During last Thursday’s Meeting, one participant commented that she’d noticed an interesting benefit of A Meeting With Your Writing. Like so many of us, J is prone to changing her schedule a lot. This means making decisions about whether to write now or to do some other thing on the big list of important stuff.
A Meeting With Your Writing isn’t subject to change. It is at a fixed time. You paid for it. Even though you spend most of that time alone in your office working on your own writing, you know that everyone else in the group is doing that, too. It makes it harder to not come.
What J had realized is that this makes it so much nicer and easier. She just turns up and writes.
Decisions take a lot of energy.
You have limited cognitive capacity, which you’d really rather spend doing your writing rather than deciding when to do your writing, or if you should do your writing now or later.
I tend to resist routine. One of the advantages of being self-employed, like being an academic, is how flexible your schedule can be. But that flexibility can have a downside: using a lot of energy to make decisions about what to do and when to do it.
You are busy enough. Your cognitive resources are much better applied to the intellectual problems you are grappling with in your writing and teaching than to the question of whether and when to write, to feeling guilty about not writing enough, or worrying about the impact not writing enough is going to have on your career.
Would you benefit from support?
A Meeting With Your Writing is part of the Academic Writing Studio, an online community that supports academic writers. There are resources to help you plan your routine, A Meeting With Your Writing to help you keep your commitment to write, and a community for support.
Related posts:
You need a writing practice
Edited May 31, 2016.
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