In any given session of A Meeting With Your Writing it is not uncommon for someone to be coming back to a project they haven’t looked at in a while.
Summer and sabbatical are also times when you might revisit abandoned projects with a view to getting some of them finished.
You don’t need to punish yourself.
There are many good reasons to set a project aside:
- a sustained push on another project
- teaching and other duties taking over your life for a while
- needing distance from it to figure out what comes next
- frustration
The reason you abandoned it doesn’t matter. How long you have abandoned it doesn’t matter.
Set some reasonable goals for your first session back.
Newton’s first law of motion (inertia) seems to apply to much more than the physical world.
The force required to get something moving is greater than the force required to keep it moving.
So when you’ve not been working on something for a while, it is like a huge boulder just sitting there on your desk.
Your goal for your first session is to examine your boulder and work out whether and how to get it moving again.
Collect your drafts and notes. Read through your materials to remind yourself what you were trying to do. Make notes to yourself as you go.
In addition to notes about what it needs, make sure you notice what is worthwhile (or even exciting) about this project. Notice how it feels to reconnect with it.
Decide if you are going to finish this
You don’t have to finish everything you start. Whatever you have been working on since you set this project aside may have changed your perspective on this topic. It may no longer be worth finishing in the form you had imagined.
Trust your intuition. And then verify that gut feeling.
If reading the draft and going through your notes gives you a sinking feeling, then look for a good reason *to* work on it.
Seriously, your gut feeling is a good enough reason to abandon the project. Verify that by finding reasons to go ahead.
The work you’ve already done will not be a waste. It has informed whatever you did next. Some of the work you did to get it to whatever stage you got it to may be useful for other things.
Challenge the “You started so you have to finish!” idea and come up with a better answer.
If reading the draft and going through the notes reveals sparks of excitement and interest, trust that feeling, too.
Start from the sparks and decide whether you want to rekindle the original fire or start a new one. That new one may involve salvaging quite a bit of kindling and fuel from the original project though.
Give yourself time to make that decision
I define writing as anything that moves your writing project forward.
A firm decision to *not* finish a project is still forward movement.
You don’t want to spend too much time making the decision, but you need to acknowledge that making a decision is real work that takes time.
The co-working sessions for academics: A Meeting With Your Writing guarantees 90 minutes of writing time. Use the whole 90 minutes, but keep it to 90 minutes for this reconnaissance work.
Make a decision and leave yourself notes for what it needs next. That is an excellent use of your writing time.
Then congratulate yourself.
If you decide to go forward with it
Now you’ve made the decision, you actually need to work on the project.
Even though you have a good reason to do so, you may have some emotional resistance related to having neglected it for so long. Or, the evidence of your development as a scholar in the intervening period may be painful.
One strategy to get some momentum on the project without increasing your desire to just avoid it, involves very short work sessions:
Require yourself to work on your project for 10 or 15 minutes every working day.
Unless you have another thing to do after your 10 minutes, use the stopwatch feature on your phone instead of the timer. If you look at the stopwatch and it’s been less than the time you decided, you have to keep doing something: thinking, annotating, making notes, reading, etc.… For this purpose, it’s better than a timer because if you get absorbed in what you are doing, you might “accidentally” write for longer than you think. But you do need to know how long you’ve been writing for, so you know you’ve done enough to be allowed to quit if it’s not going well.
When you get beyond the agreed time, if you are still finding it painful, just stop. You’ve done your time. You’ll come back to it tomorrow. Go do something else. Preferably something that makes you feel smart and accomplished.
One day you will notice that you’ve written for much longer than 10 minutes. Allow yourself to be pleased, even if it’s only 12 minutes. The fact that you’ve got to a point where you wanted to check if you were allowed to stop means you can still stop.
An important part of this strategy is that you have to require yourself to do it every day. So if you get to the end of the day and realize you’ve not done your 10 minutes, stop and do it right then. Even if that’s as you were heading to the bathroom to brush your teeth before bed!
Try this for a few weeks and see how it goes.
Allow yourself to be guided by how you are feeling about the project.
You might notice that you now want to work on the project more than you resist it. Or, you might notice that you’ve regularly written for longer than 10 minutes, and maybe even gone on for 30 minutes or more when you have that much time available…
At this point, you can make a new decision about when you’ll work on this project and for how long.
Enjoy your writing!
Related Posts:
Getting back into writing after a break – by Katherine Firth
Letting go of unfinished projects
When your writing project needs to be left alone
A version of this post was sent to members of The Academic Writing Studio in a newsletter on April 21, 2017. Updated to add related posts May 2017. Final section added May 2025. Lightly edited July 2025 before republishing. Added to the Spotlight On: The Power of 15 Minutes in August 2025.
