Sunday, July 15, 2018

Writing Workshop: The Term Plan

Writing productively is about actions that you aren't doing but could easily do: Making a schedule, setting clear goals, keeping track of your work, rewarding yourself, and building good habits. -Paul J. Silvia


[Note: Most of the material from these writing workshop blog posts, plus a lot more never-blogged material, is now available in my book, The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia.]

Once you have an IDP, the second step is to make a term plan. A ‘term’ can be a semester, a quarter, a summer, or whatever unit of time makes sense for you and your university’s calendar. To make your term plan, take this term’s goals (as listed on your IDP) and break them down into weekly goals.

Let’s take a moment to consider the relation between quantity and quality. Each of us wants our work to be good, and we want to produce as much work as possible. Is there a tradeoff between those two objectives?

I think the answer is sometimes yes, sometimes no, depending on what you mean by ‘quality.’ Sometimes there is a better way to do things and a worse way to do them, and you can reliably produce higher-quality work by taking more time and effort. In those cases there is a tradeoff, because you could produce a higher quantity of work by cutting corners. 

I don’t think cutting corners pays off in the long term. You want to produce work that you believe in, and that other labs can replicate. Unreliable findings will be an embarrassment and a liability down the road, even if you can produce them quickly now. So take the time to do things right: Spend the extra time and money to collect the sample size you need in order to be confident about your results; double- and triple-check the analyses; do that extra follow-up experiment. 

Obviously these things require judgment. Some researchers have cowboy tendencies: They tend to do a slapdash job and send the work out quickly. They need to learn to take their time and be more certain of their results before they go public. Other researchers have perfectionist tendencies: They tend to obsess about every detail and never feel that a project is ready to be published. They need to learn to let go and live with some uncertainty. Try to become aware of what your own tendencies are, and look for balance in your work. 

Sometimes, however, there is no tradeoff between quality and quantity: This is true of thinking, and by extension of writing, because writing is a form of thinking. You probably don’t want to do work that is just OK; you want to do work that is creative, surprising, insightful and theoretically important. When you define quality this way, there is no longer a tradeoff between quantity and quality. When it comes to ideas, quantity breeds quality. 

Dean Simonton studies intelligence, creativity, talent and genius. He has spent decades trying to predict which scientists are likely to produce great work, and when in their careers they are most likely to produce it. One of the most robust findings in his work is the ‘equal-odds rule’ (or ‘equal-odds principle’), described by cognitive psychologist Michael Martinez as follows:

Among the more surprising of Simonton's findings is that high levels of professional recognition, or eminence, are strongly a function of overall productivity. This contrasts with a more intuitive belief that highly acclaimed scholars receive recognition for every work that they produce. That is not the overall pattern. Instead, Simonton found that the probability of producing a highly recognized work product, such as an influential research article, is roughly the same for all contributors, whether eminent or not. This is what Simonton called the equal-odds principle. What distinguishes highly eminent scholars is the overall volume of works they produce. By sheer dint of productivity, those who reach professional eminence stack the odds in their favor of producing another masterpiece. (Martinez, 2010, p. 224)

In other words, if the person in the office across the hall from you has twice as many funded grants as you do, it’s probably because they submitted twice as many grant proposals. If they have produced three times as many brilliant ideas as you have, they’ve also produced three times as many mediocre and bad ideas. The only way to produce more great work is to produce more work overall. 

The Rejection Collection


If your successes are simply a fixed proportion of your attempts, then it’s logical to make as many attempts as possible. But our fear of rejection tends to slow us down. So as part of the writing workshop, we maintain a shared rejection collection. It’s an online spreadsheet where we each list our rejections. When, all together, we reach a multiple of 100 rejections, we have a party. Feel free to use this sample rejection collection as a template for your own. (My friend Sarah, a law professor and volunteer editor of this book, says that law articles regularly rack up 100 rejections in a single submission cycle, so they might have parties at multiples of 1,000. Makes sense to me.)

The rejection collection is a very useful thing. Without it, we all tend to advertise our successes and keep our failures to ourselves. But because we each experience many more failures than successes (or we should, if we are submitting things regularly), this inevitably gives each of us the impression that we experience mostly failures (which is true) while everyone else is experiencing only success (which is false).

It’s like the way other people’s lives look perfect on social media. If you imagine that your friends’ heavily curated social media feeds are valid representations of their lives, everyone else's life will seem to be better than yours. Now apply this insight to writing: We all receive many more rejections than we do acceptances. And because none of us has any control over how others (including reviewers) respond to our work, all we can do is submit as many high-quality things as possible and hope for the best. The purpose of our rejection collection is for us to support each other in submitting, and be open about the fact that every rejection is an achievement, because it means you completed a project and submitted it. By collecting and celebrating rejections, we keep the focus on the part of the process we can control.

