Finding Time to Write
Writing is like any other skill - there are no shortcuts to being "good"
The critically-acclaimed[1] family sitcom Full House — the original, not the nonsense redux — debuted an episode in its final season featuring middle child Stephanie’s band, Girl Talk. As fans of the show may remember, Uncle Jessie (brother-in-law to the late Bob Saget’s Danny Tanner) was a musician who inherited a nightclub. In “We Got the Beat,” Stephanie and several friends formed a band, but appeared more concerned with their aesthetic appeal rather than practicing for their first gig.
After receiving some initial positive feedback from family, the girls figured that they were ready for the stage. Uncle Jesse, however, disagreed.
Jesse: [as Michelle, Derek, and Lisa leave] All right, troops. Break’s over. Let’s hit the studio. Come on.
Steph: Uncle Jesse, we’ve already got the music part down. Now we just need to work on our look.
Jesse: You already got the look. You look like four girls who need to rehearse. Now, I’m not gonna be on the side of that stage calling out chords to you guys.
Kimmy Gibbler: Oh, like we can’t remember three chords? A, E…I, uhh, O, U
Steph: Come on, Uncle Jesse. What’s the big deal? Dad and Aunt Becky said we were great!
Jesse: Of course they did. They’re family. I’m your manager and I’m gonna tell you the truth.
Steph: The truth is that you want to boss us around.
Jesse: The truth is you guys made a million mistakes. Now let’s hit the studio!
Unfortunately, the girls refused to take Jessie’s feedback. They did everything but practice, and things went…well, rather poorly. So poorly, in fact, that Girl Talk tanked their performance, and Stephanie ended up in tears.
A lack of preparation isn’t good for anybody
Bombing from a lack of preparation and time management is the worst case scenario for student and professor in the context of a research project. Time is a precious commodity, but it occasionally seems like students spend it wantonly, without careful consideration for the scarce resource that it is. Consider the following series of events, which we sometimes see play out among our mentees.
Students will begin the term on the right foot. They’ll read some papers, maybe conduct a small analysis or two. Maybe they’ve even hammered out some annotated bibliographies or gotten a start on their an introduction. The fledgling researcher feels okay – not great, sure, but well enough to satiate their guilt over the mostly blank thesis manuscript file buried deep in their hard drive. I’ve made a little start, I’ll be fine the student thinks to themselves. There’s so much time left to really buckle down.
In these early days, sure. It is easy to feel complacent when there’s time for writing in the future. Until there isn’t! A break passes, the shadows grow longer and the days colder, and, all of a sudden, the student is facing down a deadline that they can’t reasonably meet.
How did it come to this?
Putting the time in
Like an athlete or a musician or even just an employee working as a cog in The Machine, faculty mentors need students to do two things when working on a term paper or research project: (1) they must be willing to put the time in, and (2) they need to be self-reflective enough to accept honest feedback (we’ll save this one for a later post).
Writing, it turns out, is like most other skills. If you want to be adequate — much less good! — then you need to write. So why don’t students devote more time to practicing their craft?
At the risk of an #OKBoomer moment here, the simple reality is that many students waste too much time. They’re not unique in this respect. Hardly anyone can give an honest appraisal of how they spend their time. Try and track some time the various activities you complete in a day, paying special attention to how much discretionary time you blow not doing the thing that you set out to do. How much time do you “waste” during a day? It’s probably horrific. You live in an attention economy. You’re pulled in 100 different directions, with five different screens or gadgets pulling at your time. Here’s what we can promise: If you do not schedule “writing time,” then no writing will get done. You have to invest in a project to see it through.
But gentlemen! you think in agony, I simply do not have enough hours in the day to commit to writing! I have four classes, two jobs, one unpaid internship, and a life to live. Ahh, yes, that time-worn perspective. We’re sympathetic, we were young once (we also have young children, so, we’re busy, sleep-deprived, and stretched to the gills, too). But while we grant that it may feel like you don’t have enough hours in the day, those perceptions are wormy little things that aren’t always connected so well to reality. In fact, they are so pervasive that there’s academic work on a psychological concept called the time-pressure illusion that explains them.
Are you really time poor?
Being “time poor” is the idea that there are so many duties to which you must attend that you cannot hope to manage them all. In modern post-industrial societies, this “time crunch” seems to be particularly aggressive. There are simply not enough leftover hours in the day to accomplish one’s to-do list.
The conventional way of measuring this time pressure usually involves tracking how many “free” hours people enjoy, or the amount of time left to people after deducting the number of hours they spend doing the unavoidable drudgery of daily life. But the problem with this mathematical operation is twofold: (1) people may spend more time than is necessary on their activities, and (2) they often accomplish more than is technically required of them.
In other words, to accurately benchmark how much time-poverty exists in your life requires distinguishing between how much time you actually spend on necessary tasks and how much time you need to spend on them. Consider as an example the flashy millionaire who spends his money on designer clothes and exotic cars; finding he has little wealth after his expenditures does not make him poor. Similarly, after devoting “too many” hours to any one of a number of the activities to which you are committed we might surmise that you actually had more time than you thought.
Thus, the illusion of time pressure involves the difference between how much free time people have and the actual discretionary time available to them. As Goodin and colleagues (2005) write,
“the amount of discretionary time actually available to people varies considerably depending on their circumstances… In general, those people who have the least discretionary time are under least illusion. That is the case with lone parents, and mothers especially. At the other extreme, those people whose time commitments leave them with the least actual ‘free time’ are in general not especially short of potential ‘discretionary time’: they are under the greatest time-pressure illusion.”
In other words, just because you have a lot of commitments doesn’t mean your time-poor. As students, you have lots of discretion over what to involve yourselves in. This person that the authors above are describing, we would argue, is the classically (over)involved student. You have the time to schedule the practice of writing. The question is whether or not you recognize it and act on that accordingly.
Moving forward to level up
Now the advice part. It is true that you only have so many hours of the day. And it is true that students vary tremendously in the responsibilities that are arranged on their plate. Some students must juggle work and school. Others class and sports. Still others may feel the pressures of socializing against the pressures of academic performance.
We would argue that the thesis writing process is something that you must make space for, yes, but that you do have time to write if you are realistic about how you are spending your time. Be honest with yourself. Writing research is not free! You have to be willing to pony up the costs.
In fact, as Uncle Jesse told a despondent Stephanie Tanner at the end of “We Got the Beat”: “You can't succeed at anything in life...without working hard and having discipline.”
Indeed, the same is true when it comes to writing research.
The takeaway: You have to develop an acute sense for time when working on a research project. You’ll need to evaluate just how much discretionary time you have and plan accordingly. The margins for error are thin!
The practical: Devoting even short blocks of time to “just write” will help. Investments snowball: putting the time in early will yield more benefits than rushing to write on deadline.
[1] The show won a Blimp award in 1995 for “favorite animal start” on behalf of the Tanners’ dog, Comet.