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Tag: little-and-often

The secret of writing: Little and often

Goal setting through a picture of wine bottlesLittle and often – that’s the secret of writing

  1. Start before you are ready
  2. Never break the chain – write every day – write something – good or bad
  3. Stop – work for half-an-hour to an hour and never more than one-and-a-half hours and stop

7 fold increase in productivity

Boise, who studied academics intensively, was able to show that these three rule accounted for the 7 fold difference in productivity between top flight and ordinary academics.

It’s a massive difference, isn’t it.

Highly productive writers

It seems that highly productive writers sit down and write, every day, usually before the house gets up and before they can be distracted.

The free write, structure, edit or do whatever they are able to do at that point but they write and they never miss a day.  That way they maintain a habit, maintain their confidence, develop fluency.

Above all, they don’t lose track. They don’t waste time figuring out where they were.

Amazingly of all, productive writers write for short periods.  Apparently the pattern is to work in 15 minute bursts with mini-breaks, quite often for as little as half-an-hour and very rarely for more than an hour. Boise calls periods longer than one-and-a-half hours bingeing.

Getting back to writing

I know all this is true..  I’ve been distracted by another project and I’ve woken up each day with a head full of other concerns.

And I’ve lost track of the concerns that led me to blog.

Then it becomes harder to blog.

Then the mechanics, like quickly finding a picture in Flickr take longer.

Yes, professional writing needs to be habitual.  It has to be given some kind of priority.

When your life changes, deliberately change the slot of time for writing?

Maybe when our life changes, we have to sit down and ask ourselves quite openly, “Where is the time for writing?”

Because most of us write because we “have to”. Without it, we feel that life loses its meaning.   And then it is even harder to get back into.

Little and often

That’s the key.

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Little-and-often: The secret of beating writer’s block, procrastination, etc etc and so on

Sleeping, resting or procrastinating before a big task

Have you ever noticed that minute you have to sit down to do a big task, such as write a paper, or get up to do a big task, like hoover the house, you want to go to sleep?  You dither, you fuss, you try to talk yourself out of it.  And you waste hours getting cross with yourself but doing nothing?

Procrastination is sane

Well you are in good company.  Sane company.  Your body is resisting being enveloped in one distracting task.  It knows better.  It knows everything else goes to wrack and ruin while you attend to this one big thing.  At best, it wants a good rest before your start.

Work little-and-often

So how do you get round your dilly-dallying?  Fussing and cursing certainly doesn’t help.  It just wastes time.

The secret is in little-and-often.  Yup, little-and-often.

Folks, 15 minutes is a long time for our alert, sociable, curious human brains.  Go much beyond 15 minutes, and you body will protest (in advance).  You might need an enveloping time slot of an hour to do that 15 minutes of work.  In reality, you are only going to do 5 or 10 minutes, but you will need a buffer zone to remember what you were doing, get out your tools, do the work, and put it away.

What work can be done little-and-often?

How can you do this, you cry?

Successful people work little-and-often.  That is why they are successful.

Successful professors, by which I mean professors who publish 7x as much as the run-of-the-mill professor publishing at 1x, get up earlyish each day and put aside 1 to 1.5 hours to write something, anything.

They get up. They go to their desk.  They look at what they were doing yesterday.  And they do a bit more.  And the next day rinse-and-repeat.

And they don’t break the chain.  They work little-and-often daily.  Because when they take a break, they’ve added the additional task of trying to remember what they were doing.   And then the task gets too big.

They write daily.  Adding something.  If they have two productive slots of 15 minutes in 1.5 hours.  Great!  But they just get something done.

When they have a real break, like a long vacation, they start again.  They get up. They go to their desk.  And they start work.  The first few days might be spent in remembering.  But they don’t get stressed.  That is the beginning point.  Because they have good work habits, they know the work will get done.

But what should I work on little-and-often first thing in the morning?

The trick though, is knowing our priorities.  What is the big task that we will attend to regularly and get finished as a landmark of achievement?

Professors have a simple (though remarkably bruising) work life.  They publish. They teach.  They do community/university service.  But they are only promoted for what is written and published.

So their priorities are clear.  The first and essential task everyday is to write – with a conference in journal in mind.  Then they go to campus and teach and “do” research for the next paper – tasks that are so much easier because they are sociable.   Their “day-job” is relaxed ,setting up a feed for the real job, that cocooned writing time first thing every morning.

Can we copy the little-and-often work routine of successful professors?

When we are procrastinating, we can be sure that we’ve left a task get too big for a series of 15 minute slots.  Or, we have left it too late and we have to do it in one fell swoop.  If nothing else, this is what university life teaches you.  Work little and often.  And begin.  Begin before you are ready.

To get into a comfortable working rhythm, we need to

  • Establish priorities (ONE, and two, three – no more)
  • Do what we are judged on first, before the house gets noisy.
  • Then do the feeder tasks during the day.

The solution is not reducing procrastination.  The solution is knowing our career priorities.  What are we judged on?  If we are judged on published papers, then we need to go one step back – where do they come from – we write them.  So writing is the main task.

How do we write?  Well, while we are writing one article, we are preparing for the next.  But without interfering with the main task.  Which is done in small time slots, little and often, beginning immediately.  The writing is the main task that must be protected.

The trick is understanding our priorities.  But that is hard.  A good mentor might spell out what we need to do.  Until w have those 3 priorities clear in our mind, then we will  be stressed and uncomfortable.

If we are in a readjustment phase,  and not clear about our priorities, we might have to weather the discomfort for while, but we shouldn’t let that stop us moving towards that clarity.  That is the hallmark of success and a comfortable, achieving life.  Clear priorities.

What will I work on daily, little-and-often?

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Work-bingeing, flu, procrastination?

Day Two at Xoozya

I strolled into Xoozya on my second day planning to spend the whole morning quietly in my office exploring the communication system and making the list of skills I thought I should maintain and those I thought I should learn in the near to medium future.

Crisis is the patron of procrastination

On my door was a yellow sticky, “Help, we have a proposal due today and we may not get it in on time.  Could you help out?  We need help proofing.  Mary, @maryjane”.  I unlocked my door and dumped my keys and bag in the bottom filing cabinet drawer, powered up my desktop, and searched for @maryjane.   Games designer putting in a proposal to use games as a research tool.  West block.  I picked up the phone and said I would be right over.  Nothing like an emergency to aid a little procrastination.

Flu – how clean is this desk?

I grabbed a pack of tissues and wipes – this is the year of the great flu epidemic and office desks are notoriously unhygenic – locked the door behind me, and headed out to the west block in search of @maryjane and her team.  7 grueling hours later, we’ve converted the files into pdf and sent them off.

Work-bingeing

Where did Day Two go?  Tired and no further forward.  That’s a terrible feeling isn’t it, and the fatigue after a work-binge is awful.  We want to work but can’t think straight.  For that matter, we can barely remember what we were doing before.

7x as productive

We don’t often apply ‘industrial management’ ideas to creativity but “Boise” has done.  He studied the productivity of academics.  People who work little and often are 7x more productive than people who binge-work.  Binge work is disruptive.  We ‘come down’ emotionally and physically, feel terrible and need time to recover.  We also have to spend time picking up the threads of what we are doing.

Little-and-often

Little and often is the golden rule.  Write every day.  Work on your main project every day.  Gather a few resources for the next project.  Spit and polish and go home!

Go home!

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