Welcome to the Get Your Writing Done podcast. I'm Trevor Thraw, author of the 12-week year for writers. If you enjoy today's podcast, please submit a review wherever you get those podcasts. For monthly updates on the pod and other writing resources, you can subscribe to my newsletter at GetYourWritingDone.com.
Do you ever hear yourself saying these sorts of things? I just don't have enough time to write. I don't have enough energy to keep going and finish this thing. I'm so demoralized at how slow this is all going. I've been working on this writing project for so long, I hate everything about it.
Now most of the productivity world, including the writing productivity world, tends to focus on getting things done faster and faster, maximizing how many words you write per hour or how many projects you finish per year.
But guess what? There are lots of times. In fact, maybe most of your time is gonna be spent working on projects where there is a hard limit on how fast you can go or should go. Whether it's a research heavy writing project, fiction or nonfiction, these things can't be written quickly, nor should they. When you have a demanding day job, a family, all the commitments of a busy, full life, most of us have to squeeze writing into corners of the week. And when you have to do that, you can't expect things to go quickly.
If you find yourself in one of these situations, You need to become a master of making slow progress. Slow isn't as fun as fast, but it's vastly superior to the alternative, which is zero progress. Slow progress, though, has a different rhythm from fast or rapid progress. Making slow but steady progress requires a mindset shift and some new strategies.
In this episode, I'll share how you can generate what I call "lava momentum" and become a master of slow progress.
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All right, you know, I think we've all been there. And really, what I think about it, my entire writing career has always featured at least a good chunk of slow progress.
What do I mean exactly by slow progress. Though, slow progress for me is progress that occurs slowly relative to how fast you would prefer to work on a given project under ideal conditions. So just to give you some examples from my own life, I sometimes would submit a journal article and then have to wait six or more months to get a response and then finish revisions that would then only take me, maybe a few days or a couple of weeks, slow progress.
There have been many, many times when I would love to spend hours and hours a day writing, but could only get a few hours a week, or in more recent times, maybe an hour or two per week to write. Very slow progress. I have mostly written things that are very research heavy that take a lot of reading, a lot of note-taking and analysis to write each and every section.
I was an academic, but think academic or scientist, historians, people writing research heavy nonfiction stuff, journalists who have to check all the sites and sources for things, these things just slow you down.
I've told this story before, but I'm gonna mention it again. One of my favorite examples of slow progress, I was watching a book chat show, and the author being interviewed was Joseph Ellis, famous historian who was a professor at Mount Holyoke College and the conversation was focused on the Pulitzer Prize winning book he had just written Founding Brothers about founding fathers to folks and during the conversation the interviewer asked him how long the book had taken him to write and and Ellis just casually replied you know about ten years not like it was a big deal or an issue or like it had taken unusually long time.
Ten years! Can you imagine any writing project that took you 10 years to finish. But you know, when you're asking yourself how the heck did something take, like somebody who writes pull-out surprise winning stuff, you somehow in your mind think this guy is probably a very good, fast progress kind of a person. Why the heck would it take him 10 years? But you know, I can tell you as a former professor myself, I know exactly why it took him 10 years.
First of all, and it's not because he typed slow. I tell you that. No, I mean, historical work like that takes years in the best case. There are documents to unearth all over the country, libraries, archives, lots of things that are not in great shape. There are lots of historical riddles and mysteries that are unresolved and take a lot of adjudicating of different documents and lots of readings to figure out what you think you need to say about things. And then of course don't forget that he's a professor which means not, I know a lot of you think professors don't work at all, but he teaches at a college where teaching is actually a real focus so he taught a lot of courses during that time which took up a lot of time. He had students to advise. He had conferences to go to, media interviews to do, right? All good things but all of them getting in the way of making fast progress. Ten years. Not that hard to understand when you think about it.
Now, your slow progress situation is probably different from mine or Joe Ellis's but all slow progress situations have some things in common. So my list is this.
First, they force us to wait longer between writing sessions than we would like. You'd like to write every day maybe, but when you're in a slow progress situation, it's every few days, it's twice a week, whatever it might be.
