This summer I am doing something I've wanted to do for years: the Faculty Success Program from the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. It is focused on building sustainable academic writing habits, and the heart of the program is writing every workday for at least 30 minutes. This is harder than one might think.
One piece of the program is looking squarely at our inner resistance: when you pause and listen to the voices that tell you not to write, what are they saying? I was familiar with the idea of writing resistance from Steven Pressfield's War of Art, but today I have been thinking about two insights I wanted to share from the daily practice of pushing back against resistance.
The first comes from high school physics. Remember learning about coefficients of static and dynamic friction? You need more oomph to put the object in motion than you do to keep the object in motion. I feel this SO MUCH with academic writing: I listen to the cacophony reverberating inside my brain, saying, "not worth it - won't get published - co-author will hate it - don't bother," and I struggle to sit down and start the timer. The coefficient of static friction is pretty high. But once the timer is going I remember that the coefficient of dynamic friction is markedly lower: I can zip along fairly happily for 30 minutes. (This is reminding me of the Wait But Why piece on procrastination.)
Not only do those coefficients differ from each other, they vary from week to week depending on what I've got going on. It's easier to sit down and work on a paper if that's just a Thing I Do Every Day (lower static friction). It's easier to make good use of my writing time today if I wrote yesterday and the day before and left myself some brief notes about what to do next than if I am trying to get back to a neglected paper I last worked on six months ago, now caked in metaphorical dust and guilt (lower dynamic friction). It appears that I can bring down both coefficients with careful habit formation, at least some of the time. And I want to remember that yesterday I was feeling lousy about some stuff in my personal life, but when I sat down to write it magicked away the icky feelings for a while. Temporarily high static friction, surprisingly low dynamic friction -- not what I expected. You won't know how it feels to write until you sit down and do it.
The second thing I want to remember is the framing of resistance as something intended to protect you. Academic publishing is so often terrible and stupid. The process of publishing a scholarly paper involves a lot of soul-sucking sweat and toil, with moments of joy but a whole lot of hassle. It's no wonder your brain is like "...must we? perhaps the spices need alphabetizing instead?" This framing made me say, "Oh! This is why I resist exercise! And grading! Because they often feel terrible even though I know I ought to do them!" It's not that I'm undisciplined; it's that my brain is looking out for me, or at least the short-term version of me.
My small-group coach suggested a "maximum timer" as a strategy for grading resistance: what if you are only "allowed" to do an hour of grading in a day? That could be extremely motivating, and it could also help me deal with the illogical but persuasive voice in my head that says, "You shouldn't write if you're behind on grading, but also grading is terrible so let's do it later."
Today I sent a manuscript draft off to my co-author after a year in which "I ought to write that paper / I don't want to write that paper" kept looping through my brain. Turns out it is easier to write papers if a person sits down consistently and puts words in a row. Who knew?
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