An added bonus of the rejection collection has been that because it incentivizes applying broadly, it has lead to some unexpected successes. More than once this year, someone in our writing workshop applied for a job or a grant fully expecting to be rejected, and then had their application accepted. They applied thinking, This will be one more rejection for the collection. They didn't expect to succeed, but figured they'd get the whole group one step closer to a party. But of course, because  the ratio of successes to attempts is basically fixed (this is Simonton's equal-odds rule), more attempts automatically means more successes. 

Principles of the Term Plan


Let’s assume that you want to submit as many manuscripts and grant proposals as possible (while maintaining high standards of quality, of course). How do you do that? The answer is that you must use your precious and limited work time in a way that lines up with your priorities. For that, you need a term plan. 

It may seem like common sense to plan how you will use your time and what you will work on. But many smart and highly educated people don’t do a good job of managing their time, and their productivity and quality of life suffer. If you don’t make conscious decisions about how to spend your time, you may end up a slave to outside deadlines, such as those set by funding agencies. 

And you wouldn’t be alone. A few years ago, the geosciences arm of the National Science Foundation was struggling to cope with all the grant proposals it had to process. Submissions always spiked before a deadline, so the folks at NSF decided to try eliminating deadlines and letting people submit proposals whenever they wanted. The result? Submissions dropped by 59%! Without an external deadline to structure their work, about half the would-be applicants just never turned in a grant proposal at all. So if you don’t learn to manage your time well, you’ll always have plenty of company. But why do that to yourself? Better to be like that the minority of scientists who managed to submit grants anyway. 

The most important things to put on your term plan are your writing projects. These include papers, conference presentations and posters where you are an author, or grant/fellowship proposals that will fund you and your work. Second most important are the research activities that lead to writing: Getting IRB (institutional review board) approval, reviewing literature, coding experiments, recruiting participants, collecting and analyzing data, etc.

If your IDP includes goals other than research and writing, you can put those on your term plan too. For example, perhaps you plan to advance to candidacy in your PhD program this term. When you put that goal on your term plan, you will have to think about the steps needed to achieve it. For example, you may need to ask faculty members to serve on your advancement committee; you will probably need to schedule a time and place for the meeting; you will need to make sure you have met all of your department’s requirements for advancement; you will probably have to write a document of some kind that will be sent to your committee members at least two weeks before the meeting (so that they have time to read it), and so on. 

If you are applying for jobs, there’s plenty of work to plan: Asking for letters of recommendation, revising and getting feedback on your application materials, keeping track of all the deadlines, and so on. You can use your term plan to list all of these things and think about when (which week of the term) you want to do them.

Specific and measurable goals are better than vague ones.


Planning works best when there is a feedback loop: You make a plan, try to carry it out, reflect on what did and didn’t get done, and use this information when you make your next plan. This feedback process can’t happen if you can’t tell whether you achieved your goals or not. 

That’s why it’s important to set specific, measurable goals. For example, perhaps one of the goals on your IDP for this term is to learn about biological motion perception. That's not very measurable, because it's hard to know how much learning is enough to say that you reached your goal. On the term plan, you break these vague, long-term goals down into specific, measurable weekly goals. 

(Week 1) Make a reading list of papers and books on biological motion perception; schedule meeting with adviser to go over the list together and make sure nothing important is missing.

(Weeks 2-10) Review ten papers or book chapters per week; write a few sentences of notes about each one, just to summarize the main idea; add the notes along with the papers and chapters to Zotero library.

Realistic goals are better than very ambitious ones.


Most of us greatly overestimate the amount of work we will be able to do in a given time period. A good rule of thumb is to take your first estimate of how long a task will take you, and multiply it by a factor of 2.5. Over time, as you see what you actually do get done in a day, or a week, or a summer, you can adjust your plans accordingly. 

I’m very prone to wishful thinking. Let me see . . . I muse, If I write ten pages a day for three months, that’s 900 pages . . . It’s pleasant to imagine myself being so productive, but if I kid myself that this fantasy is my actual plan, I’m just setting myself up to fall short and feel discouraged. Fantasy plans are also not very useful for plotting project timelines with collaborators, or for deciding how far ahead of a grant deadline you should start drafting a proposal.

This brings us to another timeless truth: The only thing you can control is how you spend your time. You can’t really control how much gets done, or how good the ideas are, and you certainly can’t control how other people respond to your work. All you have is a certain amount of time to use as you choose. The term plan helps you make sure to use that time in a way that lines up with the goals on your IDP.

