It’s 1st of November. You have a goal, a clean document and the quiet optimism of someone who has decided this month will be different.
By the 15th of November the document is still open. The word count hasn’t moved since Tuesday, and you tell yourself you’ll catch up at the weekend.
Despite good intentions, writing seems to progress slowly.
Sound familiar?
Writing is something that many doctoral students find difficult. If you’re one of them, then AcWriMo is a really useful antidote.
What is AcWriMo?
AcWriMo, short for Academic Writing Month, is a yearly writing challenge that runs from the 1st to 30th November. You set yourself a writing goal for the month, tell other people about it and work towards it at the same time as researchers around the world. Thesis chapters, journal articles, grant applications and conference papers all count.
Charlotte Frost started it in November 2011 through PhD2Published, a site that helps early-career academics get published. It began as Academic Book Writing Month, modelled on National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), and more than a hundred people took part in the first year, sharing their progress on blogs and social media. In 2012 “Book” was dropped from the name so that people working on shorter pieces could join in.
Today there’s no central sign-up. Universities run their own AcWriMo events, researchers post their goals and progress under #AcWriMo, and a great many people do it quietly on their own.
That last group is the one I worry about.
Set a goal that fits your real November
The classic AcWriMo goal is a big number, often 50,000 words borrowed from NaNoWriMo. For most PhD researchers that leads to one good week, one bad week and a quiet decision to give up.
A good AcWriMo goal is big enough to matter and small enough to survive a bad week. So start with what your November looks like. If you’re working, teaching, caring for someone or studying part-time, count the hours you can realistically give to writing. Then take off a third. Something always comes up and life always gets in the way.
Next, pick the kind of goal that suits the work in front of you. Words suit drafting. Minutes or hours suit editing, analysis and reading, where good progress often doesn’t show up in a word count. Outputs, such as “a full draft of the methods section”, suit you when you already know what done looks like.
Example goals by PhD stage
- First year: 20 minutes of writing each weekday, ending the month with a rough 3,000-word outline of your literature review.
- Mid-stage: 400 words each weekday towards a first draft of one chapter.
- Writing up: an hour of revision a day, with two chapters to your supervisor by 30 November.
- Submitted or preparing for your viva: 45 minutes a day turning a chapter into a journal article.
Write your goal down somewhere you’ll see it. Then add one sentence describing what “done” looks like on 30 November. If you can’t picture it, the goal needs to be more specific.
And if the goal starts to feel like a test of whether you’re good enough, it’s worth reading why perfectionism is a fallacy before you start.
Plan the month before 1st November
AcWriMo goes better when the dull decisions are made in advance. An hour in the last week of October is enough.
Put your writing time in your diary like a meeting. Use the same slot each day if you can manage it, even if it’s only 30 minutes. Then tell one person what you’re aiming for: your supervisor, a friend, a partner or a post under #AcWriMo. Saying it out loud once makes it real.
Give each week of November its own job
Week one: Start
Set up the routine and get words on the page. Don’t judge the output yet.
Week two: Build momentum
The routine is familiar now. Protect it, and push the draft forward.
Week three: Keep going
This is where energy dips. Aim for consistency over volume.
Week four: Finish
Revise, tidy up, and look back at how far you’ve come.
Build a routine that lasts 30 days
Motivation gets you through the first week, but to maintain that motivation and momentum you need good habits, because you’ll need to be able to get stuff done even on the days where you don’t feel like writing.
Keep the time and place the same
Your brain learns quickly. After a week or so, sitting in that chair at that hour starts to mean writing, and getting started takes less effort.
Work in short blocks
Somewhere between 25 and 60 minutes, then a proper break. Parkinson’s law says work expands to fill the time available, and a fixed block gives your writing edges.
Stop mid-sentence
End each session knowing exactly what comes next. Tomorrow’s first five minutes will take care of themselves.
Set a floor
On a bad day, ten minutes counts. Showing up briefly keeps the thread of the work alive, and the thread matters far more than any single day’s total.
Track it
A tick in a box each day sounds trivial. But after a week it’s a visible record of the writing you’ve done, and on a low day that record is hard to argue with.
The mid-month dip, and how to get through it
Somewhere in the third week, AcWriMo gets hard. The novelty has gone. You’ve missed a day or two, and the gap between your goal and your total starts to look like evidence against you.
I’ve watched this happen to a lot of researchers, and here’s what I think is going on. The PhD hands you a huge, open-ended project and very little structure around it. Most doctoral programmes assume you’ll supply the routine, the deadlines and the motivation yourself, for years. When motivation dips mid-month, there’s nothing else holding you up.
A few things help.
A missed day doesn’t reset anything
There’s no penalty and nobody is marking you. Skip the catch-up and pick up at today’s date.
Shrink the goal if you need to
Finishing a smaller goal teaches you more than abandoning a large one, and adjusting a plan is a skill in its own right.
Change what you count
If drafting has stalled, count the minutes you spend outlining or editing instead.
But the thing that gets most people through week three is other people.
Why writing with other people works
When I did my PhD, most of my writing happened alone, and so did most of my stalls. What changed things was sitting down to write at the same time as other people. Nobody checked my work. Nobody needed to. Knowing they were there, working on their own difficult thing, was enough to keep me in the chair.
There’s a name for this now: body doubling, or co-working. You write in the company of others, often in silence, with a fixed start and a fixed end. It gives you two things the PhD rarely provides: a reason to start at a particular moment, and company while you work.
We see it in our own numbers. In a single month, 38 researchers logged 701 hours of writing in our 24/7 Writing Cafe across 371 sessions, with no facilitator and no schedule. They came because other people would be there. On our thesis bootcamps, where people write together over four days, participants average around 17,500 words.
Free Monday writing retreats through November
If you want company as you take part in AcWriMo, you should know that every Monday in November we run a free half-day writing retreat on Zoom, from 9am to 1pm UK time. You work in four 60-minute blocks with 10-minute breaks between them, with a short check-in at the start and a wrap-up at the end. Camera on or off, as you prefer. Nobody reads your work. Usually 20 to 30 PhD researchers join, from first years to people a few weeks from submission.
For AcWriMo, it works as an anchor: one morning a week when your writing is guaranteed.
Take the AcWriMo pledge
AcWriMo FAQs
When is AcWriMo?
Every year, from 1 to 30 November.
Do I have to write every day?
No. Plenty of people write on weekdays only, and the goal is yours to set. What matters is a rhythm you can keep up for the month. Missed days are normal and don’t end anything.
Can I do AcWriMo if I’m not writing a thesis?
Yes. Journal articles, grant applications, book chapters, conference papers and reports all count. So do reading, planning and editing, if that’s what your project needs this month.
Is AcWriMo free?
Yes. Nobody owns AcWriMo and there’s no fee to take part. Our pledge, tracker, daily emails and Monday writing retreats are free too.
What if I fall behind?
Adjust the goal and keep going. A smaller goal that you finish will do more for your confidence and your thesis than a large one you abandon in week three.
Can I join the Monday retreats from outside the UK?
Yes. The retreats run from 9am to 1pm UK time on Zoom, and researchers join from all over the world.
So, what will you write this November?
0 Comments