Читать книгу How to Write Brilliant Psychology Essays - Paul Dickerson - Страница 25

This is usually not just an excuse, as there are many, really valid and important demands on our time. It is sometimes helpful to write down rather than simply mentally recycle all of the different pulls on your time that you experience. In some cases, being honest about the amount of time required for your academic work and the other things you have and/or want to do, and acknowledging how flexible or inflexible they are and when they occur, can be helpful. Taking time to do this can help you schedule your work to some extent.

A second factor to bear in mind is that it is easy for us to tell ourselves – and others – that we need a clear morning, or afternoon, or a whole day to be able to devote ourselves to our academic work, or, more specifically, to writing our essay. This can lead to us under-valuing those smaller pockets of time that we could potentially use, perhaps especially in the earlier phases of writing. Anthony Trollope wrote 250 words every 15 minutes as he sat at his desk from 5:30 to 8:30 each morning – before going to his day job with the postal service. We might not be as systematic and disciplined as Trollope, but we could be missing lots of opportunities for good writing if we are thinking that we need an uninterrupted stretch of a day or a half-day in order to achieve anything.

Sometimes we may actually need to attend to other matters and then come back to our writing. This could be better than being in a state of tense inactivity where we feel unable to get anything done because of the competing demands we face. If there is something else that is time sensitive to do, then perhaps doing that is the right thing, although often we do not need to see our day, or part-day, in either/or terms. We might do that and this as well.