Shut up and write!

In May I wrote a blog post called “We all need a little bit of discipline (and punish) now and again” which was about the one day writing retreat I attended ran by Rowena Murray organised by the SRHE. In that post you can see how the ran according to Murray’s schedule.

I decided about a month ago, that I needed to run something like this myself on a more regular basis as I felt that working alone at home all day was making me feel a bit lonely and my productivity was sipping a bit with days and days going by and only scrappy bits of work being done. So I contacted a couple of former colleagues from the University of Bedfordshire who are on Twitter and I know are doing part-time PhDs and tend to work weekends on it.

So on Saturday, on the Bedford campus, we ran our first one day writing retreat.

A couple of participants surprised me by saying that their friends and colleagues were not keen to come because they were worried about the idea of working with others as they assumed there would be interruptions, or that the idea was for group feedback and group discussions which perhaps people sometimes do not want or want to avoid!

I found this strange as I deliberately called the writing group a ‘Shut up and write!’ but perhaps my ‘advert’ was not so clear and came across as too friendly but speaking to each other during writing time is strictly forbidden!  I wonder if this dread of working in groups comes from people’s experiences of working in open plan offices where the idea is that you are supposed to collaborate and share ideas whereas in reality open plan offices can often be the noisiest and least productive places to work.

However, by the end of the day, they were converted.

Feedback from participants fitted the feedback from every other writing group like this which were:

• Realising how much you can get done
  Realising the importance of breaks
  The benefit of working in a different environment
  Benefit of avoiding social media/internet
  Benefit of working with others present to help motivate you to continue and avoid temptation.

After Shut up and Write! you will have avoided temptation and will feel virtuous. Photo from Patricksmercy on Flickr

Although we are not allowed to speak to each other during writing time, you can during breaks and I thought this was useful as I learnt about Jon Rainford’s work and realised we were reading some of the same books etc. So if you have similar subject and topic ideas, this chatting is good! However, you should not feel that you have to talk during breaks. I would hope that if people did not want to talk because they are in a thinking zone, then that is perfectly permissible.

So we are going to run a group once a month on a Saturday. The good thing about doing it on the Bedford campus with participants who are staff is that we have access to room booking as well as the staff kitchen and fridge.

If you want to run one, feel free to use this schedule as a template or refer to the original Rowena Murray schedule which involves a longer day than ours:

Five minute writing task:
Write down your short, medium and long term goals in full sentences for 5 minutes.
Short term means by the first break.
Medium term is by Lunch.
Long term is by the end of the day.

Share these goals with a person in the room (or whole room if group is very small).

Role of facilitator – to keep time and announce when it is five minutes before the end of each session. They also tell the group that in this five minutes everyone needs to write a sentence to themselves about what they are going to do after the break.

10am to 10:15 welcome and goal setting. Make cup of tea

10:15- 11:30 am Session 1 (1 ¼ hours)

11:30 – 11:45 Break [step away from the computer and stretch]

11:45 – 12:45: Session 2 (1 hour)

12:45-1:30 Lunch [go for a brisk walk after eating]

1:30-2:45 Session 3 (1 ¼ hours)

2:45-3:00 break [step away from the computer and stretch]

3:00 – 4:00 Session 4 (1 hour)

4:00 Did you meet your goal? Quick chat and feedback.

I also join in the Bi-monthly  Shut Up and Write group on Twitter and like that too. You can join on Twitter (see @SUWTUK for the UK group #SUWTUK , @SUWTues for the Australian one which I cannot work out the time zone difference, but I think it is something like 1am UK time, and finally there is the North American group @SUWTNA which is on at around 4pm UK time).

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