Are you struggling to get work done during the time you’re scheduled to write? Do you walk away from a writing session feeling like your time would have been better spent watching water boil? It’s frustrating to protect your time, then feel like you have nothing to show for it. In today’s episode, I’m going to help you bring focus to your writing sessions. Your time is precious, so we’re going to make sure that you make the most of it. Let’s get into it.

Welcome to Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s head into today’s episode.

Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Academic Book Writing Simplified. I’m your host, Jane Joanne Jones, and today we are going to discuss writing sessions.

I know a lot of writers struggle with focus, and guess what? I’m one of them. So today I’m sharing some strategies to improve your focus that I use with students in my coaching programs and that I use for my own writing sessions. Even when I’m writing the scripts for these podcast episodes, I have three strategies to share with you today. Two are related to planning, and one is about your mindset. As always, make sure you have a notebook handy because these are strategies you can put into action immediately.

Before I get into the strategies, I want to be clear that I’m talking about writing sessions in this episode. There are other types of work sessions, such as reading the secondary literature, organizing and analyzing your data, or editing your own work. But today we’re discussing writing — as in getting new words on the page.

So let’s discuss the three strategies.

Strategy Number One: Have an Agenda for Your Writing Session

Before you start writing, get as clear as possible about what you’d like to write. This might mean consulting your outline or reviewing work you’ve previously written.

I see so many writers try to wing their writing sessions because they’re not sure what they should focus on. And I know you can’t predict how a writing session will unfold with 100% accuracy, but if you have absolutely no idea what you will be writing, that just means you haven’t done enough prep work.

Now I know there’s going to be some uncertainty. For instance, if you have a chapter where you want to discuss three different themes, you might be unsure about what order in which to discuss them. My advice here would be to work this out in the outline, or just start writing up the themes and organize them later once you look at them on paper.

So what does an agenda look like? It can be as simple or involved as you’d like it to be. I have some students in my programs who are as precise as: “I want to write 300 words explaining one concept that’s important in this chapter, contrasting it with this other concept from the literature.” Or: “I’m going to incorporate three quotes from my interview data and give context for them.”

Your level of specificity is directly related to your level of planning — and also your level of progress. As you get further on in your writing, you’ll probably gain more specificity. But that doesn’t mean that you need to go in with no clue in the early writing sessions. Rely on your evidence, your analysis of the secondary literature, and your own instincts about what you want to write about to structure those early writing sessions.

Strategy Number Two: Adjust Your Session for Your Capacity

This is an issue I touched on in Episode 22 on making a Summer Writing Plan. So if you haven’t listened to that, go ahead and listen.

Please don’t plan a three-hour work session when you know your upper level of focus is 90 minutes. I know you want to get as much out of your writing time as possible, but there are going to be diminishing returns if you know that you can focus for a set amount of time and you always set your writing sessions for much longer than that.

If you want to work on increasing your focus, go for it, but understand that that’s going to be incremental. You’ll be able to increase, you know, by a certain amount over time, but you’re probably not going to be able to go from the ability to focus for 90 minutes to, within a week, being able to focus for four hours. For instance, take your time on increasing your focus and plan accordingly.

Also, get serious about learning how you work. Do you need some warm-up time at the beginning of your writing session? Perhaps you need an organized desk to focus. Maybe you need to review what you wrote in your last session. You might start every session with five to ten minutes of free writing to get your creativity flowing.

Knowing what you need to write well — and then actually doing it — will make every writing session more rewarding.

And here I just want to give you some tough love. You might be arguing in your head with me right now: “I don’t have time for all of this, like, pre-work or, you know, getting prepared. I need to dive right into the session because I have so much to do.” And that’s not going to make for a better session.

A good session happens when you do that prep work so that you can truly sit down and get to the important work. So if you need to, you know, organize your papers, if you need to write in your journal for a couple of minutes — that’s part of the work, okay?

People try to argue that you shouldn’t need to do any of that — you should be able to dive right in. And if you can, that’s great. But if you can’t, then understand that that’s just part of your process.