The second is that slow progress situations disrupt our preferred rhythm of writing. And here it's not necessarily just about how often, but maybe also how long you can sit down at one given time, what time of day you might be able to do this, right? So our rhythms, and I've talked about writer rhythms in another pod, but I'm a big believer that rhythms are things you need to obey in order to be your most productive. And being in a slow progress situation typically means you're not able to follow your rhythms perfectly.
Slow progress situations also make it difficult to plan and predict our writing. Because again, sort of endemic to the notion of a slow progress situation or scenario, is that there are obstacles and slowdowns because of conditions that are outside your control. So, you know, when you're maybe waiting for a collaborator to finish and get back so you can do your part, or, you know, your life is so busy that you can't get to your writing all the time when you want to, or things come up on a regular basis. suddenly you can't go to that writing session, right? So it becomes more difficult to figure out when things are going to get done and all that sort of stuff.
And the end result of all of this is, of course, that we produce finished work much more slowly than we would prefer. So you can imagine when you put all those things down on paper, you realize slow progress situations are difficult for writers. They cause all sorts of problems for us, frustration with the lack of visible progress, a loss of motivation as things drag on and things aren't seeming to get done. It's harder to show up for your writing sessions because you so far from things getting done that it feels like it doesn't matter if you write today or not. "Ah, I'm never going to finish this. So what does it matter if I go today and try to write?"
Then there's a loss of self-confidence and a worry that you actually won't finish something because it's taking so long, you're starting to doubt that you can do it. Then on top of that comes stress about the writing and maybe anxiety about publishing.
And if you're doing this for an audience or you're doing it for a work, you worry about the performance in front of that audience. And then because of the sort of conditions of a slow progress world, you then might face more difficulty focusing when you finally can sit down for a few minutes. Your life has gotten so busy and crazy that even though you're able to sit down, finally you might wanna collapse instead of write.
And then for those of you who are working with others and facing slow progress situations, you get the additional fund of the fact that a slow progress can cause a lot of tension between co-authors, colleagues, collaborators, and so on.
So in short, facing slow progress situations is very challenging. And I know this from repeated personal experience. As an academic, putting up with delays and interruptions to the writing process is endemic to the profession. Yeah, sure, you do have more time to write than most people do, but because it's your job and you never feel like you could ever write enough to do the job you're supposed to do, relatively speaking, you're always in a slow progress situation, it seems.
Just a couple of stories about that. I should have known this from the minute I was entering the field, my dissertation, after I finished it, I sent it to a publisher, and this is back in the very dark old days when you actually mailed a copy of it physically to people. I mailed it to a university press, and they were interested in taking a look, so they had someone review it, and that reviewer said some nice things, but made some revision suggestions, and no contract, just, you know, we'd need to see some revisions before we might consider it, and it was a very good press, so I said, "Oh, sure, fine," and so I made those revisions, I sent it back, and then three months later, they said, "Oh, no, no thanks," (laughs) and then I sent it to another publishing house, and they said, "Okay, we'll review this," and they sent it to a couple of people, and those two people had differing opinions, one said, "Let's publish this right away," and the other said, "I don't like this at all," and so they said, "We pass."
Well, that was another eight months. Then I sent it to a third. You're starting to get the strength. That happened again at another place. They split reviews. And so the end result was that three big reviews and four years later, I finally wound up publishing the book with a fourth place after a story I won't go into.
But that should have been my clue that I was entering a world where slow progress was going to be the norm because I would work on the book a little bit, send it off, wait months, work on it a little bit more, send it off, wait months. I pulled all of my hair out during this process. And then the funny thing was when I left academia, I thought, well, now my cares are over. It's fast, fast progress all the time, baby.
And I got a couple of doses of that here and there, but then the book I'm working on right Now I started in January 2022. I had to put it down in February 2022 for all the busy slow progress life reasons. Didn't pick it up again till August 2023. And since then I have been purposefully making only slow progress on it because that's the world I live in now. And that's why I have some of these strategies to share with you. But it's very different from the way I honed my mindset to work on writing projects where I was able to move with greater speed than I am moving today.
And my stories are no different from so many that I've heard from people who are writing while holding down a day job or all sorts of other things. There isn't that much time for writing in a best case week. And for a lot of us, writing has to fit nooks and crannies thanks to kids, parents, or friends, whatever other commitments and obligations you have. And some weeks get crazy and there's just, There's just no writing at all, right? So that's just, again, it's something that I think all writers have to deal with.
