Introduction

As a PhD student or academic, writing is a core element of the job. In order to succeed, you need to be a productive writer. However, completing a PhD is by no means easy and I can attest to some of the self-sabotaging behaviours that will be mentioned in this post. Half of the reason I wrote this is to summarise a bunch of tips I’ve come across for my future self because I know I will need to be reminded of them. The other half is to put this out for other PhD students and academics in the hope that it is useful.

What Writing Is Not

Let’s start by discussing what writing is not and get some preconceptions out of the way. Gardiner and Kearns puts this aptly:

Writing isn’t editing: you should not spend your … time trying to find the perfect word or getting your grammar right. Writing isn’t reading journal articles for research: write first and read afterwards, so that your writing shows you what you need to read. Writing isn’t referencing: when you make that killer argument and want to reference Smith and Brown (2006; or maybe it was 2007?), don’t stop and look it up. Write “Smith & Brown (200??)” and keep going. You can look up the reference later. Furthermore, writing is not formatting, literature searching, photocopying, e-mailing or nosing around on Facebook. Writing … means putting new words on the page or substantially rewriting existing words.

Self-Sabotaging Behaviours

Kearns1 lists seven self-sabotaging behaviours. This guy runs a lot of programs focusing on developing cognitive and emotional skills for PhD students at Flinders University and has written books and papers on the topic. People are more likely to self-handicap when the task is very important as Greenberg2 found and PhD students are particularly susceptible. I would suggest taking a look at following list and not use any of them for an excuse as you will have some level of control over them. This will be very difficult and will require improving study habits and time management.

  1. Overcommitting

    Taking on so many things that your high priority goals suffer

  2. Busyness

    Looking like you are very busy but, in reality, only less important things are actually getting done

  3. Perfectionism

    Setting unrealistic and impossible expectations

  4. Procrastination

    Putting off important or necessary tasks, often until the last minute

  5. Disorganisation

    Not developing a routine or system that makes managing your time and life easier

  6. Not Putting in Effort

    Not practising or trying very hard

  7. Choosing Performance Debilitating Circumstances

    Trying to work in a busy or unsuitable location or situation

Kearns uses the following steps in the Cognitive Behavioural Coaching model explained in 1.

Prepare Yourself To Write

Ergonomics

This tip was inspired by this blog post.

If you are feeling uncomfortable, then you are certainly not going to feel comfortable writing for extended periods of time. You don’t want to damage your neck, back, arms by having poor posture. Ideally, you want your screen at approximately eye height to prevent straining the neck and this pretty much means raising your monitor if you haven’t already. Using textbooks, pads of paper, or boxes is cheap way to do so. For those who use a laptop, you can raise your display and use a separate keyboard and mouse. If you don’t have a dedicated office space and need to move your workstation around, you use a box to raise your laptop screen and use it to store your keyboard and mouse as you move. You can even use your rolled up backpack in replacement of said box. For the keyboard, you want your elbows approximately perpendicular to your torso as you type.

I’ve used the large boxes Amazon ships me to make a standing desk setup. Standing can become uncomfortable after a long time so I find it helpful to transition between standing and sitting every so often.

Being uncomfortable will distract you from writing so consider how this might work for you. You don’t need an expensive motorised table, fancy laptop stands, etc to get started.

Touch Typing

You will spend hours… days… years typing so it’s definitely worth your time learning how to touch type. It also helps with ergonomics since you don’t need to look at your keyboard anymore. A good typist can get over 100 words per minute but in practice, unless you are transcribing, you don’t need to be this fast. I find it good enough to type at thought speed. I trained by going through a dictionary and typing many words but you can train in other ways. For example, those playing fast paced online multiplayer games get really good at typing to communicate with team members and asking for assistance as the situation calls for it.

As a side note, I don’t remember what some of my passwords are because it’s in muscle memory! My fingers know what it is and to work it out (say if I needed the password on my phone), I have to visualise a keyboard and play back where my fingers go.

It’s bizarre that I still see academics hunt and peck as they type. For a job that requires writing papers and answering many emails, I think it’s definitely a good investment to increase your typing speed.