In our writing workshop, we make our term plans together during a meeting, just like our IDPs. We work mostly in silence, speaking only when necessary and about the work at hand. For example, one student might say, “I want to apply for an NIH-NRSA predoctoral fellowship, but I don’t know what’s involved in that application, and I don’t know how many weeks I should plan to spend on it.” Another student might answer, “I applied for one of those last year; I’ll send you my materials.” This is a benefit of having students from different years of the PhD program together in the same workshop.

I also have a couple of colleagues that I meet with at the beginning of every term, and we make our term plans together. We gather in my office and sit there for an hour or so, and at the end of it, we each have a term plan-- or at least a draft of one. (And term plans are never really more than drafts, because they can always be changed at any time.) For some reason, making plans in the presence of a buddy or two seems to be the secret to actually getting them made. So sit down with your writing buddy (the person you are reading this book with) and make your term plans.

How to make a term plan in 50 minutes


Step 1. Copy this term’s goals from your IDP over to your term plan (5 minutes).


Check out these examples of term plans, and choose a template that you like. There’s also a printable blank term plan if you prefer to work with pen and paper. Now copy this term’s goals from your IDP over to your term plan. List the projects in order of priority. The highest priority is whatever has the earliest submission deadline, or is closest to publication. Your goal is to submit as many things as possible, and almost-completed things are easier to complete and submit than far-from-completed things, so the former take priority.

Step 2. Break down each term goal into weekly goals (40 minutes).


This step involves a lot of guessing, but it gets easier after you’ve done this for a few terms. For each term goal, think about the steps that it will require, and how you want to distribute those across the weeks of this term. For example, say that your IDP has the goal “Submit Paper X.” For your term plan, you figure out the steps that will get you from where you are now to the completion of that goal, and you decide which steps you will take each week. 

The first question is where you are with Paper X already. Let’s say you’ve already completed data collection and analysis, and you wrote a draft of the introduction and method sections before you started data collection. So the work you have left is to draft the results and discussion, and then revise the whole thing. Now you estimate how long that will take.

My rule of thumb is that I plan to write about ten pages or 5,000 words per week. (Outlining, drafting, revising and making figures all count as writing.) I also know that I will have to write at least three complete drafts of every paper and grant proposal. The truth is that I usually write more than three drafts, but I have to pick a number for planning. So I usually plan to write 10 pages (or 5,000 words) per week, per draft. 

In the past there have been times (e.g., when I was teaching a new undergraduate lecture course and had to prepare all the lectures from scratch, or when my children were young and required constant attention) when five pages of writing a week was more realistic goal. And occasionally (e.g., on the last day before a grant proposal deadline), I’ve written as many as ten pages in a single day-- but I can’t maintain that pace for very long. 

Please set whatever goals seem reasonable to you, and then adjust them up or down based on how much writing you actually get done. After a few weeks, if you’re usually meeting or exceeding your goal, you can update your plan to be a little more ambitious. If you are usually falling short of your goal, you can update your plan to be more modest. 

Just about everyone starts out with goals that are too ambitious; please don’t beat yourself up when you get nowhere near as much done as your plan said. (This is another way that having a weekly meeting with writing buddies is helpful: You soon see that no one gets as much done as they planned.) Just revise your goals downward for the next plan, and realize that your old ideas about how much time things should take were based on no data at all. They were fantasies-- the equivalent of imagining yourself as a superhero, like the illustration at the top of this post. Once you start planning your work, you will be able to collect real data about how long things actually take.

Step 3. Copy your weekly goals onto the shared writing log (5 minutes).


A key part of our workshop is our shared daily writing log. After we make our term plans, we copy the writing tasks for at least the first few weeks over to the writing log, putting them in the column that says Writing goals for this week (from term plan). Some people like to fill in their weekly writing goals for the whole ten weeks right at the beginning (even though the goals will probably have to be updated over the course of the term); others just fill in a few weeks at a time. In a later post, I’ll talk about filling in the other columns on the log. For now, just fill in the columns for weekly writing goals, for at least the first week or two.


Step 4. Discuss your term plan with someone.


When your plan is drafted, discuss it with your writing buddy. Does it seem reasonable? Have you forgotten anything? If you are a graduate student or a postdoc, it’s a very good idea to schedule an appointment with your advisor to go over your term plan. Make sure that you and your advisor are in agreement about the work you are going to do this term. Many bad experiences between junior scientists and their mentors stem from confusion about what each person expects from the other. 

Your advisor may also have some insight into whether your plan is realistic. For example, if you have given yourself two weeks to collect data and your advisor knows that it will take at least two months, you can update your plan accordingly. And besides, walking into your advisor’s office with a draft of your term plan makes you seem organized and independent, and those are very good things.

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