Each of you comes from a different discipline. Your exams look different, your dissertations look different. The process by which you are given approval to begin the dissertation process differs from department to department as well.  You work in labs, you do field work, transcribe interviews, work in archives, code data. Some of you work with collaborators.

One thing you have in common, a feature of academic writing, is that the writing itself is part of a project, and that project is part of a process of problem posing, research, and problem solving.

Often, when we talk about writing, we think of a process that begins when we begin to draft, say a chapter, and includes generating text, creating outlines, getting feedback, preparing drafts for readers at different stages, rewriting, revising, editing.

To create the kind of work people are creating in this room requires working on multiple projects that run concurrently. Research is conducted while methods sections are written. Chapters are revised while other chapters are outlined.

These projects also require a great deal of patience. Advisors or collaborators must return work. Labs must re-open. Data is incomplete.

So, when I say “Writing” today I mean “everything that goes into the process of producing the work that you will submit, finally, as finished,” your dissertation committee, the first and second readers of your exams, the editors of a journal.

Our workshop is divided into two parts.

Our goal for today is to start a process– which I hope you will continue throughout the week– that will lead you to choose priority project goals and identify the actions it will take to complete them.

Next week, you’ll return with those goals in hand a preliminary sketch of those actions. At our next workshop, we’ll focus on how, week by week, you can use your time effectively to reach your project goals. We’ll discuss how to identify time for you work, how to use writing sessions effectively, and how to use resources to stay on track, especially when you encounter obstacles.

Put what we produce in a folder. These are project documents. Consider this a part of your “Project File”.  Something I hope you will begin to do– if this is not already a part of your writing life– is regularly reflect on your process and your project. You step outside of the flow of things and  ask yourself– where did I start? Where am I going?  How is it going? You will find it helpful to develop a position with respect to your work as a writer for your profession in the same way you see yourself with respect to the craft of you discipline. By the time you are preparing exams, writing articles, or producing dissertation proposals and chapters, you have developed the habit of critical reflection, not just on key ideas in your work and discipline, but on how it is to do your work– you reflect on past experiments, field work, the deployment of methods, your choice of representative texts, your habits and procedures. You think about your craft.

I would like you to develop similar position on your work as a writer. As you become more experience, my guess is that for many of you, what you actually learn to do to do your work becomes less complex than you expect it will be now. I also think that if you develop the habit of monitoring your work and reflecting on how your work is going, you will find always be able to “stay found”– or re-orient yourself when you feel a bit lost.

So, please don’t treat what you do here today as scraps of paper on which you jotted notes quickly– although they may look that way. What I’m asking of you is not to be neat, but to treat this material as both data, points of reference, and part of a process of thinking through the problem at hand: how do I accomplish my writing goals this semester.

In this workshop, you’ll be introduced to strategies that can help you figure out what a writing situation calls for, how to use what you already know, and how to go about learning what you need to know. We’ll talk about how to identify your strengths and weaknesses, how to find the help you need, and the kinds of questions to ask your professors about writing for their classes.

I’d like to ask you to keep all of the writing we’ll do today together and to keep it “open”. That is, revisit it during the week. Add to it. Make margin notes. See if you can find a bit of time before you come back next week to revisit what you’ve written.  So we’re going to do five minutes of writing to get you started on three topics

We know that your big project will not be finished in a week or a month.

We will be working with “quarterly planning”. Online if you look up “the twelve week year” you’ll find a whole productivity system built out the observation that long term projects are accomplished a step at a time, and that it is more effective to plan each stage on the way to completing the project.

We’ll discuss how choosing a twelve week project period influences how you might use time, plan, monitor your work and set goals in our next workshop.

Our today is to help you identify the smaller projects that you must manage and complete so that you can move along the path of your project to your goal, and the actions you’ll take each week to complete those projects.

When you go home with the material you have in mind, your homework is to return to this material, and arrive at next week’s workshop with a list project list which may have many projects on it.

Of those projects, I want to decide on three to five priorities for the next twelve weeks, and among those three to five, the number one priority.

To get started, I’d like to do a simple exercise so that you can put the goals you have for the week in the context of the product your have in mind.