Back Up Your Work Regularly and Use Version Control

I remember a day in the past, I lost a day of work because I forgot to save a Word document. I was devastated for about 10 minutes before smashing the report out again because it was due that day. That was stressful! You don’t want this to happen to you when writing your thesis so back up your work regularly.

I now use Overleaf to write my reports/papers and it saves as you type so you don’t lose a second of work. It’s the Google Docs for LaTeX and also integrates with GitHub for version control.

For software projects, I use GitHub and this is great for text files (since you check a diff for every commit) but also works for saving binary files. The advantage of using a version control system is the ability to roll back changes and try experiments in a separate branch before merging with the master branch. This is great for collaboration where your team may be working on the same code base but separate modules.

Get Into The Groove

Binge Writing or Snack Writing

Should you set aside a large block of time for writing or many small blocks (snack writing)? I’ll let this article do the talking:

Big blocks hardly ever come, and when they do, usually not get used productively. When possible, try snack writing first thing in the morning. Our experience suggests that this increases the chances of success by minimizing distractions and ensuring that you have sufficient energy to write clever things. However, for snack writing to lead to really high-quality results, you also need to write in a very specific way.

ABCDEs of Writing

Figure 3, which I sourced from 3 summarises what the ABCDEs of writing are:

The most striking realisation I had from reading this paper (Gardiner and Kearns, 2012) was that the best motivator for writing is writing itself. They challenge other misbeliefs about writing like “it won’t be good enough”, “I’m not ready yet”, and “I don’t have enough time” and offer evidence based tips for writing. This paper gave me the reason to writing this blog post, so I think it’s well worth reading.

Form A Writing Group

Inspired by NaNoWriMo (which is short for National Novel Writing Month), I created a writing group with a few friends also doing their PhD. I you don’t know what NaNoWriMo is, here is the description from Wikipedia

National Novel Writing Month is an annual Internet-based creative writing project that takes place during the month of November. Participants attempt to write a 50,000-word manuscript between November 1 and November 30.

Writing with others creates some accountability and with the mutual encouragement, it should also help you put words down no matter if it’s good or not. To start, I would recommend going for a smaller goal like 100 words/day so by the end of the month, you will have 3000 more words that you never had before.

When starting a writing group, I need to stress it is not a competition (that is a scarcity mindset which is founded on the idea that if someone is successful, it means you lose). You should instead have a abundance mindset - that is there are enough resources and successes for everyone so you can celebrate the success of others. It is worth a segue to take a look at Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People4 and apply some of the interdependence tips to your writing group.

Segue: The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

In summary, there are three stages of increasing maturity: dependence, independence, and interdependence - and the 7 habits are designed to get you to interdependence and being good leaders and team players that can combine talents.

Dependence $\rightarrow$ Independence

  1. Don’t be reactive. Be proactive.
  2. Begin with the end in mind. Don’t just act, thinking first about the end goal and consequences as you plan towards you goal.
  3. First things first. Do what is important first.

You can categorise tasks into four quadrants shown in Figure 4.

  • Quadrant I. Urgent and important (Do) - important deadlines: crises, deadline driven projects, meetings, and preparations
  • Quadrant II. Not urgent but important (Plan) - long term development: prevention, value clarification, relationship building, empowerment
  • Quadrant III. Urgent but not important (Delegate) - distractions with deadlines: interruptions, some phone calls, some emails and reports, some meetings
  • Quadrant IV. Not urgent and not important (Eliminate) - frivolous distractions: trivia, junk email, some phone calls, time wasters, “escape” activities

The ideal quadrant to work in is II. That means starting on papers and assignments early and minimising time spent on distractions. As a PhD student, you are often delegated tutoring roles by lecturers and while you can learn a lot about communicating ideas and gauging understanding while solidifying your own understanding, know that it can be a distraction. So, if money is not an issue, it is up to your own judgement as to what works for you - remember habit 2: begin with the end in mind.

Independence $\rightarrow$ Interdependence

  1. Think Win-Win. Seek mutually beneficial solutions.
  2. Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
  3. Synergise. Combine people’s strength through positive teamwork and achieve goals that would not be attainable if done alone.

Continual Improvement

The final habit is to

  1. Sharpen the Saw; Growth: Learn, commit, do.

Balance and renew your resources, energy and health to create a sustainable, long-term, effective lifestyle.