And so let's talk about some strategies for making progress slowly. Because I think that's the reality for most of us, actually most of the time.
So the first strategy is to embrace the slow progress mental model. This is the mind shift I talked about up front. I think most of us, without realizing we're doing it, approach the writing game like we approach most other sorts of productive projects. And that is with this rapid progress model in our heads. I think it's just the dominant way we think about getting things done. So it's not like I think most of us chose it. And this model says that as long as you're organized, you make good plans, you stay on top of things, You're accountable, you fall through on a consistent basis. Our progress will be rapid and predictable. That's the promise. And if you read pretty much any projectivity guru or any of their books, any of their websites, you'll get more done before 6 AM than most people get done all day. You'll get more done-- you're all right? I mean, that's the promise, right? Just one simple hack, and you'll lose 50 pounds, right?
And that mindset is, I think, fine if you're maybe at work where everything is set up for you to do the job or do the writing, whatever it might be, and where you have the ability to organize your day to make it so. I think people have trouble even then with that mindset, because I think it sets us up to have expectations that are unrealistic for a human being to follow through on.
But the rapid progress mindset is particularly poisonous. If you live in a slow progress world, if you're in a slow progress scenario right now, if you're in that world, having a rapid progress mindset is just going to make you feel guilty and stressed out and it's going to point you towards the wrong strategies for getting your writing done.
Just to illustrate how poorly the rapid progress mental model fits, let me just quickly compare rapid progress and slow progress worlds along some important dimensions so you can get a a sense of just how poorly the two fit or how different the two are. Rapid progress. Your focus on work, your ability to focus on the work is high. If you're a full-time writer or maybe even a professor, your ability to focus on the writing is going to be pretty high if you're in that situation. In a slow progress world, your ability to focus on that is low. You've got so many other things going on that you can't focus very much on the writing relative to all the other stuff going on. What about the nature of progress?
In a rapid progress world, your progress is steady, but in a slow progress world, your progress is going to be lumpy. You're going to work sometimes, you're going to not work sometimes. You're going to make progress occasionally, and then occasionally things will just sit still for a long time. The predictability of your output in a rapid progress world is high, but it's low in a slow progress world because you don't control when life is going to get crazy. You don't always know when things are going to be able to get done. So the predictability of your output is low. Your control over the work, high in a rapid progress setting, but low in a slow progress setting. When you don't get to dictate your hours, you don't get to dictate when you write, you don't get to dictate how quiet the house is when you write. on and so forth, your control over your environment is low, and that's going to make life harder, of course.
Finally, and this is just a teaser for some of the stuff I'm going to say in a little bit, the main goal, your sort of main focus as a producer, I guess if you will, in the rapid progress world is maximum productivity. That's the focus. I'm optimizing for productivity so I can get the most tasks done, the most projects done, the most goals hit, the most words written, and so on. But in a slow progress world, that is a dream. And what we're really looking for is maximum inevitability, maximum steadiness, and I'll talk more about that in a bit.
So the first thing you need to do if you're in a slow progress world is to ditch the rapid progress mindset, mental model, and embrace the slow progress mental model. I know we've all heard this phrase so often. It's lost its meaning. But the phrase, it's the journey, not the destination, is not a terrible mantra. It's a decent place to start. Because when we're in a slow progress world, we just need to understand and accept that things are going to move slowly. The progress will be measured over time, long periods of time, as opposed to hourly or daily. we have to learn that we are ultimately not in charge of how quickly things get done. There are bigger forces at work.
And so instead of maximally ambitious writing goals, we need to dial those goals back to a place that's realistic for our situation, right? Instead of gauging your success by productivity, by how many thousands of words you wrote a day or a week or how many books you've published, you need to find measures appropriate for your pace and your place, right?
So the immediate implication, I kind of just foreshadowed that there, the second strategy that follows immediately from adopting the slow progress mental model is to right size your goals, plans, and expectations. So it just, it's just an immediate implication of well, if I'm in a slow progress world and I embrace that model of how things are gonna happen, I have to, I have to, I have to scale back, right? You can't be setting the same kinds of expansive goals in a slow progress scenario that you could in a rapid progress scenario. Your goals need to be more focused, less expansive. So when you have less time, you need to do fewer things.
