Author: Kerry Ann Rockquemore, PhD, Founder of the NCFDD
March is a time in the academic year when it’s easy to feel overwhelmed, like time is flying by, and that our to-do lists will never end. It’s also the time when the day-to-day stream of requests and demands can begin edging out our commitment to daily writing. In fact, it’s the time of year when lots of daily writers fall off the wagon, and the binge-and-bust writers give up entirely by telling themselves: “I’ll get caught up on my writing during summer break.”
Because this can be the most difficult time of the spring term, we love to provide an opportunity for people to either invigorate their daily writing practice or to start a daily writing practice. In other words, we believe the worst time of the term is the best time to (re)commit to daily writing. But the only way that will happen is by applying the formula that’s been so successful for productive faculty: Community + Support + Accountability = Writing Productivity. What we’ve done is create an opportunity for you to try daily writing in a way that eliminates all excuses not to try it. We provide the community, we provide the daily support, and the people in your group will hold each other accountable. Best of all, it’s free to all NCFDD members, so there’s no wiggling out based on resources.
If that sounds like a great opportunity, here’s how it works:
Experimental Mindset
We ask all participants to take an experimental approach. Specifically, we’re asking you to commit to a new behavior (daily writing), execute it for two weeks, collect data on yourself, and analyze your data at the end of the challenge. If daily writing increases your productivity, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, stop. If having a supportive community increases your enjoyment or decreases your anxiety, keep doing it. If it doesn’t, stop. And if certain forms of accountability get you to actually live up to the promises that you make to yourself, keep doing them. If they don’t, stop. We encourage you to take an experimental approach because many people learn best practices (the most productive academic writers write every day in small increments), but never try them because they’ve analyzed the idea and decided it won’t work. What the 14-Day Writing Challenge is designed to do is to experiment with the new behavior, track your data, and analyze whether it works or not. In short, this challenge is about getting you out of your head and into the game!
Put Writing Time in Your Calendar
Before the challenge begins, we’ll ask you to put your writing time in your calendar every day, Monday through Friday. And we don’t just want you to put “writing time” in your calendar, we want you to designate a specific task for that day. For example:
- Draft an abstract
- Revise two paragraphs of the introduction section
- Insert two tables in the findings section
- Outline the argument
These examples are specific, measurable, and possible in 30 minutes. You are likely to feel different at the end of your writing time if you have a specific goal than if your goal is to “make progress on my article.” When you break the big goals (finish my article) into the smallest possible steps (revise two paragraphs of the introduction), you will find three things to be true: you’re more likely to actually do follow through, you will start to get a clearer idea of how long writing tasks take, and you will feel a sense of accomplishment by checking off that they are done.
Log in to our pop-up community before your writing session and set the timer
We use our custom writing accountability software platform to support our Faculty Success Program and during the 14-Day Writing Challenge, we open it up to all members who want to give it a try. All you do is log in, set the built-in timer (there’s a big button that says “Write Now”), and start writing. You can choose how much time you want to spend, but we recommend that you start with 30 minutes. At the end of 30 minutes, the timer will go off and you’ll be invited to answer a few quick reflective questions (this is the data you will analyze at the end of the 14-Day Writing Challenge).
Supportive Community
We ask all participants to spend two minutes at the end of their writing time to encourage someone else in their group. It’s not hard, you just click on their daily update and leave a supportive comment. It may seem silly at first, but positive reinforcement for the process of writing, as opposed to the outcome, (the book getting published, the grant getting funded, the article getting accepted) can change your feelings about writing on a daily basis.
Analyze your data
At the end of the two weeks, we’ll pause to ask: what worked, what didn’t work and what adjustments do you want to make? Instead of just thinking about it, you’ll have data to review to answer those questions. Whatever works, keep doing it. Whatever doesn’t work, stop.
That’s the simple structure that we’ve created for you to step into a daily writing practice and we’ve had hundreds of people take the challenge over the past four years. If you’ve been wanting to try daily writing, there are no more excuses. All you have to do is show up, start the timer, and get down to the business.
We hope that you’ll join us for the next 14-Day Writing Challenge!