Solving The Issue Of Being Unsure Of What To Write

Misconceptions

Sometimes people think they should write when they are “ready” and need to read endlessly or conduct more experiments. Ironically, this makes them less likely to write and more confused. And sometimes people think they should understand the material first and then write but in practice, after writing, they find that there were inconsistencies and certain parts didn’t flow well - signs that they didn’t understand the material coherently in the first place. According to this Nature article,

In fact, writing clarifies your thinking. Writing is not recording - you don’t just take a photocopy of what is in your head and put it on the page. It is a far more creative and interactive process. As you write, you develop your thoughts. Writing is, in fact, rigorous thinking. Writing means putting new words on the page or substantially rewriting old words.

Rubber Duck Debugging

If you find yourself stuck on how to write a certain section, try rubber duck debugging. Instead of trying to debug code, you are trying to debug your sentences. The essence of rubber duck debugging is to force yourself to explain the problem to someone else (in this case an inanimate rubber duck) and in the process, find a solution. or facing a difficult problem

Thinking Walks and Exercise

When you still feel stuck after a session of rubber duck debugging, try going on a short walk and let your subconscious do the work in the background. Working on something difficult? Go for a jog and clear you mind. Doing exercise regularly is also good for your health and subsequently, good for increasing productivity.

Run A Series of Seminars On The Topic

Not sure where I read this tip from… (maybe from this long seminar transcript?) This is a trick that some professors use apparently. Having trouble understanding the background needed to solve an important problem? Teach it, run seminars, write a blog about it, …. Doing so will force you to get to grips with the topic and express the concepts clearly.

Know When To Switch Writing Tasks

Inspired by this post and reframing it for writing tasks:

switching [writing tasks] too frequently (and giving up on promising ideas) is a more common failure mode than not switching enough. Often, while you’re engaged in the long slog towards getting your current idea to work, another promising idea will come along, and you’ll want to jump to that idea. If your idea is quick to try and the potential upside is large, then go ahead and do it. But more commonly, your initial results on the new idea will be disappointing, and it’ll take a more sustained effort to yield significant results.

Personal Development and Working On Important Problems

Don’t just write your thesis, take the time to learn something new and write about it. (or blog!) As this post says:

If you don’t allocate this time, then your knowledge is likely to plateau after you learn the basics that you need for your day-to-day work. It’s easy to settle into a comfort zone of methods you understand well—you may need to expend active effort to expand this zone. … One strategy, which I haven’t tried personally but makes a lot of sense upon reflection, is to devote some fixed time budget to trying out new ideas that diverge from your main line of work. Say, spend one day per week on something totally different from your main project. This would constitute a kind of epsilon-greedy exploration, and it would also help to broaden your knowledge.

If your research is in some niche application of machine learning, broaden your knowledge and read textbooks and papers outside your field. You never know when something your learned will spark a new idea.

Also, as a PhD student, you want to develop skills and solve important problems but it’s likely you don’t end up doing so for a few reasons according to this blog post.

  1. Lack of self-development

    Many people don’t spend enough time on self-development. If you stop your development at the level which resulted in your first paper, it’s unlikely you’ll solve any major problems.

  2. The treadmill of small problems

    Social factors such as the need to publish, get grants, and so on, encourage people to work only on unimportant problems, without addressing the important problems. This can be a difficult treadmill to get off.

  3. The intimidation factor

    Even if people have spent enough time on self-development that they have a realistic chance of attacking big problems, they still may not. The reason is that they have a fear of working on something unsuccessfully.

… worth thinking about.

Be Inspired

/u/ryans01’s Four Rules of Life

This Reddit post sparked a reply which is summarised in the following image.

  1. No More Zero Days A zero day is when you make no contribution to what you are doing. Make sure you every day a non-zero day.

    Didn’t do anything all day and it’s 11:58 pm? Write one sentence. One pushup. Read one page of that chapter. One. Because one is non zero. Turning into productivity ultimate master of the universe doesn’t happen from the vortex. It happens from a massive string of CONSISTENT NON ZEROS.

