Writing as Project

If you’re like me — a contractual teaching load of seven courses per academic year, plus overloads, committee work, and administrative duties — you tell yourself that you’ll work diligently on those unfinished conference papers and journal manuscripts during the winter holidays. And then life happens, time slips away, and suddenly the spring semester is about to begin.

There are simple tools — which aren’t part of the standard graduate program curriculum, but should be — that can help you become a more productive writer. I’ll mention two.

Stretch & SMART

The stretch goal is your ultimate objective or ambition; the whole project. For example, write a complete draft of a book chapter. SMART is an acronym that describes the actions that need to be taken to reach one’s objective:

• Specific — actions must be defined and discrete, such as create a literature review that will be part of the book chapter.
• Measurable — actions must be countable so that progress can be gauged. Each morning, find and read twelve peer-reviewed articles that are relevant to the book chapter. For each article, write a phrase or sentence on, respectively, its methods, findings, and quality.
• Achievable — create the conditions needed to complete the above tasks. Clear morning schedule, turn off email.
• Realistic — ensure that the tasks can actually be accomplished. Don’t go down rabbit holes; on the first day select which journals will be searched, a date range, and other limiting criteria.
• Timeline — establish a schedule with an endpoint. I am devoting one hour each morning to the literature review. If I define my search on Monday, and then subsequently locate four articles per day, then I will have a total of twelve articles by the end of the allotted time on Thursday and can begin writing the literature review on Friday morning.

There are many definitions of Stretch & SMART; if the one above is unclear, others can be found with a quick internet search.

Front Forty & Back Forty

Front Forty & Back Forty maps the tasks that are part of a project and tracks which of those tasks have been completed. The technique was invented by my colleague and illustrator extraordinaire, Susannah Strong. An explanation is here. Make sure to scroll down to the sample map.