Getting Started: I used to…but now I…

Take out a sheet of paper. This will give me a chance to introduce you to a very powerful practice, one that’s very helpful and goes by many names, but which I’ll refer to as “free writing”. You’ll find guidelines for it in this document at this link. More resources for it here, including  articles on its value can be found here. bit.ly/ResourcesforWriting

You’ll write for ten minutes without stopping exploring the following: how your thinking about the project process and your ideas have evolved over time. Use the generative sentence “I use to think… but now I think…” to get you started. To get started, you may write versions of the sentence and when you get stuck, you might return to it and rewrite it to clarify or extend your thinking. Most importantly, keep your hand moving. This is “stream of consciousness” writing, so the goal is to produce text, not pretty sentences or thinking for an audience. Reflect, ask questions aloud, talk to yourself, but be concrete and particular as you explore your thinking.

Setting out the Path

Take a sheet of paper, turn it the long way– landscape, as per a printer- and fold it into thirds so that you have two rows.

Top Row: My Destination

Label the third row “My Destination”. Take a few minutes and describe the product as you envision it currently. Be as concrete and detailed as you can be, even if it means using your imagination to describe what you haven’t quite pinned down yet. You might consider the following:

• Describe the problem your work addresses or will solve
• Describe the form it will take, such as the number of chapters or sections
• Describe the method involved and the data you’ll be using
• Describe your stance and point of view
• Describe who you intend its readership to be

Row Two: Where I Am Today

Now, label the first column “Where I Am Today”.

In this column, describe where you are currently with respect to that final product. You might consider some of the following:

• What have I written? Don’t be shy about including notes, journals, drafts, seminar papers, proposals for conferences, conference presentations– use any documents you think will contribute to the work you intend to do.
• What have I read? What data have I collected? Academic writing, especially dissertation writing, but also journal articles and other professional writing, situates itself in a body of current work. What is the status of your research in the respect?
• Where am I in the process? Consider the process with respect to you discipline and your department’s requirements, of course, but also with respect to the work as it is your own. That is, this is your project, you are the creator of something new: what is your current thinking? What problems have you solved or identified?
• What is the current status of your thinking? Where do you currently stand on the issues or problems you’ve identified?

We know that your big project will not be finished in a week or a month.

We will be working with “quarterly planning”. Online if you look up “the twelve week year” you’ll find a whole productivity system built out the observation that long term projects are accomplished a step at a time, and that it is more effective to plan each stage on the way to completing the project.

We’ll discuss how choosing a twelve week project period influences how you might use time, plan, monitor your work and set goals in our next workshop.

Our today is to help you identify the smaller projects that you must manage and complete so that you can move along the path of your project to your goal, and the actions you’ll take each week to complete those projects.

When you go home with the material you have in mind, your homework is to return to this material, and arrive at next week’s workshop with a list project list which may have many projects on it.

Of those projects, I want to decide on three to five priorities for the next twelve weeks, and among those three to five, the number one priority.

There are processes involved and part of what you’ll do is learn to manage them– you need to write routinely, you need to learn to generate text freely. As the artist and author Jessica Able observes, processes happen again and again over time.

Projects, however, have a beginning, middle and end.

You need to have a clear picture of your destination and, most days, she points out, forget about it: you need to concentrate on the tasks, each day, each week, that moves you closer to your destination.

So while you intend to produce a dissertation, over the next twelve weeks, you’ll be completing a draft of chapter one.

Our goals for today– and for you to think about over the next week are

• to create as a clear picture of the destination, the final product, as you see it today
• to define the many smaller projects that feed the overarching project (the production of the product)
• to decide among those projects which are your priorities for the next twelve weeks
• to break those smaller projects down into next actions you can choose among each week so you can monitor your progress and cross of the list

To help us identify the smaller projects that will be your priority for the next twelve weeks, I want you to generate a list of questions to answer about the project.

To Do:

Ask yourself,

• What questions do I need to answer to complete the project?

Every discipline has its own punch list– a list of things that are routine concerns, as well as novel concerns that pertain to your project. Here’s a list of topics that might help you generate questions.

• Rhetoric of the document you need to create– what do you know about he genre, structure, and style,
• Your research
• Your research process
• Your research topic
• The problem you are trying to frame
• The arguments you are trying to make
• The institutional process
• Your committee
• The development of your ideas
• Your own writing and research process
• A specific product your working on– a chapter, article or section

What questions do I need to answer about the process itself, with respect to the institution, the department, or, if it’s pertinent to the project, publication?

What questions do I need to answer about the form of the final product? Consider this from two angles– your goals for it as your creation, and genre or departmental requirements (for example, the form of other dissertations or the style used in publication)?

What are the next steps in my research? This may include reading, data collection, data coding and collation and so on.

What questions are open in your thinking? What problems do you have to solve? While you may be certain of the main claim of your piece, you may also have questions and “open loops” that must be addressed. What are they?

Rely on the standard, Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How to help you.