  2. Be Grateful To Your Three Selves Your three selves refer to the past you, the present you, and the future you.

    Be GRATEFUL to the past you for the positive things you’ve done. And do favours for the future you like you would for your best bro. Feeling like (redacted) today? Stop a second, think of a good decision you made yesterday. Salad and tuna instead of Big Mac? THANK YOU YOUNGER ME. Was yesterday a nonzero day because you wrote 200 words (hey, that’s all you could muster)? THANK YOU YOUNGER ME. Saved up some coin over time to buy that sweet thing you wanted? THANK YOU. Second part of the 3 me’s is you gotta do your future self a favour, just like you would for your best friend. Alarm clock goes off and bed is too comfy? (redacted) you present self, this one’s for my best friend, the future me. I’m up and going for a 5 km run (or 25 meter run, it’s gotta be non zero). MAKE SURE YOU THANK YOUR OLD SELF for rocking out at the end of every. single. thing. that makes your life better. The cycle of doing something for someone else (future you) and thanking someone for the good in your life (past you) is key to building gratitude and productivity.

  3. Forgive Yourself

    Maybe you got all the know-how, money, ability, strength and talent to do whatever is you wanna do. But let’s say you still didn’t do it. Now you’re giving yourself (redacted) for not doing what you need to, to be who you want to. Heads up champion, being disappointed in yourself causes you to be less productive. Tried your best to have a nonzero day yesterday and it failed? so what. I forgive you previous self. I forgive you. But today? Today is a nonzero masterpiece to the best of my ability for future self. This one’s for you future homies. Forgiveness man, use it. I forgive you. Say it out loud.

  4. Exercise and Books

    Pretty standard advice but when you exercise daily you actually get smarter. when you exercise you get high from endorphins (thanks body). when you exercise you clear your mind. when you exercise you are doing your future self a huge favour. Exercise is a leg on a three legged stool. Feel me? As for books, almost every thing we’ve all ever thought of, or felt, or gone through, or wanted, or wanted to know how to do, or whatever, has been figured out by someone else. Get some books max.

Prolific Writers and Updating Readers/Supervisors

I like reading fantasy with well thought out magic systems and if we’re talking about prolific writers, one author to aspire to is Brandon Sanderson. This man is a machine and many of his fans joke that he’s cloned himself or is a robot because the sheer amount of well written output (and does a weekly podcast, updates fans on social media, goes on writing tours, and teaches a writing class at BYU). If you check out his website, he has progress bars for his works which is updated regularly! If you like fantasy, be sure to check this author out at the risk of being so engrossed by the story you spend the whole week reading instead of writing…

Warning: Patrick Rothfuss has some of the best writing I’ve ever read but the third book in the trilogy is nowhere near completion and, at the time of writing this blog post, I’ve been waiting 9 years since book 2 was published with no updates on progress - not even his editor knows. Do not do this to your supervisor! You do not have the same luxury as a PhD student or academic.

If you are avoiding your supervisor(s) when they are asking for a draft chapter, that is a sure sign you’re in deep waters.

Writing Excuses Podcast

I found this podcast on writing after following one of my favourite authors who is one of the hosts. From the homepage

Writing Excuses is a fast-paced, educational podcast for writers, by writers.

Although most of the content revolves around writing fiction, many of the writing tips and writing prompts are great to get you thinking and motivate you to write. Great for something to listen during your commute.

$~$

I hope you enjoyed reading this and found it useful. To close, I will end on the same injunction used in Writing Excuses:

“You’re out of excuses. Now go write.”

$~$

References

1. Kearns, H., Gardiner, M. and Marshall, K., 2008. Innovation in PhD completion: The hardy shall succeed (and be happy!). Higher Education Research & Development, 27(1), pp.77-89.↩

2. Greenberg, J., 1985. Unattainable Goal Choice as a Self‐Handicapping Strategy 1. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 15(2), pp.140-152.↩

3. Gardiner, M., Kearns, H., Newsom, G., Dent, E.B., Newnham-Kanas, C., Irwin, J. and Schmitt, N., 2012. The ABCDE of writing: coaching high-quality high-quantity writing. International Coaching Psychology Review, 7(2), pp.237-249.↩

4. Covey, S.R. and Covey, S., 2020. The 7 habits of highly effective people. Simon & Schuster.↩