Helen Sword is a guru in scholarly writing circles. She’s spent a decade finding out what makes academic writers tick and publishing evidence-based books and articles about various aspects of scholarly writing and publication. Whilst her research has focused on academics, it applies to any writer wanting to smash their writing goals and strike a more balanced relationship with their muse.  [click to continue…]

Prolifiko is a coaching platform for writers. We offer a range of services such as this blog, online courses and our digital coaching product to help you achieve your writing goals and find a writing system that works for your life. [click to continue…]

If you’ve ever missed a deadline the planning fallacy may well be the culprit. It’s the tendency we have to underestimate the time it will take us to complete something – whilst knowing full well that similar tasks have taken longer in the past. It’s based in an innate biological bias towards optimism – but if you want stop missing your deadlines and start hitting them, it’s something you need to master – here’s how. [click to continue…]

How do writing scholars – people who write about writing, teach writing skills and research writing behaviours – get down to write themselves? To find out we spoke to academic Christine Tulley, author of a new and original Paris Review-style book on scholarly writing, How Writing Faculty Write. [click to continue…]

As a productivity method, we’re huge fans of time-blocking or scheduling. We’ve written before about how it’s essential to top academics like Adam Grant and it’s cropped up in our own research time and time again. But what’s the science behind time-blocking? Why is the act of scheduling important to helping you focus on your work – and what’s the alternative? [click to continue…]

Everybody writes differently but one thing is the same – the most productive (and least stressed-out) writers have all developed some kind of personal strategy to help them write. This is how you find yours.  [click to continue…]

Some people equate being highly prolific writers and researchers with producing dross. They prefer to constantly refine and perfect The One Idea they have. Perhaps because they think their idea is so special. Perhaps because they think they’ll never have another idea again. Either way, we believe that the best way to improve is to be unashamedly and un-apologetically productive – writing lots, failing lots, picking yourself up, writing more and improving.  [click to continue…]

The path to excellence in any field comes through hard graft – that’s true. But research finds that scholars at the very top of their game are also highly prolific, deeply curious, with multiple, unrelated (and often quite bonkers) creative hobbies. So, if you want to be superstar scholar, focus your mind – but never close it. Keep researching, go off on tangents, experiment and play – hundreds of Nobel prize laureates can’t be wrong. [click to continue…]

At the time of writing, the top two trending articles on Buzzfeed are: ‘15 Struggles You’ll Only Understand If You’re Obsessed With Cereal’ and ‘The 15 Emotional Stages of Mobile Phone Ownership’. It’s safe to say that Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, hasn’t read either. [click to continue…]