Writing #3--Finding time to write
Everybody thinks they need big blocks of time to get serious writing done. But nobody has big blocks of time. It's a wonder anything gets published at all. Spoiler alert: I've never found a magic bullet to this problem. For me, it just took a lot of working at self discipline. Another thing that helped was I had the opportunity to take a time-management class, and I'll share a trick I learned. I hope this post will help.
When I got married in graduate school, I made a promise to myself to work like mad during the weekdays so that I could have evenings and weekends with my husband as much as possible (he worked at an 8-5 job). I was amazed at how much more efficient I became when I kept that goal in mind.
I basically used the same technique in teaching myself to write with smaller blocks of time. Part of it was an adjustment in perspective. Rather than looking for big blocks of time, I started focusing on the little blocks of time that I was wasting, like the half hour between meetings or the 20 minutes after I finished lecture preparation and before I had to actually give the lecture.
I taught myself to use that time to pull up a paper I was working on and add a sentence or two, enough to capture a line of thought. Or I would continue drafting a figure. Or read through a paper I needed to reference. Something, anything, to keep the paper moving along.
And I taught myself to jealously guard the big blocks of time I did have. In some ways this was even harder.
I didn't always love to write the way I do now. When my discipline was shaky, I was a master procrastinator. But, when I really looked at what I was doing, I realized I was throwing away even big blocks of time by allowing myself to become distracted by minutiae (like email), or I would go check for mail and suddenly find a need to have a chat with a colleague just then, or I would decide to go through the latest journal that had arrived (this was back before everything was instantly online), even though I already knew none of the papers was relevant to what I was doing at the moment. The excuses were endless. I would manage to carve the big blocks of time up so that all I had left was little blocks of time and, of course, I couldn't write anything with a little block of time.
All this despite the fact that, once I got going on a paper, I enjoyed the process. The problem was getting started. I just had to force myself to close my office door, close my email program, and just get to work.
However, finally, over the years, it dawned on me that writing is where the creativity that makes us scientists bears fruit. Field or lab work can be fun, but it's all pointless unless we pull it all together, fit our work into the larger body of scientific knowledge, and get our work out to others. And, if that's not enough motivation, it is also the primary thing that gets us pay raises and promotions.
I finally managed to get myself to look forward to writing. Then, I started anticipating even the small blocks of time.
Now for some thoughts about time management.
Many years ago, a guy named Stephen Covey wrote a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I've never read it, but I am very familiar with a diagram he produced, which has been reproduced over and over in a number of different versions. I've never found a version made specifically for academics, so below is my attempt.
It's been a few years since I retired, so I know this is incomplete, but it will get the point across, and I want to make some comments about it. The upper left quadrant is full of stuff that has a specific time component (hence, the "urgent"). These are things that must get done because they have deadlines, and they are also important. You have to show up to lecture on time or you are not doing your job. You have to get a dissertation read and critiqued in time for a thesis defense. And so on. Some of these are urgent by nature (e.g., the thesis defense). But some only become urgent because of foot-dragging. The deadline to turn in my annual report was never stressful because every time something happened that had to go on my annual report (invited lecture, grant proposal submitted, paper published, etc.), I would add it to my annual report right then and there. It usually took less than a minute.
It is harder to learn to write abstracts, grant proposals, and deadlined papers ahead of time. Abstracts, though, are a great way to use a little block of time or two. For years, I submitted abstracts well ahead of time using this technique.
The upper right quadrant is where you should be spending most of your time. Grant proposals and deadlined papers really should be in that quadrant. These are the things for which you should be using most of those blocks of time, big and small.
It's the stuff in the lower left quadrant that is the hardest to resist. An email pops up on your screen and it feels like you have to deal with it. Colleagues and students nowadays get very impatient if you don't answer an email right away. But that's their problem; don't make it yours. You have to close your email program when you're going to write. It is just too tempting to get pulled away from what you should be doing.
At some point, of course, you have to deal with your email (and mail, although that's getting rarer). When I took the time management class, I mainly learned I was already pretty efficient, probably because of that vow I made to myself about spending time with my husband. One trick I did learn, though, has saved me unbelievable amounts of time, and I use it to this day.
At the time, email was less common, so I was still picking up physical mail. I learned to go through it right there at the mailbox and immediately throw away anything I did not want or need. Then I would carry the rest to my office and deal with it right then and there. Here's where the time is really saved: How many of us have huge piles of stuff that we tossed there, intending to get to "later"? How much time do we spend sorting through those piles looking for stuff, and how much mental energy do we spend thinking about the stuff we need to get to but haven't gotten to yet? The questions almost answer themselves. A lot. The same applies to email, which is more efficient in that it gets delivered right to your desk. Pick a couple of times during the day when you will deal with email and when you do, immediately trash the stuff you don't want or need and deal with the rest immediately if at all possible. Only rarely will it be impossible to deal with an email right away; that gets flagged and a time is picked to deal with it. File the rest of the email in an appropriate folder so you know where to find it. It just takes a second or less.
