{"id":623,"date":"2019-11-20T12:00:43","date_gmt":"2019-11-20T18:00:43","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/?p=623"},"modified":"2019-06-13T13:02:32","modified_gmt":"2019-06-13T18:02:32","slug":"dont-spend-your-holiday-break-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/2019\/11\/20\/dont-spend-your-holiday-break-writing\/","title":{"rendered":"Don\u2019t Spend Your Holiday Break Writing"},"content":{"rendered":"

I<\/span>n a few weeks, I\u2019ll be heading to Arizona with my husband and our preschooler. We\u2019ll be on vacation for 13 days, and I will not bring my laptop. That\u2019s because I practice what I preach as a writing consultant and academic-productivity specialist: Don\u2019t just finish your monographs and articles on time \u2014 finish them on time without compromising your quality of life.<\/p>\n

I ask every client I work with \u2014 whether a graduate student writing a dissertation or an academic working on a book or article \u2014 to take semester breaks actually, unequivocally, 100-percent off. Decompress. Enjoy (or “enjoy”) their families. Or just spend a week or two walking around in the fresh air, lingering over a fun conversation in a cafe, or binge-watching\u00a0NewsRadio<\/em>\u00a0reruns and eating\u00a0Red Vines<\/a>\u00a0at 9:30 a.m. Whatever.<\/p>\n

The secret to taking holidays off is to be all caught up on your work plan before they start. And the way to be caught up on your work plan before the holidays start is to have a work plan. You\u2019d be amazed (or not) at the number of perpetually aggrieved academics I know who don\u2019t. They just sort of launch themselves in the general direction of their research a few times a month, and then \u2014 you guessed it \u2014 sequester themselves miserably for a few weeks of life-ruining lockdown right before their deadline.<\/p>\n

If you actually want to have a happy relationship with your work, you need a prescription for exactly what you want to do every day. Yes, it can feel overwhelming to\u00a0executive-function <\/a>intellectual labor. But I guarantee that spending a 10 minutes a day (plus about 30 minutes at the top of the week) organizing your writing projects will save incalculable time and effort down the line.<\/p>\n

The key to a successful work plan is to start a project \u2014 an entire monograph, a chapter, an article \u2014 with a healthy work trajectory and a clear-cut blueprint. Only you know how you best impart new information into your big, smart noggin, so I won\u2019t presume that the structure I\u2019m about to suggest will work for everyone. I will, however, presume that it will work 100 percent better than the most popular competing “strategy”: fretting and doing nothing.<\/p>\n

Step No. 1: Write first.<\/strong>\u00a0Possibly the most unconventional suggestion I give clients for creating a first draft is: Write first, then read, then write again, read more, and write one last time.<\/p>\n

That flies in the face of the general wisdom that faculty members impart to undergraduates, which is to read the material carefully before they write a word. And for them, that holds \u2014 but not for you, because you have already spent upward of two decades reading and writing smart things, and you\u2019ve almost certainly read the primary source material of your project at least once.<\/p>\n

Most of you don\u2019t follow that advice when you start a project. Instead you spend an untold amount of time attempting (and failing) to read Everything \u2014 every book, article, paragraph that could ever be relevant to your topic. Then you proceed to get more than a little psyched out by the polished quality of the published work:\u00a0Will I ever be as good as this? Oh, no, what if I\u2019m not? I\u2019m not! I\u2019ll never be! Hey, my couch needs vacuuming<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Yeah, don\u2019t do that. Instead, at the beginning of a project \u2014 even if you have only the vaguest idea what it should be about \u2014 I suggest you set aside a week and free-write. On each workday of that week, spend 25 minutes twice a day (two “<\/span>pomodoros<\/a>” a day) and write down all the things that you know, want to know, are interested in, are confused, or are excited about in your new venture. Don\u2019t try for paragraphs or even full sentences. Revel in the mess.<\/span><\/p>\n

At the end of that week, you may have 1,000 to 4,000 words of semi-gibberish \u2014 but it holds the key to your future brilliance.<\/p>\n

Step No. 2: The baby bibliography.\u00a0<\/strong>From that inspired semi-gibberish, you will then mine your first annotated bibliography. And the annotations are the most important part. You should never read anything without writing something down about it. Look up about 10 sources on your subject \u2014 the 10 best or, at any rate, the most famous, or most recent and “exciting,” or most in vogue, or most\u00a0something<\/em>. Just start somewhere. For approximately two weeks, spend every work session reading (or rereading) those sources carefully, creating a full bibliographic entry for each one. Annotate each entry with:<\/p>\n