extrapolated a rough word count. At first, I was appalled to discover that my published research output averaged out to only about one hundred words per hour. One hundred words! That’s less than half the length of this paragraph. However, I soon came to realize that my new self-knowledge, albeit dispiriting, was also empowering. Now, if a colleague asks me to contribute an eight-hundred-word blog post or newsletter column (“You’re a good writer, I’m sure you can bash something out quickly”), I know that it will probably take me at least eight hours to produce and polish. Armed with this knowledge, I have become much more realistic about planning my workload, more disciplined about carving out dedicated writing and editing time, and more confident about achieving my goals. Ten hours per week of writing can add up to an eighty-thousand-word book manuscript in less than two years.

The third part of my Boicean experiment, unfortunately, did not pan out so well. In an effort to re-create the sense of accountability imposed by Boice on the participants in his most successful group, I recruited a colleague to meet with me once a week to exchange time logs and discuss our respective goals and progress. However, my “writing buddy” stuck to his daily writing routine only for a short time; after that, our weekly meetings disintegrated into a morass of apologies and excuses, until we gave them up altogether. Over the next few years, I tried several times to resurrect the arrangement with other writing partners, but with no luck. Boice insists that keeping a daily writing log is critical to mastering a productive writing routine: “Sometimes the chart alone, especially the guilt of posting up a wasted day, is stimulus enough to get people writing.”3 But that guilt wasn’t stimulus enough for my colleagues, apparently. One after another agreed to a weekly exchange of writing logs and supportive conversation; but one after another, despite my enthusiasm and encouragement, they soon fell by the wayside. Remorse and self-flagellation invariably followed: “I know I’m supposed to schedule daily writing time like you do, but I just don’t seem to be able to keep it up. You’re much more disciplined than I am. I’m sorry I’ve let you down.”

In retrospect, I should have taken my colleagues’ resistance as a warning signal. Instead, relying on my own positive experience rather than their negative ones, I became an eager evangelist for the Boicean cause. With a convert’s zeal, I began offering productivity workshops at which I tirelessly preached the “Write every day!” mantra. To colleagues who resisted changing their ways—“I can only write when I feel like writing” or “I can’t write in the early mornings because I’m too busy looking after my small children” or “I don’t like the idea of scheduling every moment of my waking life”—I recommended Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, a succinct, witty guide to academic productivity in the Boicean mode. Silvia insists that productivity has nothing to do with pleasure:

Some kinds of writing are so unpleasant that no normal person will ever feel like doing them.… Struggling writers who “wait for inspiration” should get off their high horse and join the unwashed masses of real academic writers.

“I’m too busy” is just a “specious excuse” for avoiding daily writing:

Like most false beliefs, this barrier persists because it’s comforting. It’s reassuring to believe that circumstances are against you and that you would write a lot if only your schedule had a few more big chunks of time to devote to writing.

So is an aversion to scheduling:

Binge writers spend more time feeling guilty and anxious about not writing than schedule followers spend writing.… When confronted with their fruitless ways, binge writers often proffer a self-defeating dispositional attribution: “I’m just not the kind of person who’s good at making a schedule and sticking to it.” People like dispositional explanations when they don’t want to change.4

Silvia’s no-nonsense, pull-your-socks-up advice clearly resonated with many of my colleagues; they headed back to their offices with eyes bright and shoulders squared, determined to give daily writing a try. But how many of those enthusiastic disciples, I wonder now, were still writing every day a year, a month, or even a week later? And how many others slunk away from my workshops in brow-beaten silence, feeling even more “guilty and anxious” than before?

When I first started researching this book, I assumed that my findings about academics’ writing habits would affirm the advice of Boice, Silvia, and the authors of other best-selling productivity guides, which aligned with my own experience as a devoted dailyist. The successful academics I interviewed would tell me, mostly, that they write every day; the colleagues who enrolled in my workshops in search of effective writing strategies would tell me, mostly, that they do not; and I would be able to publish persuasive empirical evidence that daily scheduled writing is indeed the magic bullet that Boice claims it to be, the secret elixir that ensures academic success. As the interview transcripts and data questionnaires began to pile up, however, they yielded some unexpected results. Only a small percentage of respondents in both groups—13 percent of the handpicked interview subjects and 12 percent of the self-selected workshop participants—reported that they systematically schedule daily writing time throughout the academic year. Put another way, roughly seven out of eight academics surveyed admitted that they do not write every day. Daily writing, it turns out, is neither a reliable marker nor a clear predictor of productivity.

