Just Write
Productivity advice I'd give myself: Lower your standards for writing
Like most people, I tend to struggle with the blank page. It feels awkward and contributes immensely to writer's block. I tend to be terrified my words might not come out flawlessly, that I won't be happy with them, that my supervisors will find flaws in my arguments, or that I won't please everyone because some people will disagree. The reality is: there's no silver bullet. People will disagree with any claim you put forward. Or if they don't, they will deem it trivial and thus uninteresting. So one lesson I am trying to learn is: Lower your standards. Just write.
One of my goals for 2025 is to write two blog posts a month, which would mean 26 blog posts a year. Of course, they’ll be shorter than what I have already published, since I have other things to do and this is just a little extra, a little public journal on the side. But I do have a long list of titles of what I want to write about. So I'll keep referring back to these tips that I’ve learned over the years and that I’m putting out here because I'm giving them to myself. I hope it works!
(Yes, it is very meta to procrastinate on writing my academic work by writing a blog post... To be fair, writing this takes me like a few hours, tops. A solid draft of a chapter can take me days or weeks. Sigh.)
The Perfectionist Trap.
Perfectionism doesn’t make your work better—it stops you from finishing it. Academia teaches us to fear mistakes, overexplain our ideas, and avoid criticism at all costs. Peer review often reinforces this defensive, overly cautious style. (I recently read a post by Richard Yetter Chappell on why academic writing tends to be so defensive and unnecessarily long—30 pages just to establish a footnote to Plato. I absolutely hate that form of academic writing, and in a small way, it’s my personal rebellion against the academic system. Plato sucks, anyways.)
Obsessing over “perfect” sentences leads to procrastination and anxiety. You can't please everyone, and you shouldn't even try. Trying to make every reader happy is impossible. Writing for philosophers, students, and the public at once will dilute your voice. Your job isn’t to be universally liked—new interesting ideas will upset people. You'll make enemies along the way. You have to accept that. But you'll also make friends, so there's that, I guess!
Tips to Lower the Bar.
Do an Outline. This prevents you from meandering or mentioning ideas that are interesting but completely irrelevant to the topic. (Did you know the news this week? They spent a bunch of money making shrimp run on a treadmill?? How cool is that?? But it’s irrelevant to this post. So please cut it.)
Write a Bad First Draft: Your goal is to get ideas jotted down somewhere, not to sound smart or have a sophisticated view from the outset. It can be messy. It’s a sketch, or a skeleton, of the final thing.
Voice-to-Text Dictation. I often find that when I write directly, my writing is too technical and complicated for most non-experts to understand. It is too dense, I will cram entire ideas from a book in a single paragraph, and then do the same in the next. Unfortunately, most readers can't follow that kind of writing pace. I tend to write the first draft of these blog posts and some of my academic writing by voice-to-text dictation. That way, my writing becomes more conversational.
Turn Off Your Inner Editor. This is a tip I learned in high school, but it still works. Don't try to edit until the first draft is finished. Just put all your thoughts on the page. Save revisions for later. First, just create. Aim for “done first draft”, avoid “perfect first paragraph”. Use rough drafts to clarify your thoughts. Polish later.
Create Slides. This is a new technique I have learned from doing some presentations for university. Once you have finished a first draft, try to make a talk for it with slides. Then rewrite your essay based on those slides. Pretending you have to present it for an audience will help rewrite your essay in a more structured and coherent way. It’ll flow better.
Most Writing Out There Sucks. Even the one by the best authors. Think of your favorite author. They probably wrote some shitty books that we don't remember. We remember the best ones. Let the sands of history be the filter that erases your shitty work, instead of deleting it yourself.
Embrace AI. Generative AI helps a lot with writing, particularly if it doesn’t come naturally to you, or if you’re not a native English speaker trying to write in English. I have embraced AI for some of my writing. I give it the broad idea and it fleshes it out a bit more. Then I revise and polish what it has written, and change the language so it sounds more like me. Works pretty well.
Find the “Shower Moments”. Have quiet time in the shower or brushing your teeth. Don’t listen to music or podcasts or anything else. This is one of the few times where ideas can pop into your head without conscious thought. I’m not sure of the theory of why this works so well. Perhaps because we’re focused, but only using like 30% of our conscious mental energy, since it’s a very automatic process that we’ve done a lot in the past. Those “low mental strain” moments are great for idea generation. I have like 20 or 30 ideas for blog posts that have popped into my head during these times. Or even entire blog posts or drafts that I’ve drafted in my head during “shower moments”.
Keep a Notebook By Your Bed. Some ideas pop into your head while struggling to fall asleep or if you wake up at 4am. Mull over them for a bit, and then write them down into a notebook or your phone with a note-taking app. The ideas will be gone in the morning, so why not keep them?
Productivity Tips.
Let’s talk productivity, or how to do more in less time. I will be borrowing liberally from a variety of sources. Here's a very good one-hour video summarizing many books about productivity. It's very good advice, although your mileage may vary depending on what line of work you do (research, office, email-oriented, etc.).
Here are some of my favorites that I’ve learned over the years:
Eat the frog. Do the hardest, most energy-consuming thing first. Such as writing. Then, as your energy starts running out later in the day, do the easier tasks like responding to emails or doing light reading. Finally, relax at the end of the day when you’re tired.
Avoid morning procrastination. In the same vein, watching a YouTube video or scrolling social media is the worst thing you can do to start off your day. It sets the day up for failure. Use social media later.
Break your work into very small, manageable chunks. There’s no way a person can write a book. You’ll procrastinate on it until the end of time. There’s also no way most people can write a chapter. But you can write a section or a line of argument in one go. So do that instead.
Intuitive, Flexi-Pomodoro Traditional Pomodoro doesn’t work. 20 minutes is wayyyy too little to enter a state of flow in your deep work. I write in chunks of two or three hours. Then I break as I notice a big dip in productivity. Works much better.
Distinguish Urgent from Important. Writing for academic journals and my PhD is important. I need to have it finished. But it is not URGENT. I don’t need it for tomorrow, this week, or even this year. That means it is easy to postpone. Don’t do that, though, because it’ll bite you in the ass later. Protect that time and plan your day around it.
Preplan your day. - Have a plan for, at least, the top three things you need to do tomorrow. That way you can avoid wasting energy every day trying to figure out where you’re going to start.
But don’t schedule five-minute tasks, just do them. This means laundry, brushing your teeth, taking a shower, and similar things that take little time. Those don’t need a spot on your Google Calendar. Just motivate yourself to get off your ass and do them. Reward yourself with a gummy bear or chocolate bar if you need to. Pavlov Skinner Box that sweet sweet reptile brain of yours. You’ll feel better by getting them done.
Conclusion.
Your best ideas will stay trapped in your head if you wait for them to be perfect. They will be stuck, without getting further polish. Writing is an integral part of how you discover what you think, it is your extended mind. It is how you organize your ideas, not just how you share them. Allow yourself to lower the bar. Write poorly. Just write.