Hi, everyone! This is Heather from the
Purdue Writing Lab. Welcome to our virtual intensive writing experience.
The purpose of this writing experience is to help you make some serious progress
with your thesis or dissertation, and I know that getting started can be both exciting and
a little scary, but don't fret! We're in this together.
Whether you're in the drafting stage of your project,
or if you've moved on to revising, it's important to have some clear goals in mind to help you
make the most out of your writing time. In this video, we will be talking about goal
setting and motivation strategies. More specifically,
we'll be talking about how to set an overall
objective for your writing routine, and how to break up that larger goal into small,
more manageable goals. The purpose of establishing these bite-size benchmarks is
to help you keep your momentum and stay on track with your project.
Throughout this intensive writing experience video series, there will be moments in our
vidcast for you to set a timer and pause the video
so that you can journal or work through an activity.
For our first activity, let's pause here and set a 10-minute timer. Challenge yourself
to use the full 10 minutes to journal, and if you need more time, that's fine!
As graduate students, most of us have been asked to write quite a bit, but that doesn't mean
we've all had the opportunity to really sit and reflect on our writing process. With this in mind,
use the next 10 minutes to reflect on your own writing process and how you usually go about
setting goals for yourself. It might be helpful to reflect on one or two specific writing projects
that you’ve worked on recently. How did you get started?
Did you set specific writing goals for yourself? As you reflect on your past writing processes,
try to honestly reflect on what felt successful and what could be improved upon moving forward.
Be as clear and consice about those goals as you can. You can also use this time to
reflect on how you feel about writing. Are you excited about your project?
Nervious about it? What parts of the writing process do
you enjoy and feel you are good at, and what parts feel a bit more tricky or
dull or difficult? Your attitudes about writing can impact how you write,
and it’s helpful to self-reflect and
identify some of your strengths and growth areas as a writer.
Now that we've discussed our journaling prompt in more detail, set your timer and start writing.
I'll see you in 10 minutes!
Welcome back! Before we move forward to talk about specific goal setting and
motivational strategies, it's important to remember that progress takes many forms.
When we think about writing progress, we're not just talking about building
your word count or page limit. Let me say that again:
making progress with your writing involves more than just adding words to
a page. Writing is a process, and as you start to map out your goals for your project, it's
valuable to remember that progress can look like reading scholarship, revising data,
making notes, building outlines, workshopping content and ideas with other people, and so on.
A day spent revisiting data or building outlines is not wasted writing time.
It's all part of the writing process and therefore counts towards progress.
When thinking about ways to establish writing goals that feel productive, helpful,
and motivating to you, keep in mind that goal setting is most effective when you
work towards specific and measurable objectives. Imagine you are trying to complete your
literature review. An example of a specific and measurable goal to approach that project
could be: “I will draft two paragraphs of my literature review using five previous studies in
45 minutes.” Notice how this example contains a clear
objective and accounts for the amount of time it will take to complete that objective.
Now let's compare this example to a more vague goal you could set for yourself.
You could set out with the intention to simply work on your literature review,
but how might that level of open-endedness be a hindrance?
It can be tough to get started or keep going when you feel like you're climbing
a mountain instead of approaching your work as one massive task.
Try to break up your to-do list into smaller parts. Take a moment to pause here
and read through more examples of specific and measurable writing goals.
Again, notice how each goal addresses a task that should take no longer than one hour
to complete. When you start working on your own project, be mindful of your time estimations
and if you find that your expectations often turn out to be too generous or too
constricting, try to address your goals more accurately to reflect your pace.
So far, we've talked about the importance of creating specific, measurable, and
manageable goals, but how can we actually go about identifying those goals?
Start by acknowledging your overall objective. If you're writing a dissertation, for
example, you can't just sit down and write the whole thing in one go.
Instead, you're going to be completing a project made up of multiple chapters, each with
their own sections and subsections, that are created one paragraph at a time, one sentence at
a time, one word at a time. To help you feel less overwhelmed, let's consider the large
undertaking of a dissertation in terms of the project's smaller parts that are completed
over time. It can be useful to approach goal setting for a large project the same
way someone might approach a long road trip. When you pull up directions, you can see
your overall route on the map, of course, but when you're actually in the car, you
can only see and navigate a small section of the road at a time.
Similarly, it can be helpful to create writing goals that span short, consistent
windows of time, like weekly, for example, to help you give yourself a sense of pacing.
Now that you've seen a number of examples of small, manageable goals,
start to make your own list. Set a timer for 10 minutes. Begin by
identifying your overall goal for this upcoming week. What would you like to
have finished by the end of this window of time? Next, think about how many writing
sessions you will have in the next week and how long each of those sessions will be.
Will you write for one two-hour block each day? More or less than that? This step will
help you to determine how much time you have to fill with those bite-size tasks.
