TAA member David Stehlik, an associate professor of Management and Leadership at the University of St. Francis, shared his approach to increasing writing productivity during TAA’s August 2024 Conversation Circle on the topic of productivity:

“I block double the time and commit to half. So, if I think I could write it in two hours, I book a full morning/afternoon, and then I commit to getting half of it done. It’s more realistic. When I’m on the ball, the productivity is energizing. When I’m not, it’s less debilitating.

I use two different scheduling/measurement approaches. The first is color-coding the “writing events” I schedule (recurring or one-off). The other is using an app that does something like this for me (Rize – really helpful for developers/coders). The latter categorizes everything according to focus/break/meeting based on actual activity on the platform (privacy/security/invasiveness is something important to consider when using it, and so it’s only on my personal computer and not work devices).

And if you use questions, turning your writing tasks into questions you have to answer, then taking personal voice-memos (for speech-to-text) can occur all the time, almost anywhere in chunks you can manage (and it will help you move through your argument and notice gaps faster – what you don’t know how to answer fluently but know is a question you must answer).”