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.