Boice’s highly prescriptive formula works well for some writers, particularly those hobbled by self-doubt and plagued by procrastination. But the Boicean way is not the only way, and academics who resist the evangelistic fervor of Boice’s “missionary work” are by no means doomed to fallowness and failure.5 Productivity, I discovered, is a broad church that tolerates many creeds. Some successful academics write daily, others sporadically; some at home, others at work; some on trains or airplanes or during children’s sports practice, others in distraction-free environments; some on a word processor, others in longhand or using voice-recognition software; some whenever they have a few minutes free, others only when they have cleared hours or days of uninterrupted time. Some map out a detailed topic outline before they start writing; others write to discover what they have to say.

The three chapters that follow lay out a sheaf of renovation ideas rather than a single behavioral blueprint. Time regulates the first chapter; space structures the second; and rhythms and rituals animate the third. Every one of the strategies described in these chapters has worked for some writer somewhere; at least some of them are bound to work for you. Keep in mind, however, that behavioral habits of daily diligence are likely to crumble over time unless they are shored up by the other three foundation stones of your BASE: artisanal habits of craftsmanship and care, social habits of collegiality and collaboration, and emotional habits of confidence and pleasure.

1. Finding time to write

You can’t lose time behind the back of a sofa or discover a forgotten stash tucked away in a kitchen drawer. You can’t mint it like coins or spend it like cash. Nevertheless, academics talk constantly about making time, finding time, carving out time to write. We fantasize about having more of it, and we bemoan our chronic lack of it. But from what—or whom—can we slice it away without doing damage to something or someone?

Proponents of daily writing offer a simple solution to this dilemma: by scheduling as little as half an hour of research writing into your calendar every day, you will ensure that your writing time never needs to be “found,” because it’s already there waiting for you. Email doesn’t generally count as research writing (unless you are, say, communicating with a coauthor or journal editor); nor do administrative or teaching-related documents such as course syllabi, annual reports, or student references. Beyond that, however, the jury is out as to what kinds of activities qualify as “writing every day.” For Robert Boice, “writing” is the composition of new sentences on a page, whether or not those words are intended for publication. For Paul Silvia, on the other hand, scheduled writing time may also include reading, note taking, editing, and data analysis—any research-related activity that moves the writing project forward. For Patricia Goodson and Joan Bolker, “every day” actually means five or six days a week, with occasional days of respite allowed. And for the novelist Stephen King, every day really means every day. King confesses that when he is working on a new novel, he writes for four or five hours each morning, no matter what: “That includes Christmas, the Fourth [of July], and my birthday.”1

There are many compelling reasons why you might consider adopting a daily writing routine:

• Daily writing prevents procrastination and blocking. Instead of complaining about how hard it is to write, you simply sit down at the appointed time every day and do it; no more putting off starting until you have read just one more article or sharpened a few more pencils.

• Daily writing demystifies the writing process. Academics who write every day—even if only to sum up an hour’s worth of reading or to record some preliminary thoughts about their data—have no fear of the blank page.

• Daily writing keeps your research always at the top of your mind. However cluttered your schedule may become with meetings, teaching, administrative tasks, and other obligations, a daily writing jag guarantees that you have spent at least some part of every workday thinking deeply about your research.

• Daily writing generates new ideas. As scientist Linus Pauling famously remarked, “If you want to have good ideas, you must have many ideas.”2 Writing prompts new modes of thought, activating parts of the brain that might otherwise lie dormant.

• Daily writing adds up incrementally. If you write just three hundred words per day five days per week, by the end of the month you will have a six-thousand-word article or chapter that might otherwise have remained just a gleam in your eye.

• Daily writing helps you figure out what you want to say. In the words of playwright Henry Miller, “Writing, like life itself, is a voyage of discovery.”3 Sometimes we have no idea which way we are headed until the sails have been hoisted and the wind kicks in.

