Amber Cook

As I write, I am sitting in a coffee shop after enduring three days without my trusty laptop, whose hard drive self-combusted last week. Although things were looking up after a trip to the repair shop, I woke to a power outage this morning, leaving me without means to get online, a prerequisite for my job as an online writing tutor.

Not to be deterred, I toted my laptop to the local Port City Java for good coffee and a Wi-Fi connection, only to find that my new hard drive cannot yet receive outside wireless networks. So I have no Web access, I’m trapped at a coffee shop, and I have access to only
Microsoft Word. Only under these conditions would I write this article.

Because I get upwards of 15 messages a day from Walden students needing assistance with writing, I know that I am not the only procrastinator at Walden. Most students are balancing some combination of family, full- or part-time employment, community activities, and coursework.

This kind of schedule rarely leaves long stretches of time available for thoughtful, careful writing, so students are often surprised to find themselves a day or two before their deadline, staring at a blank page and wondering where the time went. They start debating which font style is the largest and whether the instructor would notice if they bumped the 12-point font up to 14-point. (The answer is yes.)

If these students were to look back at their previous week, there were probably moments that were open for writing, but they were filled with other activities instead, with the promise to get to the writing tomorrow. To better take advantage of these moments, here are a few pieces of advice for avoiding procrastination.

Just Write
The most common procrastination device I notice among Walden students is perfectionism. You are graduate students, after all, and you feel that writing is something you ought to have mastered at this point. Because time is so precious, you do not want to waste time on poor writing, so you feel that every word that goes down on the page should be a perfect pearl of wisdom, with no need for revision. A nice thought, but believe me, it doesn’t happen that way.

If you meet writers who say they write without revising, you are meeting either very bad writers or very bad liars.

To get over this unproductive obsession with the perfect paper, writers must be willing to just write. To paraphrase Anne Lamott’s wonderful Bird by Bird, writers must learn to write really, really horrible first drafts—the kind of writing you’d be embarrassed for people to find if you died in your sleep before you got to revise it.

Doing so allows you to get your ideas down on paper without slowing yourself down with second-guessing and self-critique. It’s much easier to revise bad writing than to start from scratch, so just write and deal with the woodshedding later.

Schedule Your Writing
Regardless of whether or not you are a structured person, having a time and place set aside for your writing is crucial. Scheduling time with yourself is not easy, as meetings and other obligations start to creep in.

• So if someone asks you to join in on a conference call at 6:30, and 6:30 is your writing time, your answer should be no.
• Waiting until the time is convenient or the mood strikes is a bad idea, for the mood and time rarely present themselves willingly.
• If you know your writing time is coming, you will be more mentally prepared for it than if you suddenly find yourself with a free hour and would rather be resting, walking your dog, watching the primetime line-up . . .

Ax the Self-Pity
It’s easy to find reasons why you should not have to write. You work hard, and you really do deserve a dinner with friends, a trip to the park, or just a day to not think about any work or school obligations.

Sadly, you largely forfeited the right to those things when you enrolled in graduate school. I confess that self-pity was my own biggest struggle as a graduate student.

I had to work two jobs while writing my master’s thesis, and I spent most of my free time complaining loudly to anyone who would listen about the injustice of this circumstance. This habit did not make me very popular, much less productive, so what should have taken me one year took me three. The venting felt good at the time, but it only hurt me in the end.

So do what you have to do—scream at the top of your lungs for a few minutes—but then get writing. The sooner you get this stuff done, the sooner you can tell war stories about your graduate school days while walking in a park or having a nice long dinner with friends.

My cell phone just rang, and a recording told me that my power is now restored. The moral of the story: If you procrastinate, karma will debilitate your computer and your home until you have no choice but to write. Don’t let it happen to you.