For the past 20 years, I've worked alone at home. The lifestyle is great, but it can be really hard to work alone. It’s lonely. So how do we motivate ourselves to work? How do we find the energy to not only get started, but to keep going?

In academia, the managerial notion of time is brought to bear on academics through the idea of "publish or perish". It catalyses anxiety and fears about thinking, experimenting and writing against a ticking clock. But academics are not managers and don’t need to use managerial time. They’re artisans, and need to work on artisanal time.

Chefs practice mise en place—the key culinary technique we covered in our previous post—whereas most PhD students are expected to learn how and what to write on their own! This lack of training is a paradox, especially considering the importance of writing skills to academic success.

So, you want to finish a piece of writing you have been working on. Or you are attending a writing boot camp. Will you waste precious hours writing, deleting, writing and then eventually surfing the internet? Or will you create something of good and promising value?