“Concentration is the secret of strength.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
I always like to think that there's some magical thing that I'll stumble on someday that will make writing as effortless as breathing. Maybe I'll stumble onto a magical pill or a certain smartphone app that will solve the difficulty of the creative process and my productivity will shoot through the roof!
I regret to report that I've tried all kinds of productivity tips and tricks to crank out more writing, but the only one that really works is this:
Write.
This is not to say that smartphone gizmos and massively complex productivity methods can't enhance writing productivity. They can and often do. Fr'instance, in recent years, the Pomodoro method has taken off in popularity, promoting short twenty-five minute bursts of productivity interspersed with short breaks. There are entire apps and websites devoted to this method (I still can't figure out why not just use a kitchen timer?) and a fair number of people swear by it. I think its probably good for getting non-writing tasks done, but for writing, there's no way that I can even get warmed up in twenty-five minutes.
What I have found that works for writing is time tracking, as in timing the actual amount of time spent writing, as opposed to using a souped-up stopwatch countdown. Before I started tracking my writing time, I thought that I wrote for hours upon hours a day and couldn't understand why I had so precious little to show for it. When I started actually tracking my work time, I realized that I was spending way less time writing than I thought. Tracking my work time lets me see how much I work as opposed to how much I think I work. Plus, its nice to see that I'm accomplishing things. I shoot now for four hours a day, broken up into hour long stretches. An hour gives me enough time to warm up, get focused, and produce decent writing. Four hours of intensive writing is hard, but its doable. What really matters is that this structure helps me get stuff done, rather than dinking around (my mother's words) and just thinking that I'm getting things done.
Quality of writing time is just as important as quantity. The easiest way to get work done is to work during the time when I say that's what I'll be doing. So, for my hour long stretches, all I do is write. No Facebook, no phone, no distractions. Just me, a glass of iced coffee, some piano music, and my writing. When I'm truly focused, I can accomplish in an hour what takes me three hours to accomplish in a distracted state. Single tasking is the new multi-tasking.
One last tip: dissertation writers are particularly prone to thinking that writing and research are the same activity. As in, "Oh, I just need to research XYZ to be able to write this next paragraph!" and suddenly, you (by which I mean me) have fallen down the rabbit hole of research and you (me) suddenly find that you've invested (read: squandered) five hours watching kitten videos or trying to find the end of the internet.
STOP.
Research and writing aren't the same thing. Everyone likes researching. Its fun and feels like finding buried treasure. Everyone hates writing because its hard, lonely, isolating, frustrating, and difficult. Do not avoid writing by making excuses about how you (I) have to do just a little more research. You don't. What you need to do is write. When the researching urge strikes, put the item on your to do list and keep writing. When you're done writing, then you just have a nice, neat to-do list.
In other inventive strategies, I've seen a fair number of people using the hashtag #writingpact on Twitter, in which writers publicly commit themselves to writing [insert project here] on a particular day. I haven't tried it yet, but judging from the number of posts, its working for a fair number of people
There's a tropical storm passing over the region where I live right now and its supposed to rain all week. The silver lining, I suppose, is that it means more writing time!
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