Q. Do you have any helpful techniques for getting stuff out the door?
- Write an hour every day! Even if you delete it the next day. This includes creating and recreating outlines. It keeps the material fresh even as you suffer through midterms.
- Freedom.exe
- Just hunker down when the deadline approaches.
- Sheer terror at an approaching deadline.
- deadlines and priorities
- Can you put some on the site, please? :-)
- Graduate students. The ones who know how to write and do what I tell them to do are very helpful.
- Deadlines - I usually target special issues of journals or conferences. That forces me to get things done by a given date.
- Yah, remembering that I do not yet officially have a permanent job yet have a large mortgage and am the sole support for my family. That does it.
- Quit whining and get to work.
- No.
- Masturbate while watching Maury.
- Write stuff down, and then send it out.
- Deadlines help. too.
- Canceling a few classes and limiting course preps to, say, 30 seconds or so works great. But the consequences don't exactly feel worth it.
- Find good people and collaborate with them.
- Looming yearly progress reports.
- Yes. Read "Stupid Motivational Tricks."
- Retreat!
- Work instead of fussing about office politics.
- Getting stuff out the door is the hard part for me. Research and drafting are no problem, but then I start to obsess about whether it is good enough or not. I fear rejection. Which (and I know this makes me insufferable) I actually haven't faced yet. Every article I've sent off has been accepted.
- I wish.
- Just bust it out
- I work with superb PhD students, and collaborate with teams of researchers, and submit 8-12 refereed articles a year.
- Post-tenure review. Keeps the flame under the butt. Not good for things like having kids, though. Tends to be harder on the women.
- Don't be a perfectionist. Realize nobody will really read it anyway.
- Fear.
- I don't surf the web at work.
- Work with other people, to make delays immediately embarrassing to me.
- collaboration with others
- I refuse to put up with patently unprofessional, immature behavior by students, even if my department chair doesn't always back me up. But then, I have tenure.
- Nope. I'd like to have some, though.
- Get a research collaborator. It's hard to be entirely self-motivating, but when someone else is relying on you, it's a huge kick in the pants to get stuff done, already (for both of you).
- Reflecting on my state of (mostly) unemployment.
- close my office door, hack others computers for info
- Thinking about how disappointing it would be for someone else to publish similar results before I do helps a lot. Also, because collaboration is standard for most projects in my field, I know that others' careers may equally (sometimes moreso) depend on my work.
- I see homeless people on my way to work. That's all the motivation that I need.
- Terror that I'm stagnating.
- Freezing solid for months, then working frantically, to a deadline, while the rest of my life goes to hell in a handbasket. This does not work well. My resistance to regular research hours is phenomenal, though I know that's what would work for me. When things reach crisis point I will go and work in a café, which seems to help, if only because no one can find me there.
Before I say this, I'll make it clear:
ReplyDelete1. I'm not necessarily proud of my behavior, and
2. This only works if you have a dialup connection
I made myself write an article, for about one month, while downloading *ahem* movies from the internet. I found out that such a reward has a way of focusing my mind.
I would just rest on my laurels, but my good stuff is classified so I have to write something that I can publish.
ReplyDeleteBeaker, I used to do the same when I was sneaking interwebs off a neighbor (took forEVER).
ReplyDeleteA friend of mine used to push himself by rewarding every "well-written" paragraph. One full paragraph, 5 minutes of Arrested Development. The problem was that 5 minutes often turned into an hour, so he was often asking for extensions and getting excluded out of collaborations.
I use the ol' "write every day even if you toss it" method. And I've got hundreds of lists littering my house. All I need now are cats to complete the picture...