When it comes to writing the primary challenge most scholars face is how to find and protect time for this work.

I use 15-minutes as a short hand for any amount of time less than 30 minutes, or so short it feels pointless.

I do not think you can have a satisfying writing practice by only cobbling together these 15 minute sessions. However, I do think that making good use of very short chunks of time will make a significant difference to your writing practice.

I’ve written more about the broader context for this use of very short chunks of time in “You need a writing practice” and “3 Kinds of Time”. I have also published a Short Guide to Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing, which goes into more detail about all 3 kinds of time and how to combine them effectively.

You may think that you need full days devoted to writing to really get in the right frame of mind and do deep work. However, in my experience, many people struggle to focus when they have longer periods of time available, especially if these are unstructured. Bounded time periods can be remarkably helpful, either as a way to structure long periods, or on their own. (see “The impact of time available on your focus”)

Of course, it doesn’t much matter what the ideal kind of time is, if that kind of time rarely appears in your calendar or is impossible to protect even if you schedule it. If you are frustrated with how little time you have available for writing, you can experiment with different options to see how they work for you.

People vary. Only you can figure out what will work for you.

This Spotlight should give you some ideas for things you might like to try. I have also created a short email course, The 15-Minute Writing Challenge, to support you in experimenting with this.

Teaching terms are particularly difficult

You probably think of summers and sabbaticals as the gold-standard of writing time. The combination of fewer responsibilities and more control over your time and scheduling enables you to work intensively on research and writing projects. Even when you are not writing, you have the mental capacity to process thoughts in the background.

However, summers and sabbaticals are never long enough (if they ever were). You are unlikely to meet the expectations your institution has for outputs if you limit your writing to those longer periods. Furthermore, you will find your writing more satisfying if you also write during teaching terms.

I wrote a bit about what the transition *from* a writing-focused summer *into* the teaching term might look like in “If you had one more week”

If you’ve never successfully written during term time, you can start small. One of the first posts I wrote about 15-minute writing sessions (2009!) drew on Robert Boice’s work and suggests experimenting with 15-minute sessions.

“It is possible to write during term-time” expands on that to consider a range of ways to do that. I also clarified some options for term-time writing in “How much writing can you do in term-time?”

Habit

While Robert Boice’s research is often cited in support of writing for as little as 15 minutes, the real finding is that making writing a habit is beneficial.

This seems obvious, but creating and maintaining habits is difficult. It is especially difficult in higher education, where your teaching schedule changes at least 3 times a year, and many of your activities are episodic.

I suspect the reason Boice made such a point of mentioning “as little as 15 minutes” is because starting small is a good way to establish a habit. “Small steps yield big results” explains this in more detail.

Establishing a habit of writing regularly, even for small amounts of time, can be a good alternative to using deadlines to motivate you to write. If you’ve found that setting deadlines doesn’t work well for you and want to try something else, you might try this strategy. (see “Are deadlines helping or hurting”)

Although you may *eventually* want to be in the habit of writing regularly for much more than 15-minutes, starting with 15-minutes is a good way to *establish* a habit of writing at a particular time of day. Once the habit is established, you can work on extending the amount of time you write for.

If you sometimes find it difficult to sustain your focus in longer writing sessions, a 15-minute per day writing habit may also help you build up your writing stamina.

I have written a whole series of posts in which I illustrate how building a habit through a very small commitment might work. The focus is my personal journey to developing a daily yoga practice. How I got started, what my 15-minute practice looked like in the beginning, and updates after a couple of months, and a year. FWIW, I started that practice in 2015 and it is still going 10 years later. It even survived a transatlantic move (or maybe helped me survive a transatlantic move).

Think carefully about what might help *you* as you establish a new habit. Tracking “streaks” is a popular strategy, and embedded in lots of apps. While it works well for some people, it doesn’t work for everyone.

Things you can do in a 15 minute session

When I wrote Finding Time for your Scholarly Writing (A Short Guide), I began with those blog posts I’d already published and expanded from there. The section on “Shorter Snatches of Time” in that book includes several different ways you can use 15-minute sessions.

Here are a few specific ideas.

You can use a 15-minute practice to find your way *back* to writing when it’s fallen off your agenda.

If you are finding it difficult to focus on a project because it is emotionally draining in some way, requiring yourself to do at least 10 or 15 minutes every day no matter what, but also giving yourself permission to quit after your 10 minutes is up, can be a very effective way to keep it moving.

This also works if the work you need to do is not interesting enough for your neurodivergent brain. Stop trying to force yourself to be someone you aren’t! How long can you focus? 5 minutes? 10 minutes? What if you push yourself just a little bit, but not too much? Start there. 10 minutes a day adds up to quite a lot of work in the end.

A 15-minute practice can also be useful to figure out what to do *next* when you have multiple projects demanding your attention.

If you like to start with outlines, or if you find it hard to make big structural revisions when you already have sentences, then writing your first draft as an outline that goes right down to paragraph level is perfectly acceptable. Then you can use 15-minute writing sessions to “fill up paragraphs” (Thank you to Raul Pacheco-Vego for writing about that strategy, and to my adult kid for helping me understand that some neurodivergent brains actually like outlines even though mine does not.)

What is a worthwhile use of your research time anyway?

It’s one thing to talk about what kind of time you can find for writing, especially during term time, it’s another thing altogether to feel like it’s *worth* protecting that time.

The biggest hurdle to writing during term time is the belief that it is impossible to do anything worthwhile in the kind of time available.

I agree that there are some kinds of writing work that not only benefit from, but really need, the kind of time that’s only available in summer or sabbaticals. But that’s only one part of the work you need to do to advance your writing projects and publish them.

It is worthwhile thinking about all the different kinds of work that go into writing and publishing, so you can expand your sense of what “productive” writing time is. There are structural reasons this is difficult, which I discuss in “What is research?”. I provide a partial list in “Permission to think big thoughts”.

This mindset shift might also involve rethinking the need for goals. I hate goals, and it turns out you don’t actually need them to achieve things. If you are worried about wandering off in the wrong direction without them, guiding stars can be helpful instead.

What feels “productive” isn’t just about the type of work, and whether it is contributing to a clearly defined goal. ‘Small steps yield big results‘, and allowing yourself to stop pushing to work with ease can help you develop the stamina and intellectual strength to do something bigger.

Sometimes it’s worth just focusing on the process. Scholarly writing and research is creative work. Sometimes you just need to do the creative work and trust that the process will lead to something you can share further down the line.

One benefit of adding very short sessions to your personal writing-time puzzle is that it helps keep the writing project in the back of your mind despite all the other things competing for your attention. Thinking about your writing project, doodling notes, and other ways of keeping those background thoughts alive are a productive use of your time.

Related Posts:

The 15 Minute Writing Challenge – Join the FREE email course to support you in trying some of the suggestions in this post!

The power of 15 minutes a day – How 15 minute writing sessions can make a huge difference to maintaining your writing practice.

15 minutes a day – The original 2009 post, featuring Robert Boice’s advice and how it might apply to you!

Spotlight On: Optimizing Focus – Another Spotlight that has lots more practical & emotional advice about how to focus during your writing sessions, however long they may be.

This post was originally sent to newsletter subscribers on August 15, 2025.