I imagine this is a pretty well-known trick, I think I took it from an essay by Paul Halmos, but might be mistaken. It was originally suggested in the context of writing a mathematics paper, but would probably apply a lot more generally as well.
The trick is: always stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence; preferably an important one.
For many people, the hardest part of writing is starting to write—if you’ve stopped in the middle of a sentence, you have an obvious starting point, and you can find it relatively easy to get into the rhythm.
They spend more time writing about their tricks for avoiding procrastination, but that’s simply because they spend so much more time writing in general. Whether they actually spend more time thinking about and discussing procrastination is not so clear.
I think writers probably spend more time thinking about tricks for avoiding procrastination than, say, binmen. If you’re a binman there isn’t much procrastination you can do—you get up in the morning, drive your lorry, pick up the bins and take them back to wherever it is binmen take bins to. If you don’t, you get fired. For a writer, the schedule of a days work is much less well-defined and, probably more importantly, the deadlines tend to be much longer. Whether writers spend more time thinking about procrastination than, say, freelance web-designers is a different question.
I certainly spend much more time procrastinating now that I’m trying to write a PhD than I did as an undergraduate when I had exercises to hand in each week—currently my only ‘deadline’ is to finish in about 3 years, which seems much too far away to worry about. Probably the fact that writing is a profession in which procrastination is an option combines with jimrandomh’s point to produce the effect you’re talking about.
Yeah PhD/academia is the absolute worst, because the timespan is quite long, and many of the deadlines are soft. Miss a paper deadline? Just submit to the next one, with a slightly greater chance of being scooped. Not done your thesis on time? Just ask for an extension, and waste more months/years of your life.
Grad school is truly the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.
I imagine this is a pretty well-known trick, I think I took it from an essay by Paul Halmos, but might be mistaken. It was originally suggested in the context of writing a mathematics paper, but would probably apply a lot more generally as well.
The trick is: always stop writing for the day in the middle of a sentence; preferably an important one.
For many people, the hardest part of writing is starting to write—if you’ve stopped in the middle of a sentence, you have an obvious starting point, and you can find it relatively easy to get into the rhythm.
Writers seem to spend more time describing their tricks for avoiding procrastination than any other profession.
They spend more time writing about their tricks for avoiding procrastination, but that’s simply because they spend so much more time writing in general. Whether they actually spend more time thinking about and discussing procrastination is not so clear.
I think writers probably spend more time thinking about tricks for avoiding procrastination than, say, binmen. If you’re a binman there isn’t much procrastination you can do—you get up in the morning, drive your lorry, pick up the bins and take them back to wherever it is binmen take bins to. If you don’t, you get fired. For a writer, the schedule of a days work is much less well-defined and, probably more importantly, the deadlines tend to be much longer. Whether writers spend more time thinking about procrastination than, say, freelance web-designers is a different question.
I certainly spend much more time procrastinating now that I’m trying to write a PhD than I did as an undergraduate when I had exercises to hand in each week—currently my only ‘deadline’ is to finish in about 3 years, which seems much too far away to worry about. Probably the fact that writing is a profession in which procrastination is an option combines with jimrandomh’s point to produce the effect you’re talking about.
Yeah PhD/academia is the absolute worst, because the timespan is quite long, and many of the deadlines are soft. Miss a paper deadline? Just submit to the next one, with a slightly greater chance of being scooped. Not done your thesis on time? Just ask for an extension, and waste more months/years of your life. Grad school is truly the snooze button on the alarm clock of life.