How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing

Writing every weekday is nice, but the best writing schedule is the one you can stick to consistently.

Writing breeds more good ideas for writing.

“Clearing the decks” is mental alchemy: We transmute the lead of procrastination into the gold of efficiency.

Day-level goals should be concrete, the kind of goals that you can judge if you meet them.

When you find a nice place, stick to it. Habits come from repetition—doing the same behaviors with the same stuff in the same place at the same times. Our brains settle in for writing faster when they detect that they are in the writing place at the writing time.

routine is a better friend to them than inspiration”

only people can make procrastination look productive.

Writing is more than typing words. For me, writing’s endpoint is sending an article to a journal, a book to a publisher, or a grant proposal to a funding agency. Any activity that gets me closer to that goal counts as writing.