Rationing the midnight oil
If your situation’s anything like mine, you’ve got what seems like an endless stack of to-dos. With only so many hours in the day, for me at least the only clear place to steal more time is in the evenings before bed. Thus is the way of the Order of the Night Owl—a society of […]
On blocks and blogs.
Writer’s block: the struggle is real. You might have it and blame it on something else, like depression, ADD, or any of the “ordinary” mental-health stuff that all of us seem to have at least one of—or something even more ordinary, like garden-variety distractibility or busyness. But writer’s block isn’t just for aspiring novelists or […]
“Free time,” research backlog, and debt.
Giant to-do lists can be so panic-inducing that they benefit from being tackled via analogy, with the cognitive distance that analogy provides. One analogy that works for a lot of people is to think of your research backlog as financial debt. The two are similarly anxiety-inducing, but for some reason it’s easier to see the […]
Tuning out distractions
Here’s something we’ve all experienced: you’re reading and something happens to distract you. So you go back and re-read the sentence, get distracted again, and again, and then you have to back up and re-read the whole paragraph, and then the page, and then finally you’re just sitting there staring at it, thinking “wait, what’s […]
The “dear diary” folks might be on to something.
Since we started the Studio Scholars program in September 2018, we’ve had the immense joy of being able to see—and help—a bunch of people making progress on their research. One of the more striking “there are two kinds of people” observations we’ve had is this: some people habitually record what they’ve done during a work […]
Giving your scholarship some love every day
We frame the consistency aspect of the February writing challenge as giving your scholarship some love every day or touching your scholarship every day. But why bother? Why does it matter whether you think of your scholarship every day? We know that saying “give your scholarship some love every day” sounds both lalala and woo-woo. […]
Getting to your most important writing.
This year in general, our theme is giving your scholarship some love. But today, we want to take a moment to reflect on how being gentle with yourself—giving yourself some love—makes you a better scholar, helps you to get to your scholarship better, as well as some ways you could try to cultivate that gentleness. We’re writing […]
Let’s talk about facing That One Thing.
You know, that one thing you’ve been avoiding opening, that makes you feel kind of sick to think about? It’s probably a document on your computer. Or maybe an email. Or a folder including several of either. For some people, “that one thing” is basically the gateway to their whole scholarly project: you need to […]
More on Plan B.
Most “30-day challenges,” whether they’re for writing, diet, meditation, or whatever, focus on consistency. Your goal is to do the same thing every day for the duration or, put another way, to stick with Plan A. Theoretically, the 30 days gives you time to see the benefits of a certain behavior and build a habit […]