For example, for a project I’m working on

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?
• What are some models I can use to determine page length?
• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?

If you get stuck, ask questions of your questions. What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD? becomes

• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

The idea of a Project List comes from David Allen’s book “Getting Things Done”. The Project List is part of a two-step process. Once you compile a Project List, you use it to make a “Next Action” list for each Project on your Project List.

Allen defines “projects” in the following way:

Projects are any and all those things that need to get done within the next few weeks or months that require more than one action step to complete.                   

Allen writes that “A PROJECT LIST is a master inventory of your Projects” while a “next action,” is “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.”

Allen believes that a project list and its partner in the process, “Next Action” lists are more helpful, rather than a “to do” list or a list of next actions you generate as the situation calls for it.

One of the most common questions we get, as people begin to implement the GTD method, is “Why do I need to have a Projects list?” In other words, people want to know if they can get away with simply creating and looking at lists of Next Actions.

A current, clear, and complete projects list is the key tool for managing the horizon of our commitments that, in my experience, has the greatest improvement opportunity for anyone leading a life of any significant complexity.

Projects range all over the map, and most people have between thirty and a hundred such commitments, at any point in time. Each one of these agreements with ourselves needs some sort of “stake in the ground” anchored in such a way that we revisit it frequently enough to trust nothing is being missed or falling through the cracks about it, and that forward motion is appropriately happening. If you only tracked Next Actions, then once you finished the action, without a trusted placeholder for the final outcome, you would have to keep track of that desired result in your head.
   

                                   David Allen, Getting Things Done

Categorize you Questions to Answer

First, take a look at your Questions to Answer. See if they suggest any categories to you. Some may related to your process: you must read a certain number of articles a week. Others may have a concrete outcome: an introduction must be written.

See how those questions gather together into groups. Name the groups. Define them. I take this list.

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?
• What are some models I can use to determine page length?
• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?
• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

And make this new list.

Research genre features of general nonfiction

• What is the typical length of a book of this kind?
• How much “expert” knowledge needs to be included in a general nonfiction book?

• What are some models I can use to determine page length?

Establish the place of writing in ADHD research

• Have any studies been done in the last three years that look directly at writing difficulties and ADHD?
• Can I apply research that refers to executive function directly to writing obviously and clearly using Zimmerman as a bridge

Pin down the current (2020) agreement about ADHD in neuro/cog sci research

• What are the current standard diagnostic criteria for ADHD?
• Who determines the standard criteria?
• Are their any generally accepted disputes regarding the standard criteria?

Create a Project List

Take out a sheet of paper and write, Project List Draft at the top of it.

Review your questions and categories.

Make a list of projects that you need to complete to complete the product you need to produce.  

Here is a project list for a project I am working on:

• Complete visual outline
• Organize draft text according to outline
• Annotate and categorize November/December draft
• Identify features of current general nonfiction in my area

• Establish the place of writing in ADHD research

Next Action lists work in tandem with your Project List.

I create a separate Next Action list for each project. I put each project on a separate sheet of paper. I review them, typically weekly, and use to set my goals for each work session, or day, or  week.  Over time, I review and revise. Projects are completed, and new projects and next actions emerge.

Merlin Mann, whose blog 52 Folders is popular with free lancers contrasts Next Actions lists with To Do Lists.

Next action lists only hold your next actions.

For example, a classic old-school to-do might be something like “Plan Tom’s Surprise Going-Away Party,” “Clean out the Garage,” or “Get the Car Fixed.” But, as Allen cannily notes, these are each really small projects since they require more than one activity in order to be considered complete.

Learning to honor that distinction between a task and its parent project may, in fact, be the most important step you can take toward improving the quality and “do-ability” of the work on your list.

By always breaking projects of any size into their true constituent next actions–and it’s definitely okay to have several at once per project–we’re making it fast and easy to always know what should be happening next.

Next action lists enable you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ensuring that you always know what to do next, instead of half-assing your way through a badly-defined pile of fuzzy nouns. This physicality and functional piece-work act in concert to make the planning and execution of your tasks as stress-free and un-intimidating as possible.

                               Merlin Mann

MerlinMann also has some interesting thoughts about how to articulate your actions.

Articulate your to-dos in terms of physical activity–even when they require only modest amounts of actual exertion. To do so ensures that you’ve thought through your task to a point where you can envision how it will need to be undertaken and what it will actually feel like once you’re doing it.  This means you can easily visualize the activity, the kinds of tools you’ll need, and perhaps even the setting where the work should take place.

