Finding Time to Write
My publications here on Medium are split between the After Academia publication I manage and the UX research world in which I am employed. I also continue to publish in high impact peer-reviewed journals, as I’ve done with my latest research article on probabilistic reasoning.
And now my book, a Field Guide for Thriving in Graduate Studies, is available for purchase!
I write a lot.
Though it is not my day job, I write a lot. It’s become a running joke among my friends who question when I find the time to do all the things that I do. To be fair, it’s a valid question! I try to publish something new about once a month across different mediums often for very different audiences.
That said, it might surprise you to find that I do not have a dedicated writing schedule. Nor do I sit down at my computer with the hopes of knocking out a specific number of words within an allotted time. My non-work publications (like this one) are secondary to my job priorities and come well after my parenting responsibilities.
Writing is the activity I fit in between everything else that is my life.
If you want to be a writer, there’s a ton of great advice for how to do it. Tons of articles suggest creating dedicated writing blocks on your schedule every week. Set aside hours in the early morning or late at night when the rest of the world won’t bother you. Do all the things to ensure that, when you sit down at your computer or notebook, you’ll be greeted with a fresh blank document daring you to write something novel and interesting.
I am typically fond of schedules and structure, ensuring work is planned out in efficient manners. During graduate studies, every single morning was dedicated to writing something — anything — related to my research. In that space, publishing was a requirement of my job so I had to do it.
But now that writing in these various outlets is not something I’m required to do to advance my career, I find myself struggling to fit the task into traditional scheduling and workflows. More so, I tend to get in my own way when it comes to writing things down.
I hate writing. But I love the process of writing.
Despite how much I enjoy publishing and sharing my work with the world, I thoroughly hate the physical act of writing. Looking at a blank document makes all thought disappear from my head. I cannot recall what I wanted to write about. I forget the paths the ideas took as they meandered across my mind earlier in the week. I simply cannot recall what I want to say.
This is frustrating because following ideas is actually my favorite part of writing. I love the thought experiments and making connections among different concepts. I am energized when unique perspectives and points of view come together in my mind to form something new. It tugs at my scientist heart to search for and document additional information; to learn more.
With the shift away from career-required writing toward writing as a personal outlet, I needed a new method for documenting the ideas I came up with at random points throughout the day.
This is when I adopted voice-to-text technology as a writing tool. I had used voice-to-text regularly for sending a quick email or replying to a message when my hands were full, but I never tried dictating a full document.
I must admit, dictation didn’t work well the first few times I tried but that’s mostly because of user error. I talked way too fast which resulted in every other word being recorded. Mumbling is also a problem at times, and voice-to-text does much better with strong enunciation of words.
After a bit of practice, voice-to-text got easier to use and my writing style started to mimic my spoken cadence more closely than ever.
This shift from physically typing my words to simply dictating my thoughts helped me overcome two very large issues that I experience with writing as a personal goal:
1. Dictating means I’m not staring at a blank white screen.
I’ve stared down a blank document more times than I care to admit. But the nice thing about switching to dictating is that it isn’t writing in my mind. Yes I know that “writing” includes the end-to-end process from ideation to polishing, but for some reason, dictation carries a different mental weight than physically writing.
I realize that this is not the most rational reasoning, but the mental separation between these two helps me overcome the writer’s block that a blank document brings out.
2. I can dictate a lot of material very quickly without any means to easily edit myself.
Dictating helped me overcome a second issue that is key to me personally: I tend to over edit my work. Writing in academic-ese for so many years makes me hyper critical of my written words. I am overly particular about the language I use. I am verbose and somewhat repetitive.
My over-editing also removes a lot of the emotion and natural language that you’d hear when actually talking with me. This is because I want to be as exact as possible to reduce any potential misunderstandings. I strive to ensure the reader walks away knowing the core idea I wanted to convey. (Can you tell these paragraphs were written on a computer instead of dictated?)
Whether cooking dinner or walking on a trail while my son is at one of his various clubs, I can use the voice-to-text functionality on my phone to quickly capture my thoughts and document the different directions they go.
No writer’s block. No editing. And I can write whenever the mood strikes as long as I have my phone handy.
Capturing and organizing my work using OneNote.
After a few days, I got used to how dictation worked on my phone and began generating a great amount of content in way less time than I anticipated. I could go on a half hour walk and develop between three and five pages of material before getting back to my starting point.
I wrote pages of material almost every day in the small spaces between work, home, and the rest of my life.
Switching to dictation not only increased my writing speed but also helped me identify different writing paths that I had not previously considered. This led to new ideas and new directions to think about, and well. As you can imagine, the amount of material I started generating quickly became overwhelming. I needed an easy way to organize all my thoughts.
I’ve gone through several different tools designed to help with this problem and ultimately settled on OneNote (example below). The mobile version works well with my phone’s voice-to-text, and I can access the files on my desktop when I’m ready to seriously edit.
How thoughts became a book.
Using dictation with my OneNote notebook is how I built the content that ultimately became my Field Guide for Thriving in Graduate Studies book.
Every Friday, I host coffee chats with graduate students and academics. In these chats, we discuss everything from managing work-life balance during graduate studies to landing a job after leaving academia. At the end of these conversations, I would take 2–3 minutes to jot down (dictate) the topics we discussed, strategies to address problems, and anything else that came up.
At first, I placed these conversations in a single large notebook that didn’t have any sort of organization or structure to it. You can think of this as my junk drawer of ideas.
Each individual topic discussed during coffee chats was documented on its own page with its own title in this junk drawer notebook. After building up between 15 and 20 of these pages, I go back through to see if any larger themes start bubbling to the surface. After a few rounds of this, I realized I had enough to weave together a larger story.
This is where the flexibility of OneNote really came in handy. I created a new notebook with an early working title of First Year Graduate Student Resources. Every page relating to this topic was pulled from my junk notebook into this new notebook and then organized into larger themes (e.g., Mental Health, Academic Portfolios).
In just a few months, using a few minutes here and there throughout the week, I had dictated enough content to write an entire book.
Final Thoughts
If you’re like me and have a few things in the way of a structured writing regiment, considering trying something a little different. Voice-to-text technology continues to improve and be a viable tool that writers everywhere can use through their smart phone; no external or costly transcription service required. You can write on-the-go, a few minutes at a time, and anywhere you take your smart phone.
