Your Career

How to prepare your distractible brain to ease into the hard work of drafting a manuscript

Ask a published writer what helps them get through a period of writer’s block, and they might reply something like, “candles, classical music, and closed tabs.” As a productivity technique, that sounds both oddly specific and fairly enigmatic. But the underlying strategy is simple: Find a writing routine that works for you.

A repeatable pattern of actions can shift you from the chaotic world of email, social media, collegial or family interruptions, personal worries, and other pressing work into a mindset in which you can concentrate and write. Of course there are no writing rituals that are common to all successful authors. The particulars will vary from writer to writer. The point is: Don’t underestimate how the right mix of routines and artifacts can support or renew your writing focus when it has been dispersed to the many winds of academic and personal life.

Continue reading: "The Power of Writing Rituals,” by James M. Lang

Share your suggestions for the newsletter with Denise Magner, an editor at The Chronicle, at denise.magner@chronicle.com.

What we’re reading

Here’s more on career issues and trends from around the web. See something we should include? Let me know.

• A report in The Wall Street Journal says the “balance of power” in the workplace has shifted “back toward bosses.”
• Advice in the Harvard Business Review on how to “stop relying on others for validation at work.”
• In The New York Times, a story on a law professor at Columbia University who claims she was pushed to retire because of her activism on Gaza.