To keep writing, use a time log

“What did I do today!” you wail. For the life of you, wiped out at the end of the day and ready for binge TV, you can’t remember anything you did except overeat for lunch. Maybe you recall writing for eight minutes midmorning and half-heartedly pecking at your journal article in progress, but otherwise the day’s a blank. And paradoxically, you feel you’re always so busy, dashing from one thing to the next and never getting it all done.

Sound familiar? Where does the time go? Especially for academic writers, with the responsibilities of teaching, mandatory committee meetings, office hours, reading endless memos, emailing responses, and comforting a colleague who just got her article rejected—again—it’s an ongoing challenge to take hold and wrestle our writing time to the ground, or desk.

3/25 TAA Webinar: “How Trello Can Transform Your Life as an Academic”

Do you juggle multiple teaching, scholarship and service projects and worry about ‘dropping the ball’? Do you wish you had one place to easily organize your life as an academic? Then Trello might be for you. Join us Monday, March 25 from 1-2 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, How Trello Can Transform Your Life as an Academic, where Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst, both associate professors of political science at Seattle University, will provide an overview of the magic and logic of Trello. They will show you how to use it to masterfully manage multiple projects in one place—without having to switch between paper and multiple digital programs! They will also show you how to use Trello to move your scholarly projects forward. This will include a demonstration and template of a Trello board based on Erin Furtak’s publishing pipeline. You will leave this webinar with a plan to set up your Trello account so you can become a master juggler and calmly manage your academic life.

When you look at your calendar, what do you see?

As an academic with the intention of being productive in your writing, your calendar is either your friend or foe.  We are going to have a series of short articles to help you make friends with your calendar.

Let’s start with determining what kinds of time your current calendar represents for you. For this quick exercise, you will need some colored pencils (and if you don’t have colored pencils or highlighters, see if a colleague or your child does and borrow theirs).

2/28 TAA Webinar: “9 Proven Strategies to Help You Stop Procrastinating and Write Your Manuscript”

For some people, staring at that first blank page is the hardest part of the writing task. Others have good start up energy and ideas but struggle to maintain momentum. Finally, are those who wrestle with completing a manuscript and sending it out. Join us Thursday, February 28 from 1-2 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, 9 Proven Strategies to Help You Stop Procrastinating and Write Your Manuscript, where presenter Mary Beth Averill, PhD, MSW, Academic Coach and author of How to Become an Academic Coachwill present nine strategies to help you with organization, motivation, time management, and editing from start to finish whether you are writing an academic book, journal article, or dissertation.

Register today!

2/13 TAA Webinar: Creative Scheduling For Those Who Have “All of the Time in the World” and “No Time At All”

Whether you feel over-scheduled or are desperate for a little structure in your day, a more intentional approach to managing time can be a writer’s secret weapon. However, it can seem impossible to add time into an already packed schedule, or restrict flexibility when that feels integral to the writing process. Join us Wednesday, February 13, 2-3 p.m. ET for the TAA webinar, Creative Scheduling For Those Who Have “All of the Time in the World” and “No Time At All”, where presenter Katy Peplin, a coach and editor at Thrive PhD, will provide a collection of tools to think about time, how you spend it, and how that does or does not align with your life writ large.

Beyond time management: Three principles for greater writing productivity and satisfaction

For our writing productivity and fulfillment, indisputably we need time management, self-discipline, and all the pomodoros (Cirillo, 2018) we can muster. Sometimes, though, as ardently as we apply these, they don’t seem to be enough. Here are three perspectives that may help you through. They are “laws” that are described simply and eloquently by author, speaker, and spiritual and practical teacher Deepak Chopra (1994) in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success.