The Philosophers' Cocoon

A safe and supportive forum for philosophers.

Owned & Moderated by Marcus Arvan (University of Tampa)

Contact: marvan@ut.edu

Blog mission & moderation policy

IMPORTANT NOTE on how to ensure anonymity in commenting
Job-Market Reporting Thread (2026-27)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2026-27)

recent posts

about

What’s your process for drafting a paper?

In our June “how can we help you?” thread, a reader writes:

Suppose you’ve just freed up a bit of time and are ready to work on the first draft of a new paper. What’s your process? Do you get coffee, do you have notes beside you? Morning or evening? Do you do it all in one shot or spread it out over days?

This is a fun query, and I’m curious to hear from readers!

I work best when I have full weeks available (i.e. during the summer). I start with 2 cups of coffee and begin drafting around 8-8:30am each day, while listening to my favorite Spotify playlist on headphones. I’ll pretty much draft for 4-5 hours straight each day, while taking a few short breaks for a couple more coffees, breakfast, and lunch, before heading to the gym in the early afternoon and picking up my daughter from daycare. Optimistically, if things go well, I often aim for a very crude draft by the end of the week (so, if I have a paper split into 4-5 parts, I’ll aim to draft one part per day). Of course, things don’t always go so well, so sometimes drafting takes considerably longer, as does the revising side of things–and sometimes if a draft just isn’t coming together, I’ll just set it aside after days or a week or two of work to consider coming back to later (though sometimes I never do: I have quite a few abandoned drafts of things laying around–but I have also returned to things months or even years later and ended up finishing and publishing them).

What about readers? What’s your drafting process?

Posted in ,

9 responses to “What’s your process for drafting a paper?”

  1. Anonymous

    Context: I am a full-time lecturer and have two small children, but I research at a good pace (2-3 papers per year). In order to do this, I wake up VERY early and waddle to my computer to get in about 45 minutes of work.

    For the first draft of a new paper, this is the most fun part of writing. I usually have a pretty decent picture of how things will go, since I have a long set of hand-written notes to work with. (Plus, I tend to avoid citations on the first go around, unless they’re the crucial citations for the body of the paper.) But I just do good old philosophy with a cup of coffee and some punk music on. Since I write in small chunks, I’m usually thinking about the paper for the rest of the day and make more hand-written notes as I have time for them. In first drafts, I try to get to the point where I don’t need to actively research as I’m writing — viz., chasing down papers and trying to understand a sub-literature to ensure I’m not saying something embarrassing. This makes for more prep, but also a more enjoyable writing experience.

    Reply
  2. Anonymous

    For paper writing I’ll set a timer for an hour a day. I let myself go up to 2 hours if I get on a roll but try not to do more than that because the quality and sustainability of my work diminishes after that point. I don’t have a designated time of day but it’s usually late morning or early afternoon. (I have the luxury of being a postdoc with relatively little scheduled time compared to teaching faculty, but I think working for short periods daily also works well when you have a more complex schedule.)

    I try not to start drafting until I have a fairly good idea of the upshots of the paper, how it will be structured and what literature I will discuss, which may take a long time. I also try to have feedback already collected from a conference talk. I find it saves time overall to wait on drafting versus to start drafting too soon and then have to repeatedly rewrite the paper. Under optimal circumstances I can then produce the first draft in 1-2 weeks. Then I start cleaning it up to get comments. Revisions for me often take much longer than initial drafting.

    I work exclusively on a computer but I often have a notes document. I occasionally work from a coffee shop but more often from home or my office.

    Reply
  3. Anonymous

    The drafting part for me is actually a really small part of writing. I usually get a vague idea for a paper, free-write some really unstructured thoughts about it, leave it in the back of my head for a while, and then once the ideas start to get clearer I come back and write a fairly detailed outline. Only after I have that do I start to draft the paper. In an ideal world I go for a 2-3 night writing retreat with a friend and draft the whole thing there – but what usually happens is that I go to a coffee shop for a couple of hours every morning for a week or two, and turn one “chunk” of the outline into prose every day. Then, like others above, the bulk of the work is in the revising.

    Reply
  4. Anonymous

    My approach is significantly different from the previously mentioned approaches. It tends to take me about a month or so of writing to put together a complete first draft. I am currently a postdoc, so by month or so, I mean five days a week of 4-5 hours of writing a day. Unlike the previous authors, I use writing to do a lot of my thinking.

    When I first sit down, I usually have a conclusion in mind (though not always) and some sense of how I want argue for it. I know this is rather metaphorical, but I usually start writing when I have a sense of what direction I should be headed in, but I don’t need to know what the actual route is, and quite often, while the general direction I’m aiming for stays the same throughout the writing process, I am happy to go to a different destination that is in the same general direction if I stumble across a particularly interesting or compelling path to it in my wanderings. I do a decent amount of reading throughout my writing process because I tend to stumble into problems that I didn’t anticipate beforehand, and now need some help in both understanding them and figuring out how to work my way through them. I also try not to be beholden to what I’ve already written and follow the paths to where they lead – even if that means that large portions of previously written sections will need to be set aside or thrown away.

    I’m not sure if this is the most efficient way to write, though it sounds like I spend less time thinking and planning before I start writing than others, though I then spend considerably more time on the actual writing than the authors in the previous posts. However, I find that I am best able to think through the process of actually writing, and I find writing that is a form of thinking much more enjoyable than merely putting previous thoughts down on paper.