For most people, however, daily scheduled writing is neither an intuitive habit to adopt nor an easy one to sustain. As any drill sergeant or Mother Superior can attest, few humans possess the intrinsic self-discipline required to adhere to a strictly regimented routine day after day and week after week, no matter how beneficial its effects. The vocabulary of academic development—“writing coaching,” “writing cloisters,” “dissertation boot camps”—hints at this all-too-common human failing. Even Boice, who devoted his scholarly career to enticing skeptical colleagues into “the congregation of satisfied and productive” daily writers, acknowledged the danger of “backsliding,” a term he associated with straying from the strict rules of religion.4 Little wonder, then, that academe is filled with lapsed dailyists who wear hair shirts of scholarly guilt as a result of their apostasy. The logic goes something like this: “I have been told that productive academics write every day. I tried for a while but failed to keep up the routine. It is therefore my own fault that I am not as productive as I would like to be. I am a bad person.”

In fact, only a few of the writers in my interview sample told me that they adhere to the kind of strict, unbending, same-time-every-day schedule recommended by the most prescriptive “write every day” proponents. Even self-declared dailyists, I found, tend to take a more individualistic approach to their writing routine. For example, they may aspire to lay down a specific number of new words each day:

I’m a morning person so I try to do my writing then, and I try to have a daily amount. (Matthew Clarke, Education, University of New South Wales)

Or they may aim for a certain page count:

I try to write a page every day. I tell my students to think of inspiration as something inside your computer—so you have to turn it on and let it out. (Lena Roos, Religious Studies, Uppsala University)

Or they may declare themselves satisfied with just a small amount of forward progress:

Even when I find it hard to write, I still try to get at least something down every day. It could be a paragraph. It could be two sentences, but it’s just the feeling that you’re actually moving ahead. (Stefan Svallfors, Sociology, Umeå University)

“The trajectories your ideas could take”

Kalervo Gulson

School of Education, University of New South Wales (Australia)

When sociologist of education Kal Gulson became a father, he was forced to rethink his writing habits:

Previously, I would write in bursts. If I had a paper, I would just write that, and I would put off everything until I was finished. Having children made me realize I had to work in different ways—in shorter periods of time, with more planning.

Inspired by Paul Silvia’s book How to Write a Lot, Gulson began blocking out daily writing time in his calendar, just as he blocks out meeting time and teaching time:

I don’t schedule any meetings before 10:30 a.m. If people ask, I say I’m writing. I try to talk about writing as an important part of building a research culture, a reinforcement of what you do. There is nothing wrong with making writing and research a core part of your work, as important as anything else that requires the same level of effort and protection.

Gulson still “writes to think” without necessarily knowing where his ideas will lead him, but now he tries to do so within a more structured framework:

What I hadn’t thought through was that in my reluctance to plan, I wasn’t writing as efficiently as I could be. I think the act of planning particularly helps you see the trajectories your ideas could take. Ideas still come out of serendipitous moments, but the planning exercise can tie them together a little more quickly.

Paradoxically, he uses administrative systems to help reduce the burden of administration:

Now I’m doing things that I never thought I’d do, like using an online management system that sets milestones and records day-by-day tasks and all those sorts of things. Because I hate administration, my aim is to do it as efficiently as possible in order to free up more time for writing. So I’ve actually moved admin into my writing; I now manage my writing in the same way I manage the rest of my life and work.

Nor did I observe much consistency in preferred writing times. Some writers follow a strict “write first” approach:

I wake up in the morning, and I start working right away. I sit with my computer on my lap, and I drink my coffee, and I write. That’s when I’m at my smartest. I think it’s the coffee. (Margery Fee, English, University of British Columbia)

However, rising with the larks is not—to mix morning-based metaphors—everyone’s cup of tea. For every productive academic who claimed to write best before breakfast, I spoke to others who favor later times of day. Some prefer afternoons:

I’m not very good first thing in the morning, so I like to do not-so-challenging things then. But between three and seven p.m., between afternoon tea and dinner, that’s when the best writing comes. (Alison Gopnik, Psychology, University of California Berkeley)

Some prefer evenings after dinner:

I write in the evenings, and it keeps my sanity. After these days of meetings and dealings with budgets and this boring stuff, there is a total switching of gears. Some other people may play the violin instead. People escape in different ways. (Sun Kwok, Physics, University of Hong Kong)

Some prefer the middle of the night:

I got used to writing late at night when my son was small. He would go to bed around ten, and then I got into the habit of staying up until two or three and writing at night. As he grew up, in fact, he would sometimes wake up like at one in the morning and say, “Mommy, are you writing?” “Yes.” It was very comforting to him to know that I was still awake. (Ruth Behar, Anthropology, University of Michigan)

