The 16 Week Challenge

There are seventeen weeks from the last week of August til Christmas. I want to challenge you to plan a writing process for those weeks long before you go on summer vacation.

Here's how to go about it. First, scratch one week for vacation (for most this will coincide with the fall break). Next, scratch the weekends (plan to have fun; plan to relax). That leaves sixteen five-day working weeks. Divide each day into two three-hour sessions.

A writing schedule should never dominate a whole day. The standard solution is to write in the morning (9 til noon) and then do other things. If you can only write in the afternoon or in the evening, that's fine, but then you need to make sure you leave some other part of your day free to do the things that "normal" people do in the evenings. Otherwise you are asking for burnout.

In any case, at most one of the two daily sessions should be devoted to your writing. Some quick math: 5 times 16 is 80 sessions. 80 times 3 is 240 hours. The most intense "writing semester" I recommend, then, without knowing anything more about your research practices, is to devote 240 hours specifically to publishing your results.

My challenge to you is to decide over the next few weeks what you might use those 240 hours for. You have to be realistic, of course. So if you know you are going to do a lot of teaching, consider 3 sessions a week (144 hours), or even just one (48 hours). But keep in mind that you already have half your day free for teaching and administrative work.

In order to use your writing time effectively, you have to have something to write about. You have know what you want to say. Do not use "How can I know what I think until I see what I say?" as an excuse not to make some decisions about what to work on. Even if it captures an important truth about writing, you have to know what you are going to discover what you think about before you can see what you say. You have to plan to say something.

So your writing schedule needs to map onto the outline of one or two papers that you plan to write. (If you have a lot of drafts in the works that are quite far along, you can consider working on three or four papers. But if you really want to get published, less is probably more.) Part of planning a writing process is planning the written product. So write an abstract and make an outline for each paper you plan to write.

That's it. The hard part, of course, will be sticking to your schedule. But you can't begin to do that until you make one.