Organize Your Writing Time Like A Professional Writer

Is there any other skill more necessary in Grad School or College than writing? Nadda. Writing papers, essays, and your dissertation are all inescapable aspects of academia, and there’s a heck of a lot more to serious writing than just knowing correct grammar and punctuation.

Professional writers will tell you, organizing your writing time is paramount to a successful writing project. Especially if you’re working on a huge project like your dissertation, you need to get serious about scheduling your writing time.

There’s an excellent article at Study Hacks called How to Schedule Your Writing Like a Professional Writer, and they’ve done an amazing job of collecting advice from several masters of long form non-fiction.

Apply the professional writing tips to your college or grad school writing (or any writing at all) by following these steps:

1. Spread out work on an assignment over several days. Coming at it fresh increases its quality.
2. During these days, get up early. Probably earlier than you are used to. Say, around 7 or 8 am. (This means these days will be weekdays, probably early in the week so you can avoid temptations to party the night before).
3. Have a mini-ritual to jump start the day. It should probably involve coffee. Breakfast. Maybe the morning paper. Don’t take too long.
4. Go to the most isolated place possible.
5. To get your mind ready to think, review the last pages you wrote.
6. Work for two or three hours. Then stop.
7. Follow this habit regularly. Don’t write during other times. Don’t write in public places. Don’t start writing the day before.

Truly, as someone who writes for a living I found the Study Hacks post very helpful, and I encourage you to read over the whole thing. For myself I find that early morning writing with a little ritual like tea, breakfast, mediation or exercise, creates an atmosphere of optimum concentration and creativity. I could definitely benefit by taking their other tips to heart though .