#19: Not writing is an essential part of writing
Yeah, I know - you should be writing. Same here. Not writing enough is one of the worst sins a researcher can commit - and we're all committing it almost all of the time. But what if we've got 'not writing' all wrong? What if those procrastinating hours you spent trying to decide which font to use and what colour to paint your bedroom were actually important parts of your writing process? What if, without plenty of time spent not writing, you wouldn't be a writer at all - at least, not one that anyone would want to read? Shut that laptop and let your imperfect fairy godmother blow your writing guilt out of the water.
Here are a couple of summaries of the research on the role of day-dreaming and mind-wandering in creativity:
Kaufman, S. B. and Singer, J. L. 2011: ‘The origins of positive-constructive daydreaming’, Scientific American, 22nd December.
Kaufman, S. B. and Singer, J. L. 2012: ‘The creativity of dual process “system 1” thinking’, Scientific American, 17th January.
And here's the Adam Grant article mentioned in the episode:
Grant, A. 2016: 'Why I taught myself to procrastinate', New York Times, 16th January.
Episode transcript:
Are you constantly down on yourself because you think you should be writing? This episode is for you.
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and week by week I’ll be drawing on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Let me tell you about a thing I did about 15 years ago - something that supercharged my anxieties around productivity and haunted me for years. I was interested to know exactly how much time I spent actually writing, in a working day of approximately 8 hours during which writing was the only thing I was trying to get done. To find out, I installed two little stopclock apps at the top of my screen. Whenever I was actually writing - Word document open in front of me, typing words on the page - or consulting my notes or other things related to my writing project, I’d have one clock running. Every time I turned to something else - faffing on the internet, tidying my desk, thinking about stuff other than my writing project - I’d stop the writing clock and start the other clock. If I got up from my desk, I’d stop both clocks, so the clocks were measuring only the time I spent actually sitting at my desk in front of my computer. I did this for a couple of days, and I was horrified by the results. In my mind, before I did the experiment, I was spending the majority of my time writing. I thought of the time I spent at my desk as pretty solid writing time, and I was expecting that, at the end of my experiment, I’d measure less than an hour of non-writing time each day. Instead, and to my horror, it was the exact inverse of what I’d expected. I clocked up less than an hour of writing time - from memory, I think it was more like 30 minutes. The rest of the time - well over 6 hours - was just faffing. You know, pottering around on social media, reading reviews of things I had no intention of owning, clicking on one news article after another, that sort of thing. A full day’s writing was, clearly, nothing like a full day’s writing.
I might have quickly managed to feel better about this if I’d told some other people about the results of my experiment. Perhaps they might have been inspired to try it too, and we could have compared notes. We could have talked about what our writing days looked like, about the sorts of things we did when we got distracted, about our strengths and weaknesses. We could have supported each other in what might have turned out to be a helpful discussion about the mechanics of writing. Instead, though, I told exactly nobody. I was ashamed. Those colleagues I saw sitting in front of their screens were, I decided, studiously writing the whole time. What I was managing to do for less than an hour a day, they were doing for 8 hours or more. I couldn’t tell anyone my dirty secret: that I was employed full-time as a researcher but spent only a small fraction of that time actually doing research. What a fraud. And I know I’m not alone in feeling like this - I know a lot of other academics, too, feel that they are not doing enough writing to count as serious researchers.
What’s interesting about this feeling of ‘I’m not writing enough and everyone else is writing much more than me’ is that there’s an absolutely huge dollop of cognitive dissonance involved. If everyone else is writing non-stop, why does it take them at least a few years to finish a PhD thesis? Why aren’t they publishing more than you are? (Okay, a few of them probably are - but they’re not all orders of magnitude more prolific than you are, the way they’d be if you were right about how your productivity compares to everyone else’s.) Why do academics constantly joke about procrastination? Why are missed deadlines endemic among academics? What explains the ubiquitous ‘I should be writing’ placards at any protest attended by academics? How do your colleagues find time for the other interests you know they have? If I’d really been the outlier I was convinced I was, and if you were really the outlier you think you are, none of this stuff adds up. But of course, when it comes to protecting our belief in our own inadequacy, we’re all experts at ignoring evidence.
