In my experience, once I start writing and find my momentum, I don’t stop. Writing sprints are the perfect activity if your goal is writing your dissertation in fifteen minutes a day. Get your thoughts on the page as fast as you can, and rest easy knowing you can come back and clean it up later. The name of the game is getting words on the page, which gives you permission to write fast and write messy. A writing sprint is a quick, timed session devoted to adding to your current word count. Ready, set, write! As an academic and a writer, one of my favorite exercises for kicking my writing into high gear is the writing sprint. I wrote my entire dissertation using a folder on Google Docs, and it felt like a good choice for me to use a program that I was already very familiar with. While I did sample a couple, I felt overwhelmed at the prospect of having to learn new programs and writing my dissertation, and I decided they weren’t for me.
Undistracted writing software#
When I started my dissertation, I was tempted to buy software programs designed to aid my writing and help me get organized. As long as you have a word processing system either on your desktop or online (I prefer online), and access to your university library’s database subscriptions for your research, you’re good to go. To write your dissertation, you’re probably going to need a lot of fancy, expensive software, right? And definitely lots of technology, office supplies, and maybe a guidebook or two? Wrong. When writing a document as lengthy as a dissertation, it is very helpful to see concrete progress at the end of every day, even if it feels incremental. Giving myself one manageable task, something that I could cross off my to-do list, was so important because it helped me see a tangible accomplishment. When I was writing my dissertation, I remember being so intimidated by the size and scope of the project. While it may seem like a small drop of water in a swimming pool, you have to start somewhere, right? Whether you are outlining a section of your dissertation, drafting a paragraph, adding to your references, or polishing your sentences until they shine, fifteen minutes of concentrated focus is plenty of time to make a dent in your dissertation. You can accomplish a lot in fifteen minutes of undistracted writing.
Writing in fifteen-minute blocks is an excellent way to prompt yourself to get started.
Undistracted writing how to#
Psychological roadblocks get the best of every writer now and then the important thing is to know how to get through the occasional traffic jam quickly. For many writers, both within academia and beyond, the hardest part of writing is getting started. Is writing a dissertation in fifteen minutes a day really possible? It sure is.
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