Writing Everyday
I encourage my students to write everyday.
By “writing,” I mean “pushing their project closest to publication just a little bit closer.” I want them to think about the next step on the journey to a published paper and do it. According to this loose definition of writing, it might involve data collection, data analysis, creating slides, or even writing and polishing text. It might involve organization, planning, or learning new skills. It excludes any tasks that aren’t necessary to complete the project.
By everyday, I mean at least every weekday, probably at the same time every day and probably first thing in the morning. For better or worse, early-career academics are evaluated by their research productivity.
Urgency and Importance
President Eisenhower famously characterized his duties: “I have two kinds of problems, the urgent and the important. The urgent are not important, and the important are never urgent.”
Following Eisenhower’s Box, we might assign degrees of urgency and importance to tasks in graduate school. Graduate students have teaching responsibilities, RA duties, readings for seminars, homework for methods classes, preliminary exams, and administrative to-dos. All of these tasks are important. They must be completed. They must be completed well.
But writing is even more important. Yet writing never quite becomes urgent. It’s easy to put off writing to do readings or complete a homework.
The Evidence
Robert Boice studied academic productivity carefully. A couple of his studies provide some evidence for my recommendation to write every day.
First, he assessed how early-career academics spend their time. The figure below shows the results. Notice that these faculty spend more time in committee meetings (2 hrs.) than writing (1.5 hours).
Second, Boice conducted an experiment to assess the effect of writing strategies.
Boice randomly divided 27 academics into three groups:
- The control group agreed to defer all but the most urgent writing for ten weeks.
- The spontaneous group agreed write when they felt like it.
- The contingency group agreed to donate to an anti-charity if they failed to write every day.
The figure below shows that regular writing routine increase production of both pages and ideas. Notice that the spontaneous writers barely produced more ideas and pages than the group trying to avoid writing.
I find these results compelling, but note that Helen Sword urges some caution.
How I Do* It
*Would do it if I didn’t have a newborn.
- Write for two hours immediately after I wake up each morning. I don’t fix coffee. I don’t eat. I wake up and walk straight to my desk and start writing. If the task is particularly dreadful, then I might do incorporate a few breaks (e.g., Pomodoro-style), but I usually just work straight through. After two hours of writing, it’s usually about 9am and I know that I have accomplished my most important task for the day. I’m free to focus on teaching and administrative duties.
- Avoid writing outside this two-hour window (without a good reason). I want to make consistent progress for a semester. I get burned out easily, so an eight-hour binge might derail my progress for two weeks. Also, I’m much more productive across five two-hour sessions in a week than a single ten-hour binge.
- Take long breaks. I usually only write during the semester. I start about two weeks before the semester starts and stop about two weeks before the semester ends.
- Write for 30 minutes on weekends. I’m less strict about doing it immediately, but I want to maintain my momentum.
I admit that I deviate from the strategy above at some points (and not always deliberately). But I followed this plan during my most productive periods as a graduate student and assistant professor. Who knows what will happen this semester.
Things to Do
It’s my view that PhD students should write every day, from the first day of their first semester (remember that I have a broad definition of “write”). Most students need some time before they’re ready to jump into the technical details a solo project, but there are always things to do.
If you can’t identify a specific task to work on, come talk to me–there’s lots to be done.
- Plan and organize. Start by reading How to Write a Lot. Perhaps read Getting Things Done. Perhaps read Air & Light & Time & Space or Writing for Social Scientists.
- Read “Publication, Publication” and the updates.
- Before you can jump into a project, you need to know the literature. Spend some writing time exploring literatures that you might want to contribute to. What interests you most? The Annual Review of Political Science is a valuable resource.
- Once you have a specific topic of interest, you need to learn that literature. You can spend dozens of writing sessions reading and taking notes. I strongly encourage you to read and take notes systematically, as Raul Pacheco-Vega suggests using a spreadsheet, Elaine Campbell suggests a similar method, and Katherine Firth suggests a using Cornell notes. I like a cheap, 70-page, college-ruled notebook with a four-color pen.
- Tanya Golash-Boza lists ten ways to write everyday if you’ve got a paper in-progress.
Carlisle Rainey