The Diary Method for Keeping Up with Writing Projects

A Simple Hack for Knowing Where to Begin Again

Photo by Reina Lovefull on Unsplash

It’s been a whirlwind of late, and you finally sit down to work on a writing project that has been on the back burner for a while. Eager to jump back in, you open the document and stare at the page. Where on earth do you even begin? What were you doing most recently? Did you complete the first section, or did you feel like there was still more to be done? In the third section, wasn't there someone you wanted to cite? Didn’t you have a breakthrough idea for the paper’s significance that you wanted to put in the conclusion?

You go to work trying to figure out the answers to these questions, and slowly it starts coming back to you. Ah, yes, that’s where you were going with that idea. Now you’re just beginning to get your groove on and you can feel the wheels starting to churn when….

Ding.

Your calendar tells you it’s time for a meeting. You have spent the last 60 minutes of writing time just trying to figure out where to jump in and now it’s time to put it aside again. Le sigh.

Feel familiar?

One of the advantages of the daily writing method is that the regular pace of working on a project keeps your brain engaged with it, so you don’t lose precious time remembering what you were doing in a writing session long ago. The more time and space between writing sessions, the more effort it takes to even remember what we were working on last in the project or what the major argument is, for that matter. But daily writing doesn’t work for everyone and the rest of us need a strategy to manage fading memories and interrupted work flows.