Anyway, this view I held of myself as many times less productive than other academics persisted until … well, last year, actually. I started working with my coach, Rumbi Moyo, on my writing anxiety and it was she who first suggested to me the unthinkable: that perhaps the time I spent not writing was an important part of the writing process. My response at the time was: ‘Yeah, right!’ - despite recognising that my breakthroughs in my writing, when I have them, occur as often when I’m out running, waking from a nap, or chatting to other people as they do when I’m hunched, brow furrowed, over my desk. Around the time I started working on this, I ran a quick poll on Twitter for my fellow academics. I asked: suppose another academic said to you that they spent 4 hours writing today. What would you naturally assume those 4 hours involved? I offered 3 options: non-stop writing, writing with pauses to think, or a combination of writing, thinking, and faffing. The most popular answer, by far, was the last one: most people (in this admittedly unscientific survey) understood ‘I spent 4 hours writing’ to mean ‘I spent 4 hours writing, thinking, and faffing’. I was shocked - seriously. My natural assumption was that someone who told me that they just spent 4 hours writing had been writing pretty much non-stop for the whole time - although I could immediately recognise that as unlikely as soon as I articulated the thought. Some of the tweets in response to the poll were illuminating, too: one person said that he sometimes doesn’t write anything at all on a writing day, and that that’s pretty standard. Another person suggested that if he did write non-stop for 4 hours, he could come up with a lot of words, but would need to delete 90% of it. I don’t know if it’s significant or not that the people who seemed least surprised by the fact that writing involves a lot of not writing were all men in this case, nor whether that’s evidence for it being mainly women who hold themselves to the really ridiculous productivity standards - so I’ll mention it here without making anything of it. Perhaps someone else can look into it more rigorously.
When you think about it for a moment, it’s actually pretty bizarre that any of us manage to get through any academic degree without recognising that the time we spend away from our writing is an important part of the creative process. After all, most of us don’t even make it through our first decade of life without learning that Archimedes’ famous ‘eureka’ moment happened while he was sitting in the bath, not while he was at his desk toiling over his equations. And the evidence continues to pour in: I’ve mentioned some of the research about the creative benefits of day-dreaming and mind-wandering on this podcast before, and I’ll put a couple of links in the notes for this episode too. But even if you’re not up to date with the research in this area, you’ve probably had the experience of unexpectedly finding the solution to a research-related puzzle while you’re out walking or making your lunch. So why is it that so many of us still think that writing has to involve - well, writing, and little else? Why is it that, when my own coach suggested to me that not writing might be an important part of writing, I was initially so resistant to the idea - and why do my own clients give me the side-eye when I suggest the same thing to them?
I think there are a few things going on here. One is the thought that it’s just a little too convenient for it to be true that taking breaks away from our writing is an important part of the writing process. It sounds like the sort of excuse we tell ourselves when we’re being weak-willed and want to justify an afternoon nap or a sneaky couple of hours in front of Netflix. What we really need to be doing, we think, is toughing it out. We need to be strong enough to sit at our desks come what may, and resist the temptation to get up and do something else. We need to triumph over our weaker sides. Now, I talked in the last episode - episode #18: There is no such thing as self-sabotage - about the pitfalls of taking this sort of view of our inner lives, where succeeding is a matter of doing battle with and winning against the part of ourselves that’s trying to hold us back. In that episode, I explained that sometimes what feels like self-sabotage is actually anxiety, and that we can make life easier for ourselves by listening to and addressing that anxiety, rather than by doing battle with it. But it’s not just anxiety that leads us to feel like stepping away from our writing - sometimes we just need a bit of space to think and create. Stepping away from our writing is part of writing - it’s part of what enables us to come up with something worth saying. But we don’t like to accept this. I see it again and again in my clients, and I’ve felt it myself. Stepping away from our writing feels like giving up. It feels like the easy option. We even think we have evidence that stepping away doesn’t work - we say things like, ‘If I allow myself a break before lunchtime, I don’t manage to get anything else done for the whole day’, and ‘Once I stop, it’s impossible to get going again’. Now, we all have our idiosyncrasies around writing, and a routine that works for one of us might not work for anyone else - but finding a routine that works is not the full story here. If you really believe that taking a break from writing is a recipe for not getting anything else done, I want to invite you to reflect on why that is, and what you say to yourself about taking breaks. Do you, for example, tell yourself that you’re a quitter or a failure when you step away from your desk? If so, it’s unsurprising that stepping away from your writing is a problem for you - but it’s not the break from writing that’s the problem, it’s the negative self-talk. If you’re telling yourself that you’ve ruined the whole day, what’s the point in trying to get back to it? Instead, I want you to consider the new and strange idea that writing doesn’t have to be tortuous, and that what feels good - like taking a break - can sometimes coincide with what you need to do to in order to get your work done. Contrary to what many of us like to believe, it’s simply not true that the more difficult the process feels, the more intellectually respectable it is.
