Writing a lot, or how I am going to stop worrying about the time and just do it

I'm reading a great book by Paul Silvia, called How to Write a Lot: a practical guide to productive academic writing.  So far - great advice.  So far - haven't been able to implement any of it. 
Silvia's first chapter breaks down the reasons for why academics don't write and the arguments for why and how these are what he calls "specious barriers" to being a really productive academic writer.  I wholly agree with his logic, its just that I'm what you would call a really disorganized planner, so I tend to get organized, but then never follow-through. 

His first piece of advice is to schedule your writing time and guard it with your life.  Easier said than done.  While I completely agree with the scheduling part, its the "where do I find the time on my schedule that isn't blocked off for a meeting" part that gets me tied up.  I want to try and make this a part of my everyday schedule, but so much gets in the way of this, including meetings, reference hours, other obligations.  However, Silvia argues that this is your writing time and you have to defend it, regardless of who or what is trying to take the time away from you.  Librarians especially need this time carved out at work, since we unfortunately don't have the luxury of summers or semester breaks away from campus.  Starting this week, I'm going to start scheduling my writing time on my corporate calendar, since the writing is important -- not just for tenure, but because I enjoy it and want to do more of it, but always have an excuse for why I'm not doing more of it. 

A second piece of practical and insanely simple advice:  write down your goals and objectives for each writing session.  Make them concrete and most importantly, do-able.  A goal such as "Write 200 words today" is a concrete goal and easily met if you schedule your time and focus on writing and not other tasks to do while in your writing session.  He also suggests giving your writing projects deadlines, since many of us start writing, but with no clearly articulated deadline, its easy to set it aside or procrastinate. 

So here is are my proposed writing goals:

1.  Set up a writing schedule for the next six months.

2.  Write at least 1 hour every day.

3.  Finish one journal article within the six months period

4.  Submit article to a journal.

Stay tuned...

Comments

[Bonnie Swoger]

I like the part about having concrete goals and objectives for each session. I find it way too easy to spend tons of time on some minor piece of data analysis.

Thanks for putting these suggestions out there - I don't have time to read the book right now!