Building an academic writing habit, even if you don’t have data yet

Common writing advice states that we should write often, but that’s easier said than done. According to behaviour scientist B.J. Fogg, the key to success is motivation, ability, and a good prompt. How can you leverage this for your own academic writing habit? Three strategies and an exercise to get started.

“Writing every day, even for a short time, improves our thinking and our productivity as scientists. It provides time and space for reflection, allowing new ideas to mature, and maintains perspective on challenging work.” 

- Todd C. Peterson, Sofie R. Kleppner, and Crystal M. Botham

A huge part of writing is thinking. Thinking about experiments, thinking about findings, thinking about how to explain something. The more thinking you do now, the less work you have to do later.

Sounds like a win-win, but many researchers don’t write on a regular basis. Busy schedules or a lack of data get in the way of building a regular writing habit, resulting in huge binge-writing sessions to get the work done.

What’s getting in the way of a habit that seems so clearly beneficial? Let’s look at the drivers of human behaviour. According to B.J. Fogg, behaviour scientist at Stanford University, behaviour is made up of three pillars:

• Motivation: our willingness to carry out the behaviour;
• Ability: how easy it is to do the behaviour; and
• Prompting: having an automatic reminder of doing the behaviour.

According to this model, building and maintaining a productive writing habit should get a lot easier if we address each of these pillars. Let’s start with motivation.

How to build a successful writing habit

1. Grow your motivation

Motivation is key to carrying out a behaviour, but it’s also a tricky thing. While you may be motivated to have a habit – who doesn’t want to be more productive? – you may not be motivated to actually write. So be honest. How motivated are you to pick up a pen and start writing?

If your motivation is low because you find writing hard, I have good news: it gets better. The more days you practice, the easier it becomes. What also helps is to start small and build up gradually. Two minutes of writing is a lot easier than a full hour, and planning to write every day for a month is less daunting than planning to write every day for the rest of your career.

What if you love writing, but can’t seem to find time? This is what Fogg calls ‘competing motivators.’ Your motivation to write is competing with motivation for other tasks, such as marking student assignments or carrying out fieldwork. In this case, it can help to intensify the motivation to write. Here’s two strategies:

1. Actively engage with the reasons that writing is good for you. Specifically, write down how will regular writing benefit you. This works, because you are not just passively reading the information, but actively making sense of it for yourself.
   
2. Make use of the sunk cost fallacy. For example, write a short letter, ideally by hand, in which you commit to your new writing habit (you can find an example at the bottom of this post). Because you now invested time and effort in the habit, you are more likely to keep it up.

2. Make it easy

It’s harder to get started if you still need to find a pen or a notebook when you sit down to write. Remove these barriers a few days ahead of time by making a plan: where and when do you want to write? Here’s a few questions you could consider:

• Will you write daily, or specific days of the week?
• Do you prefer to write in the early morning, or at night? Do you prefer a set time (e.g. 9 am), or do you like more flexibility?
• Do you want to write digitally or on paper? Are you concerned about privacy? For example, do you need software that has a password?
• Do you prefer a beautiful notebook, or do you write better on the back of discarded print paper?

If you have no clue what your preferences are, don’t worry. You can follow the example I’ve outlined at the bottom of this post and evaluate and adjust as you go.

It also helps to know what you want to write about. You could start with freewriting. It’s super easy, and a great skill to have in your writing repertoire. All you need to do is keep writing and not stop. It doesn’t matter what you write about, anything goes. Once you feel comfortable with your writing habit, you can focus on more specific topics. For example:

• A recent paper you read. On a scale of 1-10, how relevant is it to your own research? Why did you give it this rating?
• A field campaign or experiment you’re working on. What designs did you consider, and why did you choose this one?
• The ethical considerations in your research area. What are they? If there are none, why not?

I don’t have any data yet. What can I write?

You can always work on specific skills (such as freewriting), or try one of these:

• Defining: write down 2 jargon words that you’ve come across and describe what they mean in your own words.
• Explaining: write about a scientific concept you find intriguing and provide an example or analogy to illustrate it.
• Reviewing: write about a paper you read. What do you think about the title? Does it reflect what the paper is about? And what about the abstract?
• Describing: Describe a common process to someone who has never done this before (e.g. making coffee) and explain why each step is important

You can repeat and vary with these topics, or work on other skills such as summarising papers, describing results, arguing why your research area is important and should receive more funding, or copy-editing. AI is also a great tool. For example, you can ask ChatGPT to generate topics that don’t require any data.

3. Create a prompt

The final pillar of Fogg’s behaviour model is the prompt. It tells you to “do it now!” A good prompt may be a reminder on your phone (or even better, on your computer), blocking time in your calendar, or my personal favourite: hanging up a colourful Post-it note.

An alternative is to stack habits, a strategy outlined by James Clear in the popular book Atomic Habits. In this technique, you attach a new habit to a pre-existing one. For example, you write immediately after getting coffee in the morning, or directly after coming back from a lunch walk.

A note for brains that are hard to nudge. Instead of using the prompt as an indicator to write, use it as a prompt for a smaller action: opening up your writing software or picking up a pen. Then use that action as a prompt to write the first word, and so on.

Making your new habit stick

Building a new habit is one thing, but it’s great if it also sticks. Check in with yourself regularly to see if the routine you designed is working. How is your motivation, is writing still easy (or maybe too easy?), and is the prompt working well? Find out what works well and what can be improved. You could make this reflection a part of your writing routine by dedicating a specific day of the week or month to it.

A note for perfectionists

Don’t get lost in finding the perfect notebook, the perfect ritual, or the perfect topic to write about. It’s much more important to just start – you can optimise your habit as you go. What’s more, don’t expect yourself to write anything profound. This habit is not for writing beautifully, but to create space and time to think.