The kinds of activities in the lower right hand quadrant are the ones that should be avoided at all costs. Trash that useless email; don't let it pile up in your inbox. Close your door when you are writing. Turn off your cell phone. Once you get going on the writing, chances are you'll really enjoy it because this is why you trained to be a scientist--to discover new things and add to the human race's body of knowledge about the world around us.
When I got married in graduate school, I made a promise to myself to work like mad during the weekdays so that I could have evenings and weekends with my husband as much as possible (he worked at an 8-5 job). I was amazed at how much more efficient I became when I kept that goal in mind.
I basically used the same technique in teaching myself to write with smaller blocks of time. Part of it was an adjustment in perspective. Rather than looking for big blocks of time, I started focusing on the little blocks of time that I was wasting, like the half hour between meetings or the 20 minutes after I finished lecture preparation and before I had to actually give the lecture.
I taught myself to use that time to pull up a paper I was working on and add a sentence or two, enough to capture a line of thought. Or I would continue drafting a figure. Or read through a paper I needed to reference. Something, anything, to keep the paper moving along.
And I taught myself to jealously guard the big blocks of time I did have. In some ways this was even harder.
I didn't always love to write the way I do now. When my discipline was shaky, I was a master procrastinator. But, when I really looked at what I was doing, I realized I was throwing away even big blocks of time by allowing myself to become distracted by minutiae (like email), or I would go check for mail and suddenly find a need to have a chat with a colleague just then, or I would decide to go through the latest journal that had arrived (this was back before everything was instantly online), even though I already knew none of the papers was relevant to what I was doing at the moment. The excuses were endless. I would manage to carve the big blocks of time up so that all I had left was little blocks of time and, of course, I couldn't write anything with a little block of time.
All this despite the fact that, once I got going on a paper, I enjoyed the process. The problem was getting started. I just had to force myself to close my office door, close my email program, and just get to work.
However, finally, over the years, it dawned on me that writing is where the creativity that makes us scientists bears fruit. Field or lab work can be fun, but it's all pointless unless we pull it all together, fit our work into the larger body of scientific knowledge, and get our work out to others. And, if that's not enough motivation, it is also the primary thing that gets us pay raises and promotions.
I finally managed to get myself to look forward to writing. Then, I started anticipating even the small blocks of time.
Now for some thoughts about time management.
Many years ago, a guy named Stephen Covey wrote a book called The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I've never read it, but I am very familiar with a diagram he produced, which has been reproduced over and over in a number of different versions. I've never found a version made specifically for academics, so below is my attempt.
It's been a few years since I retired, so I know this is incomplete, but it will get the point across, and I want to make some comments about it. The upper left quadrant is full of stuff that has a specific time component (hence, the "urgent"). These are things that must get done because they have deadlines, and they are also important. You have to show up to lecture on time or you are not doing your job. You have to get a dissertation read and critiqued in time for a thesis defense. And so on. Some of these are urgent by nature (e.g., the thesis defense). But some only become urgent because of foot-dragging. The deadline to turn in my annual report was never stressful because every time something happened that had to go on my annual report (invited lecture, grant proposal submitted, paper published, etc.), I would add it to my annual report right then and there. It usually took less than a minute.
It is harder to learn to write abstracts, grant proposals, and deadlined papers ahead of time. Abstracts, though, are a great way to use a little block of time or two. For years, I submitted abstracts well ahead of time using this technique.
The upper right quadrant is where you should be spending most of your time. Grant proposals and deadlined papers really should be in that quadrant. These are the things for which you should be using most of those blocks of time, big and small.
It's the stuff in the lower left quadrant that is the hardest to resist. An email pops up on your screen and it feels like you have to deal with it. Colleagues and students nowadays get very impatient if you don't answer an email right away. But that's their problem; don't make it yours. You have to close your email program when you're going to write. It is just too tempting to get pulled away from what you should be doing.
At some point, of course, you have to deal with your email (and mail, although that's getting rarer). When I took the time management class, I mainly learned I was already pretty efficient, probably because of that vow I made to myself about spending time with my husband. One trick I did learn, though, has saved me unbelievable amounts of time, and I use it to this day.
At the time, email was less common, so I was still picking up physical mail. I learned to go through it right there at the mailbox and immediately throw away anything I did not want or need. Then I would carry the rest to my office and deal with it right then and there. Here's where the time is really saved: How many of us have huge piles of stuff that we tossed there, intending to get to "later"? How much time do we spend sorting through those piles looking for stuff, and how much mental energy do we spend thinking about the stuff we need to get to but haven't gotten to yet? The questions almost answer themselves. A lot. The same applies to email, which is more efficient in that it gets delivered right to your desk. Pick a couple of times during the day when you will deal with email and when you do, immediately trash the stuff you don't want or need and deal with the rest immediately if at all possible. Only rarely will it be impossible to deal with an email right away; that gets flagged and a time is picked to deal with it. File the rest of the email in an appropriate folder so you know where to find it. It just takes a second or less.
The kinds of activities in the lower right hand quadrant are the ones that should be avoided at all costs. Trash that useless email; don't let it pile up in your inbox. Close your door when you are writing. Turn off your cell phone. Once you get going on the writing, chances are you'll really enjoy it because this is why you trained to be a scientist--to discover new things and add to the human race's body of knowledge about the world around us.
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