A good thing to know is approximately how much you can write in an hour or two. If you have no idea, then you have no conception of how long it would take you to write a 20-page article, for example. How many 1-3 hour sessions do you need to produce the 6,000 words necessary?
(For me, for example, it takes me 12 to 15 sessions (at 400 to 500 words each) to reach this goal. It might take me another 4-8 days to revise the article into its penultimate form.)
If you don't know this about yourself, you will delay work, either because you think it will take you four times more than it really will, or because you think you can do it right before the deadline in a few days. Knowing how long tasks will take is a major defense against procrastination.
3 comments:
This is something that it's very difficult to figure out because my speed, for example, varies greatly from piece to piece. The first page always takes an entire day. The last page takes even longer. Some parts, however, get written at a pace of three pages per hour.
Try to keep track of your progress a few articles, then you'll know at least the range of time it takes you. It is normal to take longer for the introduction.
I am actually doing this this week. On Monday and Tuesday I wrote 1500 words in 90 minutes, first thing in the morning.
On Wednesday, I wrote 400 words in 20 minutes first thing in the morning. Then, I wrote 600 words from 6:40pm to 8pm. Lesson so far, I am much more efficient in the morning!
This is also a fairly easy kind of writing - I am summarizing human rights reports as the data for a book. Theory and argument would take longer.
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