Now that I’m writing regularly rather than in frantic fits and starts, I’ve found myself in trouble due to inaccurate estimates of the time that a given unit of writing will take me to complete. Since I have a hard (albeit self-imposed) deadline of a May 2009 graduation, it’s very important for me to budget my writing time well. However, I’ve found that I’m routinely taking longer than I expect.

Part of the reason is simply that editing my work to my high standard of clarity and accuracy is a slow process. Of course, I could be less fastidious. However, I’ve found time and again that a failure to do that level of editing creates major stumbling blocks later in the writing since later analyses depend on the quality of earlier analyses. So if I don’t edit my work carefully, I’ll find myself totally paralyzed by conceptual confusions that I never properly identified and corrected earlier in the writing. That’s not good.

Some of the suggestions in this short article are helpful, but I’d be interested in any others that my readers might have.

Since I do now make regular and steady progress in my writing, my next step is probably to accurately measure the rate of my writing by tracking how much work I do in an hour, on average. That will enable me to make far more realistic estimates.

Any other suggestions?