Next, write out your top five bite-size goals for your
current project that will help you to complete your
overall weekly goal. Remember, this list of five objectives
needs to be specific, and you should try to estimate
the amount of time it will take to complete each task. One way to help you choose bite-size
tasks is to imagine goals that will take no more than one hour to complete.
Finally, look at how much time you've estimated those five goals would take,
and assign them to individual writing sessions. There are handouts available to help you
with this process. When you're ready, set your timer and start goal setting!
Welcome back! At this point, you should have a handful of goals to help you
approach your writing project with a sense of control and direction. Although goal setting
is a useful way to jump-start progress and to feel motivated to get started,
it's not always enough to maintain motivation while working on a long
writing project. For the rest of this video, then, we'll be talking about strategies
to develop a writing routine to keep you going. To begin, let's talk about motivation and
Time. It's important to make writing a consistent habit. While it can feel tempting
to hide from our work when we start to feel stressed,
things become much more manageable if we can approach our work with some level of
consistency. Writing every day for a short period of
time makes it easier to continue doing so even if you don't much feel like it one
particular day. Writing 500 words about two pages, double-spaced,
adds up to thousands of words a week. Each of your small victories will keep you
pushing to the finish line! So keep taking those small bites!
Once you've established your writing schedule, try your best to stick to it.
If you've blocked off an hour or so to work on your project, for example,
defend that time. To maintain this boundary, try to protect your scheduled writing
time from being taken over by other commitments. This means resisting the pressure
to allow other meetings or activities to encroach on your writing time.
Consider putting your phone on do not disturb or turning off your computer's
Wi-Fi unless you're researching something for your project online. Your time is important
and so is your project.
Let's continue talking about motivation and time. I want to note here that yes, it's
imperative to defend your writing time, but breaks are also important.
One way to feel more refreshed and recharged while writing is to reward
yourself periodically for being productive. Working towards small, measured rewards
will help you to pace your work sessions and boost productivity by avoiding
fatigue and burnout. What kind of rewards feel motivating to you during a writing session?
Some examples could include taking 10 minutes to scroll on social media,
walk outside, complete a free yoga video on youtube, or do something creative.
When you're choosing your rewards, remember that finding balance is
key here. If you work for an hour, for example, consider
rewarding yourself with a longer break of maybe 15 minutes or so.
On the other hand, if you work better in shorter bursts of time, punctuate
those mini work rounds with brief, five-minute breaks. This discussion
about finding a sense of work-reward balance is also an invitation to reflect on
your productivity habits. When do you work most efficiently? In the morning?
The afternoon? The evening? Your work-reward cycles will probably
look different depending on when you're writing and that's okay.
If you're a morning person who tends to work better when you first wake up, for
example, maybe you could hold a more intense writing session early on in the day
and then complete lighter, less intense sessions in the afternoon.
Self-reflection is so important when navigating issues of motivation
and productivity, so give yourself permission to experiment and find what
works best for you.
Another way to stay motivated is to lean on social support. Graduate student
writers can feel isolated, especially in the later stages of their program, so it's helpful
to find a writing group or an accountability buddy. Whether you’re writing with friends
over Face Time, texting progress updates to one another at the end of the day,
or sharing your drafts with one another for feedback, checking in with your writing
group can help keep you accountable for your work in a low pressure way. Another form of
social support to consider is to seek out writing tutoring if it is available to you.
Remember, writers of all levels can benefit from receiving feedback.
If you are a writer at Purdue's main campus, please come visit us at the
Writing Lab. We are here to serve Purdue students, faculty, and staff.
Regardless of where you are in your project, you can find support and
motivation with our amazing tutors. If you're curious about tutoring or how
it works, please check out some of our videos on the OWL Purdue Youtube page.
If you aren't affiliated with Purdue, does your university have a writing center?
If so, check them out!
The third and final method of boosting your motivation that we'll talk about
today is the output or deliverable-based method of approaching your writing
schedule. In addition to blocking off daily times to write and work, this method
encourages you to establish a daily word count or page-length goal.
It's important to determine your expectations about the quality
of work when you establish these goals about daily deliverables. For example,
if you are in the earlier stages of your project, perhaps you could focus more on
developing content instead of producing perfectly polished work.
Don't let the pressure of wanting to produce perfect writing get in the way
of writing it all. Again, writing is a process,
and you need to have some sort of working draft before you can dive into revisions.
If you're already well into the revising stages of your project, your deliverables
Will, of course, tend to favor more polished work.
Once you complete your daily deliverable goal, consider giving yourself a reward
after hitting your 500 word count benchmark, for example, you could
go make yourself your favorite snack or cozy up with your favorite show.
What reward sounds enticing to you? I hope you're feeling more excited and
ready to dive into your writing projects! Thank you so much for sharing your time
with me. If you are a writer at Purdue, please don't hesitate to reach out to us
at the Writing Lab to get more support on your project. If you're a writer from a
different institution, check out your university or community's resources.
Happy writing and revising, everyone! Until next time!