Rewind: Habits for More Productive and Less Stressful Writing
Rewind: Habits for More Productive and Less Stressful Writing
The Case for Ritualizing a Deep Writing Practice
Today I’m opening up a paid post that got a lot of traction from readers in the fall. I hope you find some gems that you can use for your writing! I’m posting the introduction below and linking to the rest of the post after.
It’s Monday and I had planned to start off my workday with a two hour writing session. I sit down at my keyboard and decide to check email quickly before diving in.
Turns out, I had a whole string of emails come in over the weekend about the upcoming semester, including a graduate student who needed a rather quick turnaround review of an application. I decide to just get these tasks done quickly and promise myself I will get to my writing in a bit.
Two hours later when I’m finished with the email related tasks, it’s finally time to write. I start writing, and after about 20 minutes, my email "dings" with a follow-up question from one of my students. I stop writing and fire off a quick response before returning to the page. In 30 minutes, a Twitter notification sings on my phone. I chuckle at my friend's joke about burnout in the academy and quickly reply with what I think is a similarly witty response.
I spend the next two hours bouncing back and forth between my writing project, my email, and Twitter. Oh, and there's also the group chat I have with my TAs about class-related matters.
At the end of the “writing session,” I feel tired from all the work I had done that day. Despite this, the "two hours" I blocked for it only resulted in a very small number of words on the page. I also feel frazzled and a bit stressed even though none of the issues that came through my inbox were actually dire.
It is simple to identify a problem after reading the description of my workday: distraction and a lack of quality writing time. Digging deeper here also reveals another truth: my distracted work flow contributed towards my mental fatigue. I was busy and working all day, but I had very little to show for my writing session. My mental fatigue increased throughout the day as I switched back and forth between numerous work tasks.
Many of us intuitively understand that jumping between writing, Twitter, and email does not promote intellectual productivity, but it is much more difficult to commit to creating a deep writing practice free from interruptions.
In today’s post, I’ll outline steps for ritualizing a deep writing practice instead of a distracted and shallow one. To do so, I lean on the work of Cal Newport who wrote a book called Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.