That should be obvious. It's not obvious to everyone. It hasn't been obvious to me at various points, but this is the number one thing that you're gonna need to do is stop trying to do so much. If you're busy, you need to just scale those goals way back, Focus very hard. Your plans, likewise, need to be even more focused on even fewer things, and ideally just the next and most important thing. And your deadlines are going to need to lengthen to reflect your lack of time, how slow things go, and the additional uncertainty of your schedule. 'Cause remember, you don't know necessarily how fast or slow you're gonna be able to move in a slow progress world, but you know things are less certain than they would be if you were in a controlled environment.
So you need to bake in uncertainty. Well, I think this would probably take me a week under good conditions. I'm not in those conditions. Should I get myself two weeks? Or do I need to sort of say, you know, I might need to buffer longer. And you'll play with that over time and you'll learn what kind of buffer is a reasonable amount, but just know you're gonna need to buffer more there.
So more focused, less stuff, longer timelines, and your expectations, right, if you also need to be right-sized. Because performance, when you are able to control all the variables, you can hold yourself accountable for hitting a pretty high percentage of your weekly tasks, right? And, you know, in a rapid progress scenario, you might be miffed if you didn't get at least 80% of your tasks done, right? Because it's all up to you, and if you don't hit it, it's just going to be -- it's only your fault, right?
But in a slow progress world, there's going to be so much going on that not only do you need to sort of slow your role, you also just need to understand there's going to be weeks when it doesn't happen, when it's difficult to get things done, impossible to get things done, even if you create more focused and more reasonable plans. Because that's the nature of being in a slow progress situation. You can't always get it done. There are going to be weeks when you just can't get any of the things done that you you put down, even if there was a reasonable amount of them. But when that happens, you can't treat it like a huge disaster. It's called life. So just acknowledge that's life in a slow progress world, shake it off, and keep rolling.
So now, at this point, let me just be clear. I don't mean you should stop setting goals. In fact, I think that's the opposite of what you need. Because I think, in fact, one of the biggest dangers of living in a slow progress world is thinking that things are moving so slowly that it doesn't matter if you have goals or plans.
But let me say absolutely that it does. I know it can be frustrating. We do need to build our patients muscles. It can be frustrating for things to go so slow. You can get demoralized. You can start to wonder, "Oh, am I ever going to finish?" But I'll tell you this. I sat on over 50 PhD dissertation committees. These are projects that usually took at least three years, sometimes much longer, and when you have a project that goes so slow, those are sort of the definition of slow progress because almost all those people who are writing those had jobs as well as trying to write, they were trying to write a dissertation.
So these were the definition of slow progress, right? And they're working on a research-heavy project. So this is slow progress all the way. But I'll tell you this, if you don't have plans and deadlines, even if they're slow and low in that situation you won't finish and I've seen many many people not finish their dissertation and that's what happens. They slowly grind to a halt, they stop making plans, they stop having deadlines and eventually it's just easier to give up. So you don't want to stop setting goals, you just need them to be realistic.
Third strategy is to stay in touch with your writing. Even if you don't have time to to write in a given week with your schedule, maybe you're blocked from it for some weird reasons that sometimes it's the holidays, sometimes it's a surprise visitor, someone gets sick or it could be any number of things, right? But one helpful strategy is to keep in touch with your writing project on a regular basis.
So I mentioned, I recently had to let this manuscript sit for over a year and I can tell you that coming back to it from a cold start was not much fun. It took me a long time to figure out what needed to be done, what I was thinking back when I wrote myself a bunch of little notes on different things. I could hardly read them, in fact, some of them. I didn't have a well thought out plan of attack for getting it back into gear. So once I was up and moving forward again, you know, I'm still in the slow progress world with it thanks to my day job, but my weekly writing routine includes touching base with it three or four times every week, even if it's just for a little bit, even if just for five or 10 minutes.
And that frequent engagement has kept my brain alive with the project, keeps the project front of mind. It's helped me problem solve and think creatively even when I'm not actually working on it. So occasionally you'll dart off a note 'cause something will pop into your brain. But if you're not keeping in touch with it, you don't give your lizard brain the chance to do some work in the background.
And so staying in touch is gonna help you jump back and be more focused and more productive when you do finally get time to do some of the writing. So you wanna keep it warm and stay in touch with your writing.