It’s kind of like going out for a run. You stretch beforehand, right? You warm up your muscles, you get ready, you put on the right sneakers. You don’t just jump up and run and expect to do your best — running with the wrong shoes on, no preparation, not knowing the route — and then act surprised when you don’t hit a personal best. Right?

No. You do the preparatory work or you just acknowledge that that’s not going to be your best session.

So it’s your choice. You could acknowledge that you’re going to have a session that maybe isn’t as focused as you want it to be because you’re not doing that preparatory work. Or you can do the preparatory work and make the most out of the writing session.

So again: become familiar with what you need to write well. Become a student of yourself — and then actually do those things.

I promise you that if you implement this, your writing sessions are not only going to be more efficient, but they’re going to be more rewarding. You’re going to feel better when you’re writing.

Strategy Number Three: Stay in the Moment of Your Session

And this is where we shift into a mindset strategy. As opposed to the two previous strategies, which were more around planning, this one is probably the hardest. But it’s also the strategy that will likely help your focus the most.

Stay present in your session.

If you’re writing and worrying about what reviewers will say, how much you’re going to need to revise, or an idea you have for another chapter, you’re not going to be able to focus on the work right in front of you.

It’s easy and normal for our brains to start worrying, and it takes effort to pull ourselves back to focus.

So I have a few tips to help you do that.

Tip number one: Try journaling. Write down what you’re worried about before you start writing so you can then literally put it to the side. You could write it on a piece of paper and then push that paper away. Sometimes just expressing the worry and hearing it out loud — or seeing it on a piece of paper — can make it feel less daunting.

Second: Keep a notebook next to you while writing so that when you come up with a great idea for a chapter that’s not the one you’re working on, or you realize, “Oh, I should read this article,” you can write that down and then get back to the work at hand. Right?

So you don’t end up going down a research rabbit hole or getting distracted and jumping between chapters. Just write it down — put it on a notepad, a post-it, maybe have a separate document open on your computer — so that you won’t forget it because it’s written down, but you also don’t have to address it at that moment.

Third: Remind yourself that it’s natural to worry. If you spend time worrying — right, so you spend time worrying about what a reviewer is going to say — then you spend more time being upset that you’re worried, you’ve now used twice as much time that you could have spent writing.

Like I said when I discussed journaling, acknowledging the concern can be very powerful and helpful. And this is a time for you to do that. You’re midway through the session, you suddenly start ruminating — acknowledge it, take a minute, and then move on.

Say: “I have this concern. I’ll deal with it later.” And move on.

Okay? And I know it’s easier said than done, but the only way to get better at it is to practice.

And finally: Try writing in community. This could be with a writing group, a writing partner. That way you can prepare for your writing session and debrief with writers that have similar concerns.

This kind of camaraderie can help reduce some of your anxiety.

A lot of our anxiety comes from thinking — in my experience, for myself and people I work with — a lot of your worry comes from thinking: “I am the only person that doesn’t know how to do this. I am somehow uniquely unqualified to do this. Or my problem is very different from everyone else’s.”

And when you hear that it’s not — when you hear that other people have similar struggles — it can be very reaffirming because you realize that it’s not actually a struggle. It’s just part of the process. Right?

You only thought it was a struggle because you thought that you were the only person going through it. And then you realize that, of course, everybody revises multiple times. Of course, nobody outlines perfectly. Right?

And when you realize that, it can help you minimize some of that anxiety you had.

Final Recap

Okay, so to recap the three strategies:

1. Have a plan for your writing sessions.
   
2. Manage your capacity in your writing sessions, which means understanding how you work best.
   
3. Stay present in your writing and try to deal with the concerns and also distractions that might come up when you’re actually in the thick of the writing session.
   

Okay, as always, I hope this was helpful. And if you found it really helpful, I would love for you to leave a review for the podcast. That helps us find more people to listen who could also benefit from this type of advice.

Be well, and I will see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening.

Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode.

Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you like what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation.

Take care, and tune in for our next episode.