Get the verbs right. Notice how we’re breaking these Big Nouns into little verbs?That’s deliberate.With that original to-do for your presentation, you might theoretically just keep “preparing” your presentation until some arbitrary alarm bell goes off in your head, saying “Yeah, okay, that looks like a fully-prepared presentation, so you can stop.” But a better-defined chunk of activity suggests a task with clear edges; it has a beginning and an end.

Create A Draft Next Action List for Each Project

Select a project from your list and write its name at the top of a sheet of paper.

On this list, generate a list of next actions.

• Try phrasing your task in a form like:“verb the noun with the object.”
• Not  “Year-end report,” but  “Download Q3 spreadsheet from work server.”
• Not “Meet with Anil,” you’d probably want to “Email Anil on Monday to schedule monthly disco funk party.”

Choose another project and start another list on another page.

Move back and forth between your lists and your questions to answer.

Project and Next Action Lists

Continue the process we began here today.

See if you can come to next weeks workshops with a Project List that contains five projects.

List the projects according to priority. If you had time for only one goal, which project would you devote your time to finish. Remember, a project can involve a process goal. That is, you may have “Complete Revision for Chapter One,” but you may also have “Devote two hours per week to prepare outline for chapter two”

Create a Next Action list for each Project. Give each project its own page. Sort the pages in order of your priorities. If your time is limited, complete the Next Action list for your priority goal, but label the pages for each of the other goals.

Where Would You Like to Be in 12 Weeks?

Write a brief statement that summarizes what you hope you will have accomplished in twelve weeks.

You might describe what you have created (a certain number of pages or an outline or whatever is appropriate to you project or discipline).

You might describe what you hope to have done (read a certain thing, taken notes, generated text each day).

You might describe what you hope to have explored or a problem you hope to have solved. (An idea you’ve been trying to hammer out, for example, or bug you need to debug.)

I want you to put your project in the context of your life and career goals. I want you to think about your time here and Binghamton and where you hope this time will lead you.  I’d like you to turn off your screen and answer these questions. Think about where you are now, at this moment in your project or degree.   

Here are the questions:

• What do I want to learn?
• What do I want to experience?
• What do I want to contribute?

Before you write, a note. Peter Elbow describes three kinds of audiences for our writing, authority readers, peer readers, and ally readers. My guess is that many of you when you write with authority readers in mind. We are trained to– we learn to write under performance conditions. Many of you may not have cultivated supportive peer readers. We’ll discuss them next week. As you answer these questions, you might write for yourself. But some people find it helpful to imagine  imagine  “ally readers”.

So– think about your allies– write this to them. And don’t be modest– write from your hopes and aspirations.

Now, I’d like to share an exercise I learned from a wonderful teacher, comic artist, graphic novelist and writer, Jessica Abel, who does work of the kind we’re doing here with artists. I’ve been taking a course with her this summer– some of what I’m going to share today I learned from her.

This week, go home and think about your answers to the questions above. Think about where you’d like to be five years after you complete your degree. Write a bio for yourself. Jessica Abel says, “Don’t be shy.”  She thinks that in an exercise like this, which is meant to help you clarify your current priorities by putting them in the context of a meaningful long term goal, we should reach for what we hope.

So, suppose you were asked to submit a bio for a website or publication. Write a seventy five to hundred and fifty word bio for yourself, five years after the completion of your degree. Keep it simple: Start with your name, Robert Danberg is …..

One metaphor for this process might be a river with tributaries. Another might be working iron with hammer and anvil.

If you are conducting field work or experiments in a lab, to give two examples, you may in fact see writing as a tributary. The river is the problem posing and research. The writing may be the sparks thrown off by the process of working your problem, shaping it, as the hammer strikes the anvil.

But you are hear because you need to compose a dissertation, journal article, or, perhaps, take an example. So I’m going to repurpose the river metaphor.

The rivers is the process of composing that document. The river flows through the landscape over time. Sometimes, it shrinks to a trickle, clogged with high grass. You can step across it on dry rock. Other times, if you didn’t now it was as river, and you didn’t look to your left and right, you might call it a lake.

That river travels through the landscape over time and space. It is fed by tributaries. It flows on to its end, which, in this case, we’ll call the completed product: the dissertation, journal article, or exam.

Those tributaries may include

setting your problem

conducting researching

coding data

re-designing experiments

getting approval for work with subjects

project design

research

reflection on the process

project design and redesign

work with your advisors and committee

generative writing

outlining and drafting

review and reflection

editing and proofreading

The river flows on until it reaches the sea. You will not arrive in a day. It takes time. You must manage the journey.