Ep. 91 - How to Keep Writing When You're Running on Empty

Feeling drained, scattered, or like your brain is running on fumes? You’re not alone—and you don’t have to give up on your writing. In this episode, Leslie shares what to do when your capacity is at rock bottom but you still want to keep your research alive.

This episode includes strategies for protecting your mental space, rethinking what “counts” as writing, and tracking small wins that actually build momentum.  Writing doesn’t have to be big or impressive to matter—it just needs to keep you connected to your ideas.

Along the way, Leslie invites you to reflect on what truly deserves your attention and rediscover writing as both resistance and renewal in challenging times.

If you’ve been feeling overwhelmed or guilty about not doing “enough,” this episode will help you find gentler ways to move forward. Remember that every little bit counts!

Transcript

YWU Podcast Episode 91 Transcript

“Strategies for Writing When You’re at Low Capacity”

Hi there writers! 

I decided to do this episode after hosting an informal group coaching session for folks on my email listserv last week.

My summers are crazy and I have no mental space to do anything extra.

But once fall rolls around and my clients head back to campus, my schedule frees up a lot. I can come up for air and read, think, and dream more expansively.

One of my priorities lately is acting locally and doing more small things that tangibly help those in my community. 

As the late, great Jane Goodall said, “Think locally, and then you have the courage to act globally. If you only think globally to start with, you won't have the energy to act.”

For the past year, I’ve been taking my five-year-old son to feed animals at the local science center on the weekends.

Let me tell you, there’s nothing that can cheer you up faster than watching a chinchilla take an enthusiastic dust bath.

I also donate to a food pantry in town that anyone can use when they need it and intentionally leave positive Google reviews for local businesses.

I really believe that the small things add up to something much greater.

Then it dawned on me that I have a community of kind, conscientious people who are on my listserv, and I wanted to help them in a small way as well. 

I had some space on a random Wednesday morning, so I decided to offer an hour of free group coaching. 

My invite message said that their only job was to come and offer their support to others and receive support from others.

And the only rule was that they needed to keep their cameras on! Because it’s deflating when people come to an online workshop or something and they keep their faces hidden.

In the end, about 15 people attended. It was a lovely mix of current and previous clients and other folks I’ve never met before. 

I didn’t have any particular structure for the group. I just wanted to take everyone’s temperature and get a sense of what academics are feeling in this moment.

And it’s clear that folks are stretched thin. Some are feeling very unsafe where they live and work.

Others are drowning in their many service and teaching responsibilities.

Things are hard, and naturally, a lot of folks aren’t feeling very motivated to work on their own writing and research.  

There’s so much existential worry clouding everyone’s mind. And we all know how hard it is to write when your mind feels muddled. 

So today, I wanted to give some ideas for how to keep writing when your capacity is low.

We need to use writing to both resist what’s happening and to sustain ourselves during this unstable time. 

And I think that more than ever, we need to use writing as a source of hope. 

You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/91.

First, take a short pause to breathe

So before I give a few suggestions, I want to invite you to do something you may not have done all day or all week. Or maybe even since Inauguration Day, for that matter!

Which is to slow down and take five deep breaths.

You might be listening to this while cooking dinner, washing the dishes, exercising, or driving to work.

No matter where you are, I invite you to fully stop and be present with your breath.

If you can close your eyes safely, then do it. Really fill up your chest and your belly with air. And then expel as much air as possible out of your body.

Try to elongate your in-breaths and really draw out your out-breaths.

Scan your body. Notice any pain, pressure, or tension you are feeling in different parts of your body and intentionally try to let it all go.

Feel free to pause this and just breathe for the next few minutes.

Once you are feeling more grounded and more present, let’s move on!

Suggestion #1: Practice Attentional Hygiene

So I think the first step for getting back into writing during overwhelming times involves clearing your head. 

And this means practicing something called attentional hygiene, which I’ll get back to in a second.

The 24-hour news cycle that dominates our lives was created to provoke and destabilize. 

Lately, there is so much intentional chaos and destruction that if you pay attention to all of it, you will be rendered helpless and hopeless.

And that’s what I’m seeing a lot lately in academics who are trying to stay informed.

Without clear limits, staying informed can take a huge toll on your energy and mental health, not to mention the ability to do your own work.

You must implement some conscious boundaries with information to protect what truly matters to YOU.  

I’m a huge fan of Oliver Burkeman, who wrote the amazing book 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. I talked about this book way back in Ep. 29: A Better Way to Manage Your Time. 

