Productivity is a concept that people experience in distinct ways. Some people find it energising to think of ways to improve their ability to complete beneficial or mandatory activities; others find the framing oppressive and indicative of a problematic worldview. To start with, the notion of “product” is baked right into the word. If you feel responsible for producing a certain amount of work – with echoes of an assembly line – those metrics can feel detached from more meaningful academic flourishing.
Much of the thinking around productivity puts all the responsibility on the individual, leaving little room for critical reflection on the conditions under which you are expected to be productive. When the individual is seen as the sole author of their own productivity woes, they are likely to experience a sense of personal inadequacy, regardless of the structural barriers that they face. Even if you are looking for improvements in your productivity, the available advice can often sound facile: a series of cheery bromides that ignore the complicated material conditions under which graduate students work.
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A quick aside: I use the term “graduate student”, as is customary in North America, but graduate students in other parts of the world are often referred to as “doctoral researchers” or are included in the broader category of “early career researcher”.
Productivity discourses also often struggle to understand creativity and the complex process of generating new ideas. When productivity gets aligned too narrowly with punitive notions of hardship and self-abnegation, it misses something crucial about our need for leisure and play. Everyone needs to recognise the creative underpinnings of academic writing and to understand how creative thinking flourishes. If you think of all “non-work” as bad, you may be missing the opportunity to think while walking or reading fiction or gardening or gaming or baking or listening to podcasts. A significant amount of your time will be spent not writing, but you can choose non-writing activities that are rewarding and generative for you.
Even though a great deal of productivity advice seems tone-deaf and detached from reality, the fact is that most graduate writers struggle to write enough. These writing struggles are emphatically not a superficial issue; you are not forgoing writing to have more time for leisure or more balance in your work-life arrangements. If anything, inconsistent writing habits are making it harder for you to achieve some sort of measured allocation of your limited time. The promise of writing productivity is that you might ultimately spend less time writing and still get more done.
I often ask groups of graduate writers whether their problem is insufficient time or the challenge of using that time well. For a surprising number, the answer emphatically connects to time use rather than time availability. Even those whose time is significantly constrained – by paid work, by care-giving, by lab pressures, by health issues – often say they also struggle to use the time they have well. All of which is to say, although productivity advice can be misguided, disregarding the potential benefits of productivity approaches would be a missed opportunity.
The key is to move away from an abstract notion of productivity and towards a productive writing process. Simply being productive can mean meeting external demands in a way that is detrimental to your ability to live a full life; however, having a productive process is something that naturally benefits any writer. The move from “productive” to “productive process” requires awareness of the unique circumstances of graduate writers: the practical constraints, the intellectual pressures and the emotional challenges.
Even if you can find advice that speaks to the practical, intellectual and emotional realities of graduate writing, you still need to find an approach that works for your writing temperament. And that will be challenging if you are unaware of the contours of your capacity to thrive as a writer. Most people seem to think that they should somehow be different writers from the ones that they are; this assumption makes good advice doubly hard to come by.
Here are questions you might want to ask yourself: What does being productive mean to you? What does a good day of writing look like for you? What sorts of things stop you from realising those goals? What role do guilt and anxiety play in your ability to write? What sort of writing support community do you want? What specific pressure points tend to push you away from writing and towards distractions? What might you do differently to change the patterns of your writing practice? These types of questions are how you start to understand what productivity advice might support you as the writer you are and help you to become the writer you want to be.
You will need to decide if my advice connects to the practical realities, intellectual complexities and emotional demands that you experience as a graduate writer. You will also need to calibrate this advice to meet the imperatives of your own writing temperament. These productivity strategies are among ones that, in my experience, graduate writers find helpful; establishing which of them might prove helpful to you is ultimately your call.
Looking productive
Any discussion of productivity must consider the aesthetics of productivity. Could you be working in ways that you think look like what hard work should look like – starting early, avoiding breaks, denying yourself things – rather than in ways that you have found effective? A good approach to productivity must pass a real test: does it make you more productive, in the sense of making you feel in charge and stimulated by your work? Don’t think of a midday walk as a guilty pleasure; think of it as crucial to the overall health of your embodied mind. Rather than finding it random that you have great ideas in the shower, build in ways to capture those ideas. If you are helped by napping, then a nap is probably a good idea. Mindfulness or meditation breaks may do far more for you than would just sticking with your task.
Your goal is positive writing experiences, not the appearance of hard work. The greatest hazard of trying to appear productive is the push towards long days; those sorts of writing endurance tests can be inhospitable to writing because writing is often too draining to be an all-day thing. Recognising and respecting your limits might make you look less productive while nonetheless allowing you to build a sustainable and satisfying writing routine.
Knowing yourself
Learning more about yourself as a writer can be seen as a part of a broader project of learning how you want to organise your working life. Gretchen Rubin’s book Better Than Before offers a great list of questions to help understand your own orientation towards work. Her central insight is that most of us lack a substantial understanding of what we need to manage tasks effectively; as a result, we try to live and work in ways that don’t suit us, in ways that we’ve learned from people who are nothing like us. Among her list of questions is one that I’ve found transformative: am I a finisher or an opener? Recognising myself as someone who consistently loves to finish things means that I’m able to be kinder to myself when I’m paralysed by starting something new (what if I won’t be able to finish this?) or when my energy flags in the dreary middle of a project (what if I never finish this?).
This notion is more than just a helpful reminder to keep going; it’s also a reminder to build more mini-finishes into my schedule. Since I can predict that I’ll be energised by closing in on a goal, I need to create tasks that I can finish – throughout the life cycle of a project – to give me that boost. The finisher-opener distinction might not be relevant to you, but I recommend using her whole series of questions – for example, Do you prefer a marathon or a sprint? Do you like to start early or stay up late? – to help sort out what you need to know about yourself and how you like to work.
This is an edited extract from Thriving as a Graduate Writer: Principles, Strategies, and Habits for Effective Academic Writing, by Rachael Cayley (University of Michigan Press, 2023).
Rachael Cayley is an associate professor in the teaching stream in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication at the University of Toronto.
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