Okay, fourth strategy is to find friends for the road. To paraphrase the old saying, "If you want to go fast, go alone. "If you want to go slow, go together." Okay, I thought that was a pretty clever paraphrase of the old if you wanna go far, go together, right? But this is different, this is go slow. I guess the different version of going far is to go slow. If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go slow, go together.
And if you've read my stuff or listened to the podcast for any length of time, you'll know how high I am on writing groups and writing buddies. When you are struggling, when the writing is hard, when you are running low on motivation, one of the best, single best things you can do is to talk about it with other writers. friendly, supportive, other writers, not critical bastards, but friendly, supportive writers, it is good for your soul. They have been right where you are. Maybe they're there right now. You can commiserate, you can tell war stories, you can support each other, you can remind each other how much you love writing, how important the project is to you, you can strategize about how to get things done.
And this can be a combination of kind of cathartic relief about your struggles, as well as practical help keeping your project momentum alive. And I had more than one weekly meeting throughout the 20 plus years I was in academia with people that I was working on different projects with. So I would have, instead of just one sort of generic writing group, I had project groups. And we met every week to keep the project moving along, just a great practical strategy, of course, for keeping groups moving. But what really struck me over time was how important those were for me from a momentum standpoint, because the stuff we worked on took so long from start to finish, typically, that if you didn't have something keeping it fun, keeping you active and energetic despite the lulls, it would have been brutal.
And you know, the thing is, is that no one person can keep at a high level of enthusiasm for two years in a row. It doesn't, you're not on every week. Some weeks you're low, some months you're low. Sometimes you have a bad fall or spring or whatever it is. But you know, the great thing about a group is that when one of you is low, others are high and can bring you back up. It's kind of a magic.
And so I know, you know, curiously, of course, a lot of writers are introverted bookish sorts of people. I am myself. But if you can find some like-minded souls, I feel really certain that that can be a huge boon to you making slow progress.
Okay. Fifth strategy is to build a weekly writing routine. Again, not too much of a surprise to hear from me, but when you are in a slow progress world, you need to make the most of the limited time you have to write.
So to do this, and I think to put in play the strategies I've just discussed, the best way is to have a powerful, sturdy, bulletproof, weekly writing routine. So the key to a successful writing routine is to find ways to make your writing life easier, more enjoyable, more productive, and more rewarding. And then you sort of bake these into a weekly system that you can carry out on a week-to-week basis.
When you're in a slow progress world, you need all the help you can just to get your writing done at all. So it really pays off a lot to spend time, ahead of time thinking about how to structure your weekly routine to counteract all the different challenges you face, right? Don't just let them hit you across the head and go, "Oh, wow, that was surprising." That'll probably never happen again. I won't plan ahead for it. Come on, you're gonna know what the struggles are. You know what your biggest challenges to your free time are, or to getting things done are.
And what we need to do is create a routine that reflects your best strategies for overcoming all those challenges that you have to getting your butt in the chair, focusing and getting the writing done. And I'm written and talked a lot about what the weekly writing routine looks like. Exactly, and I'll just say right now, I think the elements are the elements for pretty much anyone who's a productive writer, but exactly how you organize those and strategize those is an intensely personal thing. So I can't tell you what your routine specifically should look like.
But I think if you are trying to make the most of a world where you do not have very much time to write, you absolutely need a weekly routine to make the most of your limited time. And even as I just talked about with keeping touch with your writing as a critical strategy, having a weekly routine can be a big part of helping you do that, right?
Even if you have a super busy month or a busy quarter, your routine can help you point out and carve out 15 minutes here or there on a regular basis just to drop in on your project. Just to remind yourself what it looks like, what it needs doing. Even five minutes at lunch. Take five minutes at lunch every day and just read a page or two just to keep it fresh, right? But that's a routine. You want a routine because routines make things easier, right? They make things more sustainable. So even just I said, to help you carry out those routines, the strategies I've talked about, having a routine is I think the best way to do those things in a crazy busy world.
Okay, and before we sort of leave off, those are just kind of the key strategies, but before we leave off, I want to talk about the writer's mindset and put a pitch in for continue to develop our mindset that I talked about in the 12-week year for writers. Because I think writers always need to leverage a positive mindset, but never more so than when you're faced with slow progress types of challenges, which is I think such a taxing situation.