Before retirement, literary scholar Susan Gubar drew her dividing line not at a.m. / p.m. but at “before teaching / after teaching”:

Because teaching requires an enormous amount of concentration and adrenalin, I can’t write before I teach. But if I was done teaching at two or three, there would be an hour or two where I would really want to be at the computer. This was not any kind of puritanism or discipline; this was looking for pleasure and delight. (Susan Gubar, English, Indiana University)

A few of the academics I interviewed—very few—possess the seemingly superhuman ability to write at any time of the day or night, with little need for rest or sustenance:

The book I’ve just finished was primarily written from about eight thirty at night till about twelve thirty, and then I got up again at around five o’clock in the morning for a couple of hours and then on the weekends. It’s the way I’ve always worked. I got ruined when I was doing my PhD, because I had little kids, and it took me seven years. And the only time I could find was after hours. I never really learned to sleep again. (Shelda Debowski, academic leadership consultant, Australia)

For most of us mortals, however, sacrificing sleep for the sake of scholarship is not to be recommended. Māori studies scholar Ewan Pohe recalls what happened when he started getting up to write at what poet Sylvia Plath called the “blue hour,” that spookily silent predawn period “before cock crow, before the baby’s cry, before the glassy music of the milkman, settling his bottles”:5

Three o’clock in the morning—that didn’t really work. It’s dead quiet; you can get a lot of focused thought done once you get used to it, but it gets you completely out of sync with your family, because you have to go to bed by seven o’clock in the evening. (Ewan Pohe, Māori Studies, Victoria University of Wellington)

Pohe’s story highlights a theme that surfaced again and again in my conversations with successful academics: the intimate entanglement of their writing lives with their family lives. Some admitted that their preoccupation with writing may cause challenges for their loved ones:

When I get really deep in a project, I can’t do anything else. Stopping and washing dishes is really painful, and that can last for a long time—months. That’s when it’s really hard to find balance, and most of the time I wander around in a craze and complain to my family about how hard my life is. So they get really annoyed with me. Not only am I ignoring them and not available; I’m complaining all the time and wanting them to be nice to me and nurture me. (Mindy Fullilove, Clinical Psychiatry, Columbia University)

“Simultaneously with both hands”

Kurt Albertine

Department of Pediatrics, University of Utah (USA)

Anatomist and physiologist Kurt Albertine started teaching in an era when there was no such thing as PowerPoint. Instead, lecturers learned to “draw beautifully, simultaneously with both hands” to illustrate the details of human anatomy:

For example, if a cross-section of the spinal cord was to be drawn, you took a piece of chalk in each hand, bellied up to the chalkboard, placed the two pieces of chalk side by side as high as your reach allowed, and pulled the chalk pieces along arcs from above your head and outward and then inward to meet at your navel. The result, with some practice, was a perfect outline of a cross-section of the cervical spinal cord.

These days, when marking up papers on airplanes, Albertine chooses his writing hand based on which side of the aisle he is seated on: “This is a flexible solution to avoid crashing my elbow into the person sitting beside me.”

Albertine’s ambidextrousness reflects his two-handed approach to academic life. His workday begins at five a.m., when he rises to phone his lab and check on the preterm lambs. Next, he exercises for an hour and a half before heading to the office to squeeze in an hour of writing before anyone else arrives. The rest of the day, he confesses, “is a disaster, like everybody’s day.” But in the evening, after dinner at home with his wife, he gets a second wind. Around ten p.m., he allows himself to nod off for twenty minutes or so: “Catnaps refresh me, and physiological data suggest that they improve alertness.” Then he sits down and writes like a “holy terror” until well past midnight:

I am bright eyed and bushy tailed, completely awake. I write from eleven until one every night. These are my two hours of focused, uninterrupted writing. I typically do the writing with closed eyes. I visualize what I compose. Of course, typos are rampant. But I find that if I get the story line recorded the first time, tidying up is easy.

In the morning, he is up again at five to check on the preterm lambs, and the cycle begins anew.

Just as frequently, however, I heard stories of family lives enriched and enabled by academics’ writing lives, often in unexpected ways. Educator and poet Carl Leggo described an idyllic sabbatical leave structured around the daily needs of his intergenerational family:

I drove my son to work every morning. He’s thirty, but he didn’t have a car at the time. So he and I would have that time together, driving some distance—almost a half hour—to get him there and talking most of the way. Then I would pick up my granddaughters at about three thirty in the afternoon. In between, I would write and again in the evenings. The rhythm of that was perfect. (Carl Leggo, Education, University of British Columbia)

Rather than forcing his family to march to the drumbeat of his writing schedule, Leggo allowed the lilts and cadences of his household to set the pace for his writing.

