Ninja Writing in the Forest (App)

Writing is hard. It just feels so much harder than all the other things one could be doing. And yet as academics, it's the most important thing we do. In our lab, we are big believers in writing every day, but we all go through periods where that feels easy, and other periods where it feels insurmountably difficult.

One of the tricks several of us use to deal with internal writing resistance is the Forest app. It uses a pomodoro-type system, meaning that you decide to write for a fixed period of time (maybe just 10 minutes), and you set the timer, and do it. You could use any kind of timer to do this, and there are even some free pomodoro-timer apps that do it too; we just enjoy the Forest app because it grows a little tree while you work. Using a timer helps us work through our internal resistance by committing to little increments of just 5 or 10 minutes of writing at a time. (Actually, Barbara likes to do 5 minutes at a time, and one drawback of the Forest app is that the smallest increment it will allow is 10.) 

We call this NINJA WRITING because it is stealthy and sneaky in overcoming the writing resistance. This month, with the laziness of late summer draining our productivity away, several of us have rediscovered the forest app and are enjoying growing our little forests again.