Successful academics write a lot. The secret to writing a lot is making it into a daily habit like brushing your teeth. You want to be able to jump into your writing task with as little friction and resistance as possible. Writing is turned into a daily habit by setting up a writing schedule and sticking to it for three or more weeks.
Some (most) writers do not follow this advice. They are too undisciplined. It is hard to do. They need some form of external structure to support their daily writing schedule.
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One approach is to use an accountability mechanism for reporting one's progress to another person. This can be done via the means of reciprocal writing contracts with the other person. This works best with two people closely matched in the strength of their daily writing habits. This site provides template contracts for this approach.
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Another solution is to pay hundreds of dollars per year to participate in an online writing club, where the members hold each other accountable. Most people who join such groups struggle to stick to a writing schedule. Only about ten percent participate every day.
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A third solution is to form or join an existing writing group that meets briefly once a week to share their progress. These groups are tricky to sustain. Most people drop out after a few meetings.
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A fourth solution is an online accountability mechanism, such as a Google Sheet on which members of a writing group report their daily progress. The detail of the reporting is up to the individual. The total effort by day or effort by project can be reported in terms of time spent, words written, or both along with a brief note about what was accomplished. Sadly, most group members will not be active for a number of reasons:
- they do not see the value of this exercise
- they are too undisciplined to make the daily entries
- they fear being judged
- they want to hide their lack of commitment to writing
- they want to retain secrecy about their efforts and projects
- they want to hide that they are working on too many different projects
- they want to avoid competition
- they have an alternate accountability mechanism that works and sees no point in setting up a second system.
However, the knowledge that group members have access to your posted writing progress can be an important motivator for those who lead by example. Some people will find this approach to have a large positive impact on their productivity.
In summary, you can afford to pick one solution due to time and energy limitations.
The above MS Word document was revised and used 24 times over six years (2016-2021) with a colleague at a different institution. The contract is a writing accountability tool that operates daily during the work week between two people: each person is a Contractor and serves as the reciprocal Mentor for the other writer. We exchanged e-mails at the end of the day to report our progress.
We exchanged contracts at the beginning of the contract period. Each person made their own contract with customized terms to support meeting their writing goals. The above example has items A, B, and C. It was challenging to sustain these three writing projects in parallel, but we often had no choice. Item A would be sufficient for beginners who lack a daily established writing habit.
Some people meet on Zoom and write during their scheduled writing times. This approach may be too stressful for some writing partners.
Our contracts were limited to several months. We had several breaks due to a sabbatical year and COVID-19 infections. We used a Microsoft Word document for the contract.
We provide versions of the contract in Markdown, org-mode, and LaTeX documents. The org-mode and markdown versions can be previewed on GitHub by clicking the filename.
Org-mode is a variant of markdown on steroids. It was designed to be used in Emacs but it can be used in other editors. It has attracted many young people to Emacs in the past decade.
The keeping of the writing contract is too hard for most struggling writers: It only works with the most committed writers who need this kind of structure. These contracts may appeal to the pioneer personality type of the Five Voices personality classification system.
Finding another like-minded person to serve as a writing partner (called the Mentor in the contract) is not easy. I met my partner in a subscription-based academic writing club. I used the writing contracts as a substitute for my daily participation in the writing club and was able to terminate my subscription. I would consider making the contracts again if I found the right partner.
These contracts helped me finish more writing projects and practice the habits listed in the contract during writing sessions. In the last year of the contracts (2021), I published 11 papers (5 senior author papers). I continue to practice the habits listed in the contract during my writing sessions. I decided to share the contract on GitHub to help others develop their daily writing habit.
The contract template mentions zettelkastens (slip-boxes). These are knowledge bases that may assest the development of new writing projects. The paper version of the zettelkasten is akin to a card catalog of your knowledge. Many electronic versions have been implemented in the past decade. Some of them provide graphical views of your knowledge base that resemble an extended mindmap.
I think Obsidian is the best option (i.e., intuitive to use, free, data stored locally). Emacs users will probably want to use org-roam because it is easier to capture entries on the fly than having to leave Emacs to use another application. You can also migrate your org-roam notes to Obsidian. EKG and Denote are are two distinctly different approaches to building and maintaining a zettelkasten.
This agreement commences on August 1, 2021 (the 'Effective Date') and will terminate on October 1, 2021. The agreement is between ZZZZZZ ZZZZZZZ (Contractor) and XXXXX XXXXXXX (Mentor). The Contractor must do A-C each weekday while meeting conditions D-G. The goal is to make steady progress on two writing projects a day. This is hard while serving as a core lab director, teaching, serving on a NIH study section, and serving on several internal and external committees.
The Contractor is required to do the following writing tasks per day. The Contractor may do `windfall' writing outside of these writing blocks on the same or other projects. The designated blocks of time in A-B do not need to be adjacent.
A. Work on manuscript A1 for 90 minutes per day, M-F. Manuscript A1 is the most important and urgent manuscript. Its identity may change over the contract period.
B. Work on one grant proposal for 90 minutes per day, M-F. The contractor's R01 is due October 5th, and another is due December 5th.
C. Generative writing for one book reaching a minimum of 1000 new words by Friday of each week. The contractor has a soft goal of adding 4000 words a month. The contractor will work on the book on the weekends.
D. Qualifying text includes:
- Manuscripts, grant applications, books
- editorial reviews of manuscripts and grant proposals
- mind maps for planning manuscripts or grant applications
- entries in writing logs
- drafts of e-mails that are directly related to the project
- heavily edited or newly generated scripts for making figures for the writing document
- heavily edited or newly generated computer programs directly related to the project
- entries to databases used in the research described in the paper.