    Reply
  5. recentlytenured

    I usually think about an idea – often a title and/or main claim, slowly developing an overall argument – for months and months and then sit down and write (including research) in a completely unhealthy, like, 8-10hr day for several days in a row. I wait at least 48 hours between final version and sending it anywhere so that I can edit it with relatively fresh eyes. My partner jokes that while I was dissertating (at the very end) I was basically locked in a room with them pushing meals under the door for like 10 full days. It wasn’t *quite* that bad but it also wasn’t that much better (mostly because food wouldn’t have fit under the door…).

    To be clear, this is bad in many ways – for me, for my relationships, for my overall productivity – but unfortunately this is how I make myself focus deeply. I cannot do sustained, careful, detailed thought for periods of less than 2 hours, and unless I clear my schedule I pretty much never have that much time to sit and think and write in my day-to-day, given my commute and other obligations both personal and professional. What it means is that in practice, I do most of my writing on weekends, breaks, summers, etc. I find it much easier to edit/revise in short chunks. That also means that rest is a more complicated process, too – no time to rest, because rest time is needed for the work I can’t do day-to-day.

    I really wish I was like the people who can think deeply for short periods but I never taught myself how and now I fear I am too set in my ways. 🙁 I have published an average of 2.2 things per year post-PhD, plus have hundreds of students per year, a fair number of supervisions, etc. so it does work for me, but it isn’t a system I’d recommend.

    Reply
  6. Anonymous

    Mine starts with wondering how I’m meant to function after five years of deep sleep deprivation thanks to a sleep-averse child. I then spend at least an hour being distracted by the Internet and emails. I then open a Word document, write a few words, get distracted by the Internet again and end up closing the Word document. I’ll then try to read a book to get my mind in gear, but after a few pages I’ll check emails, read the news online, before giving the whole thing up and wasting the day.

    This isn’t meant to be flippant, but any process I had earlier in my career has been pretty much smashed to pieces by the Internet/technology destroying my ability to focus, and life more generally. The only reason I mention this is that all the above contributors seem to have very efficient and effective writing processes. I think it’s worth noting that some people – or me, at least – really struggle to have any kind of effective process. It’s easy to feel rather inadequate or simply a failure when reading about other much more productive, focused people!

    Reply
    1. Anonymous

      I am the above parent of two small children. These things are not easy to cultivate, and moreover they are very fragile. A simple illness will set me back several weeks before I am writing regularly.

      One thing that has helped me exceptionally is to listen weekly to Cal Newport’s podcast “Deep Questions”. He is sort of annoying in a lot of ways, but every Monday morning he does a productivity episode, where he discusses methods for trying to get meaningful work done in the age of the distracting internet. This does triple-duty for me. First, it annoys me when he says something that is silly, and I get a chip on my shoulder to work in my own way. Second, it gets me that little bit of motivation I need to keep my schedule. Third, I frequently get really good advice for how to work. The point is to take willpower out of the question as much as possible. For example, if working on Word makes it too easy to Alt-Tab to the internet, then maybe the solution is to hand-write in a notebook, and to leave your computer/laptop off.

      Reply
  7. Daily writing

    I write 4.5 hours/day, 6 days/week. Writing includes: directed reading towards a paper, outlining, drafting, revising, and submitting. Nothing else counts. If I am becoming unproductive, I must stop.

    I spent an unusually long amount of time outlining, but I don’t think everyone should do that. What matters is to have a process and to apply it consistently, day in and day out.

    Writing is the only outcome that I track hourly. It’s also the only one I must finish before I go to bed. No exceptions.

    Reply
  8. Hanna

    I have the central idea written down and a rough first idea on how to structure the piece.
    I go up in the morning, around 7 am. I will drink coffee and meditate a little until I feel a rush to go to my desk and work. Usually after some hours, I will go to a coffee shop and work there. It is important for me to enter a very concentrated and relaxed state; otherwise, I do not produce anything of value. I am both chaotic and highly structured in writing. I have an idea, then write in a nearly manic manner and follow the line of ideas that flow out of me. My thoughts are usually structured, but they lead me into sidetracks, many of which I will follow just to delete them later or have a short footnote. I work over the thoughts many times; they lead me into the unknown, and I must solve them through writing. I write in many documents. It is easier to focus if I have the paragraph I am working on in front of me and nothing else. Sometimes, then, I end up with too many documents and have to puzzle them together.
    Every now and then, I get stuck. It will be too many ideas in my head, and I will get confused. A kind of cognitive overload. I usually can solve that by meditating, sitting still, and perhaps listening to music, and sometimes just lying down in a dark room until the confusion resolves. Then, usually, I come to some structural layer and clarity I could not see before. It’s a little like carving a statue out of stone, following the structure of the material and also a kind of intuition.
    I am typically switching back and forth between reading and writing to anchor what I do properly enough in the literature—not to sound too odd. I always have a nagging sense that I did not read enough. I also have a nagging sense that I did not write enough—or that I did not understand deep enough. At the end I am a slow writer, even though I produce text quite fast; it takes many rounds of writing and rewriting and restructuring and refining before a piece is even close to done, and then I typically have the feeling it is trivial and veeeery superficial (and everyone else tells me it’s technical and detailed).
    I enjoy writing. I think it is a gift. And it is beautiful to see a project growing from a very vague idea into something you would not have expected, not even while writing it.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Discover more from The Philosophers' Cocoon

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

Continue reading