Scheduling writing

I read Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot yesterday, and I have to say that I liked it a lot. I’m not in Psychology, but there’s a lot of overlap between our fields so I didn’t have the same objections to it that someone in, say, the humanities might.

His main piece of advice is one that I already knew and already knew works for me, and yet had somehow managed to forget: schedule regular writing time. (I know this doesn’t necessarily work for everyone, but it does work for me.) This is how I wrote my dissertation: four days a week (Tues-Fri: I taught on Mondays and used that day for all class prep) I had to sit at my desk from 10am – noon whether I liked it or not. If I wanted to keep working past 12 I could, but I was under no circumstances allowed to stop before that. I turned off internet access, put on my trusty 500-song dissertation playlist on the iTunes, and I worked. I did my analyses for my dissertation in that time too. None of this prancing around whining about how I can’t write yet because my analyses aren’t finished yet.

So what happened? Why don’t I do this anymore? I think perhaps I felt a bit cocky since I had, after all, written a dissertation and published several papers. Also it seemed harder to schedule time like this when I have managing responsibilities and do a lot of lab work. And I liked to think that I could schedule myself to spend a whole day on a writing task, which of course doesn’t work because I can’t possibly work on the same thing that many hours in a row. I’ve been able to get grants written, but that’s about it – I am having trouble with things that don’t have deadlines.

So this week I am going to go back to my previously successful ways. From 9-11 am, I will turn off the email and the internet and sit at my desk (or somewhere else if I need to get away) and I will write. As Silvia points out, and as I knew when I wrote my dissertation, “writing” here means “anything necessary to get an article written,” which includes data analysis or reading relevant journal articles. I think this is going to work for me.

However, my favorite part of the book comes at the very end. If one schedules writing during the normal workday, then one does not need to work evenings and weekends. He writes:

A writing schedule brings balance to your life – not balance in the pseudoscientific, New Age, self-help sense of wondrous fulfillment, but balance in the sense of separating work and play. Binge writers foolishly search for big chunks of time, and they “find” this time during the evenings and weekends. Bing writing thus consumes time that should be spent on normal living. Is academic writing more important than spending time with your family and friends, petting the dog, and drinking coffee? A dog unpetted is a sad dog; a cup of coffee forsaken is caffeine lost forever. Protect your real-world time just as you protect your scheduled writing time. Spend your evenings and weekends hanging out with your family and friends, building canoes, bidding on vintage Alvar Aalto furniture that you don’t need, watching Law & Order reruns, repainting the shutters, or teaching your cat to use the toilet. It doesn’t matter what you do as long as you don’t spend your free time writing – there’s time during the work week for that. (132)

I’m not sure why I needed permission to work the way I want to work (that is, 40 hours a week during normal work hours and no more, damn it!) but I have to say that it feels wonderful to be told that one can be a successful academic this way.