Accountability Tools

While I was working on my dissertation proposal, I came across Robert Paul Wolff’s blog post “How to write a doctoral dissertation in philosophy.”  For the most part, I thought it was great. (I just reread it for the first time in years.  I still think most of it is great advice.)  I thought it was so great I emailed it to several of my classmates who were ABD.  Some of them hated it, and so we all took a break from the serious business of grad school to argue about it. I have no intention of returning to that argument here.

Instead, I want to talk about just one of the things that Wolff says.  Here it is:

On the first day, write one page and stop. The next day, write another page, and stop.... If you are able to, write two pages a day.... Also, do not write four or five pages on a really good day and then figure you can take a few days off. Those few days will stretch into eternity. You are a tortoise, not a hare. Slow and steady wins the race....

He also suggests the following for those who might need extra motivation, but I think it might be of use even to those who are fairly self-disciplined:

…cut a deal with a fellow dissertation writer. You will send her a page a day by email, and she will send you a page of her dissertation every day by email. You will read her page [it only takes a minute] and send back an encouraging word, and she will do the same for you.

I actually did this.  I found another grad student in my department (one of my “cubicle mates” since, as teaching fellows, we were given individual cubicles in shared cubicle clusters) and we sent each other each day’s work.  This worked wonders for me.  We were both philosophy grad students, so we could understand what the other was working on, but we worked in different areas, so we had little in the way of substantive suggestions.  (This might be the perfect setup, actually, as long as each person respects the area the other works in—there might be a certain toxicity if one person works in an area that the other thinks is wildly misguided.)

Above I said that I wanted to look at just one thing Wolff said, but really I think this advice can be broken into two parts:

• Write (at least a little) everyday
• If needed, create a mutual support group to ensure you accomplish (1)

I think that (1) is important (or, that something in the neighborhood of (1) is important for myself and likely for many other academics).  When writing my dissertation, I was pretty good about writing every weekday. At times in my post-Ph.D. days I have been good about this, but I have not always succeeded.  At times I fall into a pattern where I write in fits and starts, with periods of (relative) great productivity and others where I write nothing at all.  This might work well for some people.  They might rationally choose to work in such cycles.  Just to be clear, I am not one of them.

One solution—one that worked for me in grad school—is to find a writing buddy.  Last year I found another. I printed out a calendar and thought about how long it would take me to complete a major project (a book draft) that I had been thinking about.  I then set a final date to complete the first draft.  I wrote that on this calendar.  Then I set myself running minimum word-count goals for every weekday between day 1 and the day upon which the final draft needed to be done. I then got to work writing, and when the day was over, I wrote in my actual word count.  I continued this each day until the draft was done.  (I now have a contract and am working on finalizing the manuscript for the clearance review.)

I will note that my method did go against some of Wolff’s advice, since what was important was the running word count.  If I did twice as much on Monday, I could get away with skipping Tuesday.  The upside of this system is that it also builds in accountability.  If I get behind on Monday, I need to make that up on Tuesday; otherwise Tuesday will fail to meet the running word count goal, even if I did my normal amount of writing. 

Maybe others do not need any such methods to stay on track.  Perhaps others have heavy pressures that requires them to constantly work on writing. Or maybe others have such light teaching loads that it is easy for them to find time to write, and so there is no need to build an accountability system.  From talking with others, though, I suspect I am far from alone in finding that such systems can be useful.  Assuming this is correct, I am curious to hear about what has (and what has not) worked for others.

I think this is importantly different than the age-based targets that Helen discussed in an earlier post.  Most importantly, I think that both of the tools I talk about here concern targets that are largely within our control.  In contrast, I would not suggest having accountability goals in terms of getting a book accepted by a certain time, since this involves too much that is out of our control.

Before closing I wanted to add one more thing.  I have found that when I have an accountability tool in place (whether the buddy or the calendar system), I have been less stressed about my writing, have found that it came easier, and have enjoyed the process more.  Perhaps this is surprising.  We might expect a system of accountability to add to our stress levels and decrease our enjoyment.  At least for me, this was not the case.  In fact, this is a reason I think that these (and other similar) behaviors can be useful even for those who are happy with their current productivity levels.

Comments

[Marcus Arvan]

Hi Peter: great post! I don’t need a support group, but know those who do, and I have the sense it can be really helpful for accountability (particularly for procrastinators and perfectionists).

I have more experience with your first piece of advice from Wolff: the advice to write a page or whatever daily and then *stop* (and work on other things). This single piece of advice probably made the difference in me completing my dissertation. I had gotten nowhere for a coupl not years. Then I followed the kind of advice Wolff gives (I wrote three pages a day and then stopped)...and I ended up finishing my dissertation just 8 months later.

The crucial thing about the daily writing thing (and *stopping* instead of writing more) is that (1) it keeps you moving forward a little bit each day, while (2) leaving you time and energy to do other important things (e.g. revising other papers, etc.), such that each day you feel more accomplished than the day before. It leads to a kind of confidence-snowball where you feel positive each day and move toward your goals constantly. I cannot recommend Wolff’s advice (and yours) enough!