The unbroken rhythms of a research leave can, to be sure, be challenging to sustain during a busy teaching term. Some writers create weekly minisabbaticals by working on the Sabbath:

I tend to write book reviews on weekends. I try to just sit down with the late morning or early afternoon ahead of me, and dinnertime is the time by which I have to have the draft. (Anthony Grafton, History, Princeton University)

Others mark out a weekly writing day and guard it with sacred devotion:

I try to be very religious about keeping Monday completely free for research. It would have to be a summons from the vice-chancellor or something like that to draw me out. It would have to be the place burning down, or something of great seriousness. (Michael Reilly, Māori, Pacific, and Indigenous Studies, University of Otago)

I have been absolutely religious about having at least one day a week at home specifically for my research. I am just not available for meetings on Fridays, full stop, and people work around that. (Sarah Maddison, Social and Political Sciences, University of Melbourne)

Many of my interview subjects cited the long summer break as the most fertile period of their academic year, a time when articles get written, book manuscripts get completed, and the well of scholarship gets refilled:

My main strategy has been when there’s a break—whether it’s a week or a couple of weeks in the winter or the longer break in the summer—to absolutely clear the decks before I get there, to take care of any teaching or administrative responsibilities and to have as little grading as possible going into them, so that I can have concentrated writing time. (Lesley Wheeler, English, Washington and Lee University)

But not everyone wants to spend the summer hunkered down over a keyboard. Irish-born literary scholar Enda Duffy, whose family summers in Italy, recalls the grilling he received from his department chair upon returning to campus one autumn:

He said, “What did you do in summer?” He wanted me to give a full report on the three articles I had written plus the research I had done for my next important volume. But I said, “I sat on the terrace reading the Herald Tribune.” (Enda Duffy, English, University of California at Santa Barbara)

Experimental psychologist Cecilia Heyes learned the hard way about the importance of taking a break:

When I was a graduate student, finishing up my PhD, I had been working seven days a week for months and months; then I went home to see my mother, and I actually fainted for the first and only time in my life. At that point I realized okay, this seven-days-a-week thing doesn’t really work for me. Since then I have always made a point of taking at least one full day a week off from work, often two. (Cecilia Heyes, Psychology, University of Oxford)

As journalist Ferris Jabr reminds us, time out from writing can also be time well spent: “Downtime replenishes the brain’s stores of attention and motivation, encourages productivity and creativity, and is essential to both achieve our highest levels of performance and simply form stable memories in everyday life.”6

For the vast majority of successful academics, writing is neither a daily routine nor a rare occurrence, neither an immovable constant nor a random event. Writing is the work that gets done in the interstices between teaching, office hours, faculty meetings, administration, email, family events, and all the other messy, sprawling demands of academic life. Economist Janet Currie described a fantasy harbored by many of the colleagues I spoke to:

If I had a whole week where I didn’t have to do anything else, I could sit down and write a whole article from beginning to end, and that would be very beautiful. But I hardly ever get to do that, so the best I can do is to find a day here and there. I just have to take whatever time I have and be very disciplined. (Janet Currie, Economics and Public Affairs, Princeton University)

Note how the language of self-regulation (“I have to be very disciplined”) mingles here with the language of desire (“that would be very beautiful”). Words like pleasure and challenge cropped up frequently in my interviews, suggesting that successful writers do not rely on externally mandated discipline alone:

I associate writing with pleasure in ideas, in communicating with people. I think writing is the ultimate challenge, and that’s why I like it, because I can’t resist a challenge. (Ludmilla Jordanova, History, Durham University)

Perhaps what we need is a radical reconceptualization of time: not as an adversary to be vanquished (a race against time) or a criminal to be tracked down (fugitive time) or an employee to be disciplined (time management) or a commodity to be squandered (wasted time) but as an expansive, fluid entity that will always resist our efforts to contain it. Time can enrich our lives (quality time), transport us to new places and paces (island time), and help us out in moments of need:

If I can’t find the time, the time finds me. (Margaret Breen, English, University of Connecticut)

Whenever and however often you write—whether you find the time or the time finds you—there is no “right” time for writing. The best time to write is any time you do.

