For those who read this blog and are working on any kind of graduate work, the title of this post likely pulled you from your current dissertation chapter and holds you helpless like a newborn. We're all guilty of losing focus. Even with my greatest productivity villain slain - Outlook new message alerts - substantial work remains punctuated with links, articles, tweets and all kinds of other work day impurities. Even this short little post was interrupted.
Cory Doctorow has a great little article in Locus Magazine on how to be a productive writer without disconnecting from the net, caging your children, and hiding in the basement. Sharing the same title as this post, he dishes out the goods. Straight and oh so tasty.
This is my favourite of his six tips:
Leave yourself a rough edgeClick here for the full piece.
When you hit your daily word-goal, stop. Stop even if you're in the middle of a sentence. Especially if you're in the middle of a sentence. That way, when you sit down at the keyboard the next day, your first five or ten words are already ordained, so that you get a little push before you begin your work. Knitters leave a bit of yarn sticking out of the day's knitting so they know where to pick up the next day — they call it the "hint." Potters leave a rough edge on the wet clay before they wrap it in plastic for the night — it's hard to build on a smooth edge.
3 comments:
This is great advice. My last task of the day - when writing - is always to do a rough outline sketch of the forthcoming day's writing (or update the sketch that exists). Partly this is because structured thinking/writing inspires me like only clean kitchens can - and partly I think also for the reasons here.
Now if only the things I were writing were actually somehow related to this "dissertation" you speak of...
By the way - a colleague of mine has introduced me to "white boarding" and "mind mapping" which are also fabulous ways to store thoughts for another day.
I keep a white board at my desk at all times now.
Another fascinating article which I came to through similar means is this one:
Is Google Making Us Stupid?
The author comments that while the net is a huge boon for researchers, it's changing the way we think. We're less likely to pick up books and more likely to have our minds wander after a few paragraphs. So true.
Adunare - I may borrow that trick of yours. Detailing round two of work is a great idea.
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