If your goal is to work on your dissertation or your article, what gets in your way and eats up your time and energy?
Every writer can find a million more important things to do, such as watching all the episodes of the first season of Downton Abbey in one day.
But what else derails your writing plans?
Kids? Family? A job? Check, check, check.
If the derailers were just kids-family-job, you could still most likely find a bit time to write. But there’s something else that is a wretched waste of time and energy, and it’s a frequent, even daily occurrence over which you have little control . . . your commute!
If you have a bad commute, you have my sympathies.
A bad commute has an intensely harmful influence on your quality of life and also on your making headway in your writing. Not only does a bad commute increase your anxiety, but it can turn you into someone you’d rather not know. I bet you’ve seen that side of yourself when you’re stuck in traffic.
It affects your mood and even your cognitive performance. And those negative effects are long-lasting, affecting your ability to follow through on plans to write and your ability to focus.
Please take a minute and let me know if your commute is an issue for you, and how it affects your writing. How do you work around the stress of a bad commute and make headway on your writing?
Hoping you’re sprinting past the barriers and writing,
Nancy
Nancy Whichard, Ph.D., PCC
Your International Dissertation Coach and Academic Career Coach
www.smarttipsforwriters.com
http://www.dissertationbootcamp.net
http://www.nancywhichard.com
nancy @ nancywhichard.com
I am lucky enough to work on 19th-century literature that is almost entirely in the public domain, and much of which has been recorded by volunteer readers and is available for download on sites like librivox.org and littérature.audio.com. I download audio books onto my MP3 player, which I then play through my car stereo (I use a radio-like device, but newer cars than mine even have a AUX input!).
I started listening to bits of audio-books while commuting a few years ago when I was living in a city and had 30 minutes every morning in public transportation rush hour: it’s impossible to pull out a book or journal article when everyone is crammed tightly together, politely avoiding eye-contact in spite of full shoulder-to-hip contact, but wearing headphones in the metro doesn’t interfere with anything.
This habit then allowed me be less grumpy about sitting in traffic for 35-45 minutes each morning when I moved back, since I wasn’t wasting my time: I could use drive-time to get some passive knowledge of works that I might not otherwise take time to sit down and read. It also got my head into thinking about my subject, rather than my teaching or my political involvement, so that when I got to my office, I was in “writing” framework, rather than “concrete task” framework.
More recently, I have also been known to grab podcasts of current things–lectures by experts whose work I want to stay current on, etc.–through iTunes university and other sites. I’ve found it a great way to feel like my commute time is not only not wasted time, but even a bit productive, and now I’m finding that actually miss (if only a little bit) what I came to see as my “mental transition time” between home and work.
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Your image of shoulder-to-hip contact on the subway made me both cringe and smile. But how exciting that listening to your texts while riding became a habit, one that gave you enough good feeling to balance the additional commute of driving in traffic. Precommitted time works well, doesn’t it? If you can’t do anything else, you might as well read (or listen to the recordings).
Thanks so much for your comment.
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