And the mindset isn't exactly an actionable strategy, so I didn't want to consider it a strategy because developing a mindset is a long-term project. So you couldn't just turn around tomorrow and do the mindset thing, I think. But on the other hand, that sort of fits with the theme of the day, doesn't it? Because slow progress, right? Building your mindset is a slow progress kind of a thing that you do over time. And in fact, I think because building a mindset takes practice, it takes repetition, It takes working through the tough times to build these mental muscles of various kinds. And so actually a slow progress world is I believe the best, unfortunately, is the best place to learn and build those muscles because you're going to need to use them.
So let me just briefly remind you of what the different elements of the mindset are and why I think they matter for you as someone who's in a slow progress world.
So the first is commitment, right? You need a commitment mindset. And you absolutely, when things take as long as they do during slow progress, you need to commit yourself to seeing your writing through, or you will not finish. I have seen this so many times. When things get hard, only things that you feel committed to are gonna happen. So if you don't feel that commitment, I would suggest taking it right off the board. So if you're going to finish something, commit to it.
Now, the kissing cousin of commitment is accountability, the second piece of the writer's mindset. You're the one responsible for keeping your commitments. So having a method for keeping yourself accountable on a regular basis to keep yourself on track towards meeting your commitments is huge.
The third piece is grit. As we always used to say in grad school, It's not the smartest people who get a PhD. It's the grittiest people. And when work moves slowly, grit is probably your number one friend. You need to be able to sit down, despite other things going on, despite all the crazy, you need to be able to sit down, focus, turn off the social media, turn off your phone, shut off the rest of the world, and get the writing done. That takes grit. Grit is something you earn, you build through practice. So that's the only way you can do it. So practice, you may find it hard at first, but being deliberate about building your grit, trying to maybe lengthen your writing sessions by a minute a week or something small, but something visible can be great for grit.
The fourth piece of the writer's mindset is resilience. The slow progress world is a world full, more full than usual, I think, of obstacles, setbacks, challenges. And you know, resilience is about being able to separate the things that happen, especially the things that we mostly sort of frame as negative, to separate those from your self self of sense of self-worth from your own emotional state and to be able to keep moving forward despite those things happening. And and you know I think this is crucial for writers of all stripes because none of us lives in a world without setbacks. We all get rejections from editors, we all get unhappy criticisms of our work, whether they're fair or unfair, and we all need to be able to move and breathe through those without them destroying us. So resilience, especially in a slow-progress world where there tend to be more of these insults and injuries, that's critical.
And then finally, last but certainly not least, a growth mindset. Growth is for me probably the most important part of a writer's mindset, and that's because In this case, a slow progress world is going to throw up all these different kinds of challenges. The challenge of slowness being probably the big one, right? A growth mindset is the kind of mindset that says, "I'm facing a new challenge. I'm going to strategize a way around this. I'm going to reach out and find out who's got strategies for dealing with this. Hey, maybe Trevor has an idea. I'll borrow one from him. I'll borrow one from this person and that person, and I'll find a way through to the other side, and I'll make slow progress."
So a plug for the writer's mindset. OK, let's wrap it up. Let's talk about lava momentum in the world of rapid progress.
As I mentioned, we are used to seeking maximum productivity, or at least you're trying to maybe get maximum healthy productivity. But in the slow progress world, we're not in a position to maximize productivity. I think what we need to be shooting for is maximum inevitability. In other words, your goal is not to be moving fast, but to be moving steadily and surely toward your goal, ineluctably, inevitably.
When you're looking, what you're looking for is what I'm calling lava momentum. Yes, lava from a volcano moves awfully, even painfully slowly. But you know what? Nothing can stop it. It just keeps flowing, burning all the obstacles in its path until it gets where it's going.
And if you implement the strategies I've outlined today, you embrace the slow progress mental model, you write size your goals and plans, you stay in touch with your writing, you find friends for the journey, you create a weekly writing routine, and you exercise that writer's mindset. You will be flowing like lava toward your writing goals. You might not get there fast, but get there you will.
All right, that's us done for today. If you're living in slow progress world right now, I salute you. I know you can do it. And I hope the strategies I've here, discussed here, are helpful. Until next time, happy writing.
