[Project Management Series] How To Approach Your Writing Like A Project Manager (Re-Release EP 3)

Over the next few episodes, I’ll guide you through how to treat your writing like the complex, ongoing project it truly is. I’ll show you how to build systems that help you manage multiple due dates, balance competing responsibilities, and stay in control of your writing pipeline—without burning out or constantly reinventing the wheel.

In this first segment, I’m laying the foundation. I walk you through the two most important building blocks of academic writing project management:

1. Learning the core skills—like breaking big writing goals into manageable tasks and estimating how long those tasks take.
2. Creating a system that works—including templates, scheduling practices, and simple routines to keep your projects moving, even when your calendar is packed.

If you’ve ever felt like your writing is always on the back burner or you’re constantly busy but never finishing anything, this episode is for you. Start the series now and learn how to take control of your writing with less stress, more structure, and real progress. 

Essential Academic Writing Project Management Skills

Project management isn’t just for corporate teams—academics need it, too. The problem is that while we’re trained in research and theory, no one teaches us how to manage our writing workload. I lay out foundational project management skills that every academic writer should cultivate:

• Recognizing the full scope of a writing project: Writing is more than just words on the page. Reading, data analysis, organizing references, and responding to feedback—all of these are writing tasks.
• Understanding the difference between projects and tasks: Don’t put “write article” on your to-do list. Break it into actionable tasks like “draft introduction” or “revise methods section.”
• Learning to estimate time realistically: Most academics underestimate how long writing tasks take. Learn my practical method for breaking down work into one-hour chunks to better understand and predict your workflow.
• Scheduling with intention: You can assign due dates to individual tasks, schedule writing blocks, or pull from a task bank.

These strategies help you avoid feeling like you’re “never getting anything done,” and instead build momentum and confidence in your writing routine.

How to Create a Writing Project Management System

After identifying essential academic writing project management skills, I share how to create systems that make writing manageable and repeatable.

• Use templates: Create task lists for recurring project types—articles, book chapters, conference papers—so you’re never starting from scratch. Templates eliminate “wheel-spinning” and help you get to writing faster.
• Set aside dedicated project management time: Just 15 minutes on Sunday evenings and 10 minutes at the end of your workday can save you hours of indecision and inefficiency during the week.
• Trust your system: Once you’ve built a workflow that works, stick to it—especially when things get hectic. Resist the urge to change your plan midstream. Instead, adjust during your next planning session.
• Cycle through projects in focused sprints: If you can’t truly work on one project at a time (and most of us can’t), dedicate two-week writing sprints to one project to make meaningful progress without the chaos of switching back and forth.

“The truth is, professors need to be project managers, but we rarely think of writing an academic article or designing a new course as a project. It is though, and because of that, we need to start approaching our writing and all of our academic work like project managers. We need to develop some project management skills.”

“I love to make templates and I know that I need to plan a project management time, but as soon as I get just a little bit stressed, I push that all to the side. To combat this I’ve adopted the mantra ‘trust the system.’ When I want to ditch the plan I made the day before in response to something new that’s come up I just tell myself to trust the system. I work on the things I planned to work on and deal with fitting in the new task when I get to my project management planning time at the end of the day.” 

We’re receiving applications for our next cohort of Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap®. Check out the program details and start your application process here.

CONTINUE THE CONVERSATION:

1. Our 12-week Navigate: Your Writing Roadmap® program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. Apply here!
2. Cathy’s book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing is available in print! Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing,and changing academic culture one womxn and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
3. If you would like to hear more from Cathy for free, please subscribe to the weekly newsletter, In the Pipeline, at scholarsvoice.org. It’s a newsletter that she personally writes that goes out once a week with writing and publication tips, strategies, inspiration, book reviews and more.

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