PhD Tools: Freewriting and Journalling to Think Through your Work

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How freewriting and daily journaling helped me think through research problems during my PhD.
Author

Alex Strick van Linschoten

Published

September 13, 2016

Part 15 of 20 PhD Tools
All parts
  1. PhD Tools: Beeminder Aug 2016
  2. PhD Tools: Visualise Structure and Kanban Flow with Trello Aug 2016
  3. PhD Tools: Think better with Tinderbox Aug 2016
  4. PhD Tools: DevonThink for File Storage and Discovery Aug 2016
  5. PhD Tools: Save your web links with Pinboard Aug 2016
  6. PhD Tools: Scrivener for Writing Long Things Aug 2016
  7. PhD Tools: Bookends for Managing References Aug 2016
  8. PhD Tools: Mellel for Layout and Final Presentation Sep 2016
  9. PhD Tools: RescueTime for Time Tracking Sep 2016
  10. PhD Tools: Turn Off the Internet with Freedom Sep 2016
  11. PhD Tools: Backup Systems for Staving off Sadness Sep 2016
  12. PhD Tools: Omnifocus for Managing your Non-PhD Life Sep 2016
  13. PhD Tools: The Secret to Finishing Your PhD Sep 2016
  14. PhD Tools: Vitamin-R and the Pomodoro Technique for Getting Going Sep 2016
  15. PhD Tools: Freewriting and Journalling to Think Through your Work Sep 2016
  16. PhD Tools: Pen and Paper Sep 2016
  17. PhD Tools: 'Always return to your primary sources' Sep 2016
  18. PhD Tools: Goodreads for Cross-Pollination Sep 2016
  19. PhD Tools: Sleep and Movement to Nourish the Body Sep 2016
  20. PhD Tools: Tea Sep 2016

[This is part of a series on the tools I used to write my PhD. Check out the other parts here.]

A few years back, I read a book with the (intentionally) provocative title, Write Your Dissertation in 15 Minutes A Day. I was travelling back to Afghanistan from a short stay in Europe, and I was sat in Istanbul airport, waiting for my connecting flight. I remember the moment quite clearly, because a long wait time plus a delay didn’t phase me. I was sucked into the book and the idea that the author presented. (There’s also another good one along a similar theme: How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing by Paul Silvia.

Basically, she explained how writing for a very short amount of time each day, taking the time to think through whatever was going on with your research, but on paper instead of your head – was a trick that would really help your work. It’s not a new idea, this technique of freewriting. When you take this time, these 15 or 20 minutes, you aren’t writing a section of your thesis itself, you’re writing almost a note to yourself about how it is going, what you think are important things you  need to consider, whether this is a useful line of inquiry and so on.

Since that day, I’ve incorporated this kind of writing much more often as a general practice. There’s a great service run by all-round make-useful-things-for-everyone-to-benefit-from person Buster Benson called 750Words. It sends you a friendly reminder every day to write 750 words on its site. There’s all sorts of gamification and encouragement of writing streaks etc, and while writing the middle sections of my PhD, I would check in to 750words.com every day at the start of the morning to journal out my current research position and think through whatever problems I was about to face in my work that coming day.

It may feel a bit redundant at times, but I’ve found the practice really useful. Give it a try. You might find that it works for you.