Work can take interesting turns.

In my previous post I discussed my plan to write more. It was well meaning, but not practical. It was born out of my frustration with not budgeting enough time to edit my dissertation. Since then I have learned two things: write more and putting words on the page is not the same as writing.

For the last half year or so, I have been focusing on putting in an ever increasing amount of hours writing. As a scientist, I am judged by how I communicate my ideas. This is predominately done via journal article. During this journey, I have learned that writing has three major phases: idea creation & outlining, drafting, and editing.

This new framework has worked! Scientists usually write about one article per year. Since my last blog post less than two years ago, I have not written just one or two journal article but three. On top of that, I have one more in the editing stage, and two in the drafting stage. That will be six total articles before the end of the year.

All told, my previous post was an interesting idea that did not work. However, I was since been able to figure out a framework that does work. Now I am writing more and more and seeing the value from each of the three major writing phases.