At a recent meeting of the Women’s Writing Support Group, participants spoke of how helpful it’s been to write for a short block of time each week during the workshop. Each week, we spend 20 minutes working alone on our academic writing projects. There is something about this structure—regular, predictable, and brief (just 20 minutes!)—that [...]
Some writing humour for Halloween (warning – coarse language): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DDdM66_nSI&NR=1
Write. That’s what I didn’t do. Or what I haven’t done so far. Every summer I promise myself that I’ll get back to one scrap of text or another that I somehow—how?—managed to trick myself into jotting down…the previous summer?…or, no, could it really have been three or even four summers ago?… If others are [...]
Tag surfing, I came across a piece by Timothy A. Psychl that presents a slightly different “take” on procrastination. The problem might not (just) lie with the individual psychology of the procrastinator: it’s sometimes worth having a look at whether you’re trying to begin, to sustain or to complete a task. What this seems to mean, [...]
Anne Lamott, in her dare-I-call-it-”cult” book on writing, Bird by Bird, talks about always having index cards at hand to jot down ideas before they vanish into the ether (as ideas—those frustratingly elusive will-o’-the-wisps—tend to do). Often, as we’ve already observed, getting started on something can be the really tricky part. Index cards can be [...]
I came across a great recommendation on the “Phinished” website to try rotating ways of working. 15 minutes a day is great for a while. Then it’s often helpful to switch to, say, a goal of 2 pages a day for a while, and so on. See “Erika’s post”: “The 40 minute system and research [...]
This page provides a handy top-ten list for busting procrastination. Some of them are obvious — avoid TV, internet, telephone. Some are so obvious that they are impossible not to include (but often strangely easy to forget) — ie. get right to work! My favourite on the list: avoid doing extra research. How often do [...]
