In Focus: 3 elements to consider, I outlined three elements that affect your focus during a writing session: the task itself, how you are feeling, and the context. This article is updated from one published 21 April 2014 to connect it more clearly to that framework. I use the term “optimize” purposefully. Your goal is […]
Read More »Meeting With Your Writing
Posts originally written to promote A Meeting With Your Writing. These address various issues that help you take the stress out of writing and get more writing done.
A Meeting With Your Writing is a virtual writing group. It runs in 12-week sessions. Registration opens about a month before a session starts and remains open until about 3 weeks into the session.
If you are interested and registration is not currently open, you can subscribe to my advance notice list. You'll get an email when the next session is open for registration.
Using all 3 types of writing time
Writing is a core activity for academics. I advocate establishing a writing practice, and making writing a priority when you plan. Finding and protecting time for writing, especially during the parts of the year when you are teaching, is difficult. It may be helpful to consider the different kinds of time available. Writing, as far […]
Read More »One thing at a time?
I don’t know about you, but when I was growing up my mother was big on finishing one project before starting another. In my life, I’ve found that this kind of advice isn’t very helpful. What tends to happen when I get stuck and try to “not give up”, “push through”, “drive on”, or whatever, is […]
Read More »4 years of A Meeting With Your Writing
A long term participant in A Meeting With Your Writing recently mentioned that it has been 4 years. Wow, where does the time go? I remember when I came up with this idea. I wondered what I would do if no one signed up. Or, worse, if only 3 people signed up and then I […]
Read More »Decisions take energy
making decisions is one of the most energy-intensive things we do as humans. Making a decision just plain takes a lot of calories. With a complex life, our brains are exhausted most days, too exhausted to make good decisions. Mark Silver A common scenario You have a sense that you should be writing regularly. You […]
Read More »Is working at or just beyond your limits really effective?
We live in a culture in which we are often demanded to do more. How much writing can you do in a year/semester/week/hour? How many students can you teach effectively? This constant striving for more leaves many of us feeling inadequate a lot of the time. It also privileges an approach to work that is […]
Read More »Thoughts on work, creativity, and “bureaucracy’s perverse attractions”
An article about university bureaucracy by Elaine Glaser in the Times Higher contained this thought provoking paragraph: In The Utopia of Rules, Graeber offers a convincing account of bureaucracy’s perverse attractions. It offers a chimera of absolute transparency, consistency and fairness. It is like a game with perfect rules – and which is also not […]
Read More »Distraction: not the usual suspects
Distraction is the enemy of productivity. There is all kinds of time management and productivity advice telling you to track what you are doing and get rid of all the meaningless tasks that don’t contribute to moving your project forward. There are apps and strategies for doing that. But are you focused on the right […]
Read More »When does Reading count as Writing?
In the intro to A Meeting With Your Writing I ask participants to list everything that comes to mind when they ask this question: “What does this writing project need to move forward?” I give them 30 – 60 seconds to write. Then I ask them to select the thing on that list that they […]
Read More »Are you resisting routine?
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 […]
Read More »Are you taking long weekends?
We all get long weekends sometimes, though for different reasons. It seems that a lot of holidays that used to float are now observed on a Monday in order to make it a long weekend. I know a lot of academics have a hard time regularly taking 2-day weekends. I’m betting long weekends are even […]
Read More »Doing what you want to do
At the beginning of every session of A Meeting With Your Writing I used to ask participants to make a list of all the writing/research projects that they consider active. I then asked them which one of those they most want to work on during the next 90 minutes. It might be the one that would be most […]
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