The low point of my doctoral journey found me in the twilight months of my G5 year. Time kept evaporating, and my tally of completed dissertation chapters amounted to a panic-inducing zero. Immobilized by the frustration of feeling behind and by the enormity of the task still ahead, I experienced what can only be described as an epic meltdown. After descending a spiral of desperation and self-loathing, I arrived at a familiar destination: "The Stuck Place."
Many wads of snotty tissue later, I decided to completely overhaul my approach to writing.
If you have ever found yourself mired in The Stuck Place, stalled in an otherwise productive writing practice, or simply curious about ways to boost your productivity, there are myriad tools for honing your process. Some widely accepted principles of habit formation can be a good place to begin. Many of these techniques coalesce around psychologist B.F. Skinner’s findings about operant conditioning. More recently, authors like Charles Duhigg (The Power of Habit: Why We Do What We Do in Life and Business) and James Clear (Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones) have built on these insights and developed strategies for hacking behaviors to better align with goals.
Here are a few of the suggestions I gleaned while hiking out of my deepest valley, and how I adapted them to my writing practice:
- Establish obvious cues that set off productive chain reactions.
Cues are the foundation of habits—signals that create expectations and cravings for what will happen next. By planting unmissable cues, you can nudge your future self in the direction you want to go.
I changed two of the most powerful cues: time and location. I adopted early morning workouts and designated a nearby library as my dedicated space for daily post-gym writing. The time change reshuffled my priorities to put my work first. The location change let me shed laundry, plant care, and a thicket of other counterproductive cues at home and create fresh practices in a fresh space. Stacking my workout with my writing meant that by simply leaving for the gym, I had already set in motion a sequence of events that would eventually put me in front of my writing.
- Make the desired habit attractive.
This might mean giving yourself a social media break after putting in an hour of focused work. You might schedule a meal or coffee refill on the other side of your writing time.
For me, the promise of an afternoon walk with my dog or a trip around my apartment with a watering can helped me to associate getting writing done with other enjoyable activities. I also joined a writing group—an FWC Writing Oasis that provided accountability and camaraderie.
- Set yourself up for “small wins.”
James Clear describes the benefit of micro task completion as mastering the “art of showing up,” an accomplishment that creates momentum and proves that you are already moving in the direction of your goal.
I gained traction with my dissertation by breaking up large projects (unwritten chapters) into small, specific tasks. So rather than telling myself that “today, I will work on chapter two,” I instead planned to “write two paragraphs analyzing this specific source.”
- Track and reward that progress.
Tracking the time you put in and the words you generate can also demonstrate that you are getting things accomplished and motivate you to stick with it.
I used a combination of trackers. Early on, when the primary goal was simple forward motion, I logged my activity in 15-minute increments in a notebook. This strategy illuminated where my time was going and taught me how long tasks actually take. Later, I kept an Excel sheet to track words written per day and used a free app called Forest that let me scratch my plant care itch by earning virtual trees for time logged.
As I also learned through a process of trial and error, reconfiguring behaviors won’t happen all at once. There may be backsliding, and you may not cross everything off your daily to-do list. But when transforming a writing practice, or any other habit for that matter, achieving small, consistent changes is what matters most. The process is also never truly complete, so just keep tinkering!
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