- entries in annotated bibliography
- any other activity that advances the writing project
E. Confirm achievement of A and B by sending an email with “Done" on the subject line to the Mentor by 11:59 PM. Done on Fridays means that the book writing is finished.
F. The contractor may not do the following during the writing blocks and will restart if any interruptions occur.
- check e-mail
- surf the web
- listen to interview or news show videos on YouTube (music is okay if it is not distracting)
- answer the phone
- keep their office door open
- accept visitors
G. During the writing blocks, the contractor may:
- use the Pomodoro Technique
- take bio breaks
- do planning related to the writing project
- retrieve and read literature
- make figures
- analyze data
- write cover letters
- submit manuscripts
- edit text
- work on bibliographies
- track writing progress in the Excel workbook
Contractor acknowledges to the Mentor that the Contractor agrees to abide by this Agreement.
Contractor’s signature: Date: July 30, 2021
Mentor’s signature: Date: July 30, 2021
It takes 3 weeks to develop a new habit. Writing a contract with yourself can be a way to hold yourself accountable. You can create a variant of the above contract that does not require the signature of another person. If you want to make it more public, you could recruit a family member to witness your signing of the contract. You could also limit the contract to just one week to see how it goes.
At the end of the first week, you could evaluate how you did. You can identify what works and what doesn't work for you. You may find the above contract too complicated or too onerous at this time. Instead of working on multiple writing projects in a given day, you might be more successful with just working on a single writing project in a given week during 8 hours of focused effort. You could then add to your writing contract the work on two or more writing projects. You may want to focus on a single writing project on a given day and interleave the work on a second writing project on alternate days. This approach reduces context switching and eases the tracking of your effort. Once your writing habit has become stronger and you have developed good momentum on your writing projects, you may consider working on two projects on different days of the week.
Another variation is to try to integrate the Calvin Newport time blocking approach with the Pomodoro technique. Newport's time blocking is kind of merciless because it requires the scheduling of every minute of the workday. The Pomodoro technique is focused on getting the next 25 minute Pomodoro finished. The scheduling of every minute of the day is irrelevant and in fact it is suggested that you include some humane breaks between sets of Pomodoro's.
The number of Pomodoros that you could achieve in an 8-hour period may be 14 because of the time that you would have to spend on breaks. It is been my personal experience that you can only go beyond 14 Pomos in a given day when you are working up against a deadline. Then you are probably going to be so exhausted the following day that you need to reduce the number of Pomodoros that you complete the next day. Adding more Pomodoro's on a given day beyond 14 is just going to lead to stealing from your productivity the following day.
Calvin Newport sells a book that has a time blocking schedule built into it. He suggests using paper to do this time tracking. You can set up a table inside of Excel, Word, Google Sheets, or one a white sheet of paper. You can set up your time blocks and use the mouse to define their starting and end times. We think by using the time blocking that you are forcing yourself to face your limited time that is available. You are forced to give up thinking about and working on other projects that you find to be more attractive but cannot finish today.
We copied and pasted the mentored writing contract from above, and then we have edited this contract to convert it into a self contract to demonstrate a more focused and limited approach. By customizing or adopting this approach, you are probably going to want to limit the initial number of hours that you commit to your writing project in the first week. Most people have so many other responsibilities as faculty members that trying to do more than 3 hours of writing a day can be quite difficult. This means you are going to put in 15 hours in your first week and that effort is going to be of a very high quality by following the Pomodoro Technique. You can expect that to make perhaps more progress in your first week than you might have in the prior month by taking a more diffuse approach to your work.
This agreement starts on November 3, 2025 (the 'effective date') and will end at 11:59 PM November 8, 2021.
The Contractor must do A and B each weekday while meeting conditions D-G. The goal is to make steady progress on one writing project a day.
The Contractor is required to do the following writing tasks per day.
The Contractor may do `windfall' writing outside of these writing blocks on the same or other projects.
The designated blocks of time in A-B do not need to be adjacent.
A. Work on manuscript A1.
B. Follow the limited blocked-pomodoro technique.
C. Spend 8 pomodoros per day on generative writing and 6 pomodoros on editing before noon.
Support writing will be done outside of the 8 hour, focused-effort period.
The timeblock.el package will be used to schedule the time blocks in Emacs on November 2.
D. Qualifying generative writing tasks includes:
- writing in the main.tex file
- making mind maps for planning
- wrting entries in writing log
- drafting of e-mails that are directly related to the project
E. Support writing includes the following:
- heavily edited or newly generated scripts for making figures for the writing document
- heavily edited or newly generated computer programs directly related to the project
- entries to databases used in the research described in the paper.
- making entries in an annotated bibliography or zettelkasten
- making figures
- analyzing data
- retrieve and read literature
- work on bibliographies
- relabeling and tagging PDFs
- any other activity that advances the writing project
F. The contractor may not do the following during the focused effort blocks and will restart if any interruptions occur.
- check e-mail
- surf the web
- listen to interviews or news show videos on YouTube (music is okay if it is not distracting)
- answer the phone
- keep their office door open
- accept visitors
G. During the writing blocks, the contractor may:
- take bio breaks
- do planning related to the writing project
- write cover letters
- submit manuscripts
- edit text
Contractor acknowledges to the Witness that the Contractor agrees to abide by this Agreement.
Contractor’s signature: Date: November 2, 2025
Witness’s signature: Date: November 2, 2025
| Version | Changes | Date |
|---|---|---|
| Version 0.2 | Added badges, funding, and update table. Massive rewrite of the solutions section. | 2024 May 22 |
| Version 0.3 | Added habit building self-contract. | 2025 November 2 |
- NIH: R01 CA242845
- NIH: R01 AI088011
- NIH: P30 CA225520 (PI: R. Mannel)
- NIH: P20 GM103640 and P30 GM145423 (PI: A. West)