“Squishing everything in”

Janelle Jenstad

Department of English, University of Victoria (Canada)

Janelle Jenstad likes to do “a little bit of teaching, a little bit of research, and a little bit of service every day,” writing whenever and wherever she can: “on the train, on the plane, in airports, in coffee shops.” She sometimes goes to bed at the same time as her young children—“like eight thirty, nine”—and gets up at four a.m. to write: “It’s sacred time. The house is quiet. Everybody is asleep.” Her current research files are kept pinned to her Microsoft Word menu so that they are always ready to open: “I’ll write at the kitchen table if the kids are busy playing with Lego. I’ll pop open that file and add a few more words.”

A “terrible perfectionist” by nature, Jenstad has learned to write “drafty drafts” full of holes: “I give myself permission to write, ’I don’t know what I’m doing here. Come back later!’ ” Borrowing vocabulary and metaphors from her husband, a building tradesman, she distinguishes during the editing process between the “roughing cut” and the “finishing cut”:

If you’re cutting a piece of metal to make a shape, the very first thing you do is give it a roughing cut, where you just get rid of most of the excess metal. Once you’ve done that, then you do your finishing cut. I’ve used the concept a lot in my writing and with my students when they come in for editing sessions with me. We’ll start to wrestle with some little detail, and then I’ll say, “Hang on, we’re not finished with our roughing cut yet. We don’t know what the shape of this project is yet, so let’s not niggle over the details. We’ll save that for a finishing cut at the end.”

Despite the challenges of juggling many different personal and professional roles—scholar, teacher, mother, wife, writer, blogger, academic colleague, and more—Jenstad contends that she is not particularly interested in maintaining “work-life balance”:

Every aspect of my life is invested in reading and writing and words and texts. When my kids are older, we’ll probably be going to the theater together, and I’ll probably be writing about that experience of introducing children to Shakespeare. It’s not about balance. It’s about squishing everything in.

Things to try

Routinize

Many books and articles on productive writing recommend that you establish a daily or weekly writing routine, particularly if you are prone to procrastination or suffer from writer’s block. The basic principle is simple: decide how many hours per week you will devote to research writing (however you may choose to define “research” and “writing”); schedule those hours into your calendar; and keep your appointments with yourself just as faithfully as you would keep an appointment to teach a class or visit the dentist. Later chapters of this book will help you develop the artisanal skills, social networks, and emotional confidence to stay on track with your new routine—or, if daily scheduled writing doesn’t suit your style, to ditch the rulebook and try a different approach altogether.

Remix

Experiment with writing at different times of the day: mornings before breakfast, evenings after dinner, afternoons at the hour when you normally start craving a postprandial nap. (“It’s a time when one’s body … is quiescent, somnolent,” notes novelist Anthony Burgess, “but the brain can be quite sharp.”)7 Make a brief note about how you felt and what you wrote each time. Do you find that different types of writing-related tasks—brainstorming, data analysis, drafting, revising—work better at different times of day? If yes, can you leverage that knowledge into a productive writing routine?

Write at a time that feels “wrong”

For example, you could close your office door for an hour or two on a busy teaching day or slip away with a notebook during a family holiday. Pay attention to how that “transgressive writing” session goes. Did you find it more productive than “routine writing”? If so, how might you harness that subversive energy in your everyday writing life?

Read a book

If you like the idea of establishing a regular writing routine, there are numerous books, blogs, and other resources available to help you plan your productive new life. For a punchy kick-start, try Robert Boice’s evangelical Professors as Writers, Tara Gray’s energetic Publish and Flourish, Paul Silvia’s slothdom-busting How to Write a Lot, or Eviatar Zerubavel’s sensible The Clockwork Muse. There are also writing guides tailored especially for doctoral students (such as Joan Bolker’s Writing Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day) or focusing on specific academic genres (such as Rowena Murray’s Writing for Academic Journals) or promising a particular publishing outcome within a set amount of time (such as Wendy Belcher’s Write Your Article in 12 Weeks). Studies of writer’s block (such as Keith Hjortshoj’s Understanding Writing Blocks) can provide insight into the complex psychology of time management. And finally, books with inviting titles such as Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman), Slow Professor: Challenging the Culture of Speed in the Academy (Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber), and The Art of Procrastination: A Guide to Effective Dawdling, Lollygagging and Postponing (John Perry) remind us of the value of slowing down.8