Another issue here, I think, is this: when we’re sitting at a computer putting words on the page, we are being productive in a quantifiable way. We can measure our productivity in terms of how many words we write, and we can compare our productivity on different days by looking at how many words we wrote on each. But when we’re sitting there staring into space, even if it helps us get clear in our heads about something we’re trying to write, there’s no easy way to measure it. I mean, how do we reliably distinguish between an hour spent pottering around clearing out a drawer in an intellectual, reflective, pondering way, and clearing out a drawer in a time-wasting, procrastinating way? How can we judge in advance whether or not our pottering is going to give rise to an important insight? We can’t. And since we can’t measure or predict it, we think it doesn’t count. Except … it does. And the fact that it does points to the fact that the way we often think about how we spend our time, and how we should spend our time, is all wrong. In a 2016 New York Times article, Adam Grant, Professor of Psychology at Wharton, describes how he set out to procrastinate more, after learning of evidence that procrastinating over a task leads us to approach it more creatively, and to come up with a better result. He distinguishes between this useful sort of procrastinating - in which we take breaks from a task after making a start on it, and allow our minds to wander and work on it in the background - and a less useful sort of procrastination, in which we simply leave it until the last minute to make any sort of start on a task and then have to complete it in a rush. The article got me thinking how we almost never make this distinction: for most of us, procrastination is procrastination, regardless of whether whatever it is we’re meant to be working on is ticking away in the background of our cognitive task manager. But what would life be like if we did make this distinction? What would writing look like if we trusted ourselves (and our wandering minds) to get on with useful things even while we were choosing the nicest font for our latest article or browsing knitting patterns on Pinterest? What if we even scheduled mind-wandering time? If we did this, and if Adam Grant is right, we could look forward to being more interesting and creative researchers. Again - what causes most problems for us is not the procrastination itself, but the way we talk to ourselves about it. If we respond to our own procrastination by telling ourselves that we’re useless, lazy time-wasters and terrible researchers, then of course that’s not going to do positive things for our writing. If we do that, then our main problem is negative self-talk.
So, what can we do? If I could leave you with one piece of advice, it would be this: rethink what the activity of writing looks like. Think of your past experiences with writing with an open, non-judgmental mind. How did you spend your writing time? At what points did you feel distracted, and at what points did you feel able to sit down and churn out the words? Don’t think of your distracted moments (or your distracted days, or weeks, or months) as time when you weren’t getting on with writing. Accept that getting words down on a page or on a screen is only a tiny part of writing. Writing - interesting, creative, original writing - involves a whole lot of pottering, a truckload of faffing, and a supersized helping of the right sort of procrastination. That means that, if you open your Word document, write half a sentence, and then find yourself cleaning your keyboard, you’re writing. If you read through your notes and then end up cleaning the fluff from behind your radiator, you’re writing. If you hide from your thesis for weeks on end except for moments when you wake in the early hours and have panicky thoughts about it, you’re still writing. Very often, that’s just how it works. This is what the process of writing looks like. But check in with yourself regularly. If you’re feeling a resistance to adding words to your draft, ask yourself why. Are you anxious or fearful about something? If so, remember the lessons from the previous episode on self-sabotage. Or is it more that you’re not sure what you want to say or how to say it or whether you’d rather be saying something completely different? In that case, time and space to think in an open-ended way might be what’s needed - and it counts as working. You’re not a lazy, time-wasting failure. You’re just like every other writer.
Now before I go, do you have an idea for an episode of The Academic Imperfectionist? What challenges are you facing that you could do with some help with? Please drop me a line and let me know. You can use the contact form on my website, or tweet your idea with the hashtag #AcademicImperfectionist
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you like to use, and please consider leaving a review on Apple Podcasts and sharing the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful - you can take a screenshot on your phone and send it over to them. For more information and updates about me, the podcast, and my coaching, or just to get in touch and say hi, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com - or follow me on Twitter @AcademicImp or on Facebook @AcademicImperfectionist. Thank you for listening, and see you next time!
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