Yesterday marked the close of #AcWriMo 2014, that month-long festival of academic writing. At my last two check-in points, I was making slow but steady progress towards at least one of my goals. So how’d I end up doing this year?
- Revise my failed NSF proposal from 2012: MET (with some caveats). I’m calling this one “met w/ caveats” because I did ultimately move forward on this goal, just not in the way I originally intended. See, I thought I’d spend my time this month on the actual narrative of the grant, rewriting the prose and using that to figure out what experiments and analyses and such to run in December. However, when I started writing, I realized right away not just where the holes were, but exactly how I had to fill them. The act of writing made the experiments and analyses immediately clear, so I decided to switch gears and concentrate on that aspect of the proposal instead. I’m so glad I did—I made such great headway, and honestly this was something that had me stuck for MONTHS. (As a bonus, I did make some headway rewriting the supporting docs.)
- Draft my next conference paper: FAILED. Despite my best intentions, I never quite got around to this one. I kind of knew at the outset that this goal would be a stretch, but I thought I’d at least spend a couple of sessions on it. Nope. However, in its place I did spend a lot of time coding up a pretty significant simulation, which is something I did not envision happening at the outset. And I’m thinking about my data in more productive ways. So I failed, but I failed for a damn good reason.
On balance, then, it was an excellent month, and I’m very pleased with my progress, despite the fact that my goals morphed and my month was every bit as crazy as November typically is.
So what lessons did I learn from AcWriMo this year?
- Slow and steady wins the race. I reminded myself that I don’t need big blocks of time to accomplish things in my research—almost every day, I worked for an hour or less on my research, and I made tremendous progress (I have almost an entire simulation coded up, start to finish, in under a month!).
- Productivity begets productivity. Working on research one day makes me want to work on it the next day, and the next day, and so on. And making progress one day makes me really want to get back to my work the next day.
- Stuck? Just write. I am kicking myself that I didn’t try this sooner. I am still amazed by how quickly the pieces fell into place once I started writing.
- Go with the flow. My goals changed pretty much right off the bat this month, and instead of trying to force myself to stick with the original plan, I recognized the shift as a big opportunity, jumped on it, and never looked back.
- Rituals are important. I usually don’t need to trick myself into working, but I appreciated some of the little rituals I developed around my writing/research time: brewing a cup of tea, starting up some instrumental music or ambient noise, setting my notebook and favorite pen at the ready nearby. (And of course, afterwards, checking the #AcWriMo tweets!) It was fun to have the physical reminders of “now it’s time to hunker down and work”.
I plan to continue with my own version of AcWriMo in December. Despite not teaching this month, I still have a lot on my plate, and I think the structure of something AcWriMo-like will help me continue to make progress even as I’m pulled in many different directions. My plan is to carve out 1-2 hours per day (depending on the day) just for research, and specifically for the grant proposal, setting daily/weekly goals much like I did in November. By the end of the month, I’d like to have my most of the major analyses done for the grant proposal, and most of the major edits to the narrative and supporting docs done. I think I can make pretty good headway on this.
To all those who participated, and particularly those who shared their ups and downs on Twitter, thank you. (And special thanks to Charlotte Frost for wrangling this together this year and every year!) It was, and always is, much more fun working in (virtual) community than working alone, and the community aspect of AcWriMo is one of the aspects I enjoy most about the experience. I’m already looking forward to participating in AcWriMo 2015!
This is what a computer scientist looks like 