4000 weeks is the average length of a human life, which sounds pretty damn short when you look at it that way.

The book’s main point is that we need to think of time as a finite resource.

Because it’s finite, we will never be able to accomplish everything we want to in a day, in a year, or even in our entire lives.

Accepting this fact frees us up to pursue the things that are most important to us and most aligned with our values.

Recently he came out with a companion book called Meditations for Mortals: Four Weeks to Embrace Your Limitations and Make Time for What Counts.

It’s a series of 28 short essays. You’re meant to read one per day for a month and use it to reflect on your beliefs and actions.

I was really struck by the essay from Day 6, entitled “You Can’t Care About Everything: On Staying Sane When the World’s a Mess.”

It starts with a quote by William James: “The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

So I’m going to read a substantial part of this essay because I think it really sums up what so many of us have been feeling since January.

Here is what Burkeman writes on page 33 (note that his book was published prior to Trump 2.0): 

“It was in 2016, after the election of Donald Trump and the Brexit referendum result, that I first began to notice a bizarre effect of all of this in myself, and more acutely in certain friends and acquaintances. 

It wasn’t simply that people were addicted to doomscrolling (although they certainly were). It was that they’d started ‘living inside the news.’ 

The news had become the psychological center of gravity in their lives—more real, somehow, than the world of their home, friends, and careers, to which they dropped in only sporadically before returning to the main event. 

They seemed significantly more personally involved in whether Trump would fire his Secretary of State, or who he might nominate for the Supreme Court, than in any of the local or personal dramas unfolding in their workplaces or families or neighborhoods. 

Their motives were generally good, so it seems a little churlish to point out that this behavior in no way makes the world a better place. 

Living inside the new feels like doing your duty and being a good citizen. But you can stay informed on ten minutes a day; scrolling any more than that risks becoming disempowering and paralyzing, and certainly eats up time you could have spent making a difference…”

“In other words, pick your battles, and don’t feel bad about doing so. By embracing your limitations in this way, you’ll be in a position to do more to fight the battles you do pick, and also thereby to feel better about yourself, than the person who tries to care about everything.”

What I take from this is that we need to intentionally decide what we will allow to take up our mental space.

Because there is too much suffering in the world and there are too many things to be outraged about. 

Now, before I choose to spend emotional energy on an issue, I ask myself: “In this moment, can I do anything tangible to improve this situation?” 

If not, then I actively put it out of my mind.

Let’s take the example of climate change. As you’re well aware, this topic is a deep, dark, depressing and scary rabbit hole to fall into. 

It is incredibly easy to feel existential angst that gets added onto our daily-life stressors. I mean, climate change is a reason that many young people are choosing not to have children.

I live outside of Boston. At the beginning of October, it’s 80 degrees and has been for quite some time. 

Should it be this warm? No. Is it beautiful and comfortable? Yes.  

For the past few years that it’s been this way I could not consciously allow myself to enjoy the warmth because I would get so upset about what humanity has done to the planet. 

But now, I realize that me worrying about something I cannot tangibly change in this moment is helping no one—certainly not the planet! 

So I’m allowing myself to enjoy the warmth this year.

And something I can, and have been doing, is read the Dr. Seuss book The Lorax, with my 5-year-old son. 

It explains in a creative, child-appropriate way the ecological devastation that occurs when people and corporations become too greedy.

Amazingly, I’ve been able to have full-on conversations with my kid about why we don’t shop at Target anymore. It’s because they’re too greedy. And he gets it!

But me feeling guilty about enjoying a warm day in October just makes me upset and demoralized, which has negative ripple effects on everyone around me.

As Burkeman writes on page ??, “It used to be said about certain horrifying news events that ‘if you’re not outraged, you’re not paying attention.’ 

But that’s a relic of a time when people had attention to spare, and when it wasn’t in the vested interests of media outlets to stoke as much outrage as possible. 

In an age of attention scarcity, the greatest act of good citizenship may be learning to withdraw your attention from everything except the battles you’ve chosen to fight.”

All of this got me thinking about the concept of attention hygiene. It’s basically like sleep hygiene where you make a number of small, intentional decisions that help produce a better night’s rest.

I was curious whether anyone had written about this concept and found a really amazing webpage all about it that I will also link to on the episode page.

Basically, attentional hygiene is defined as “the practice of maintaining the quality of what we allow into our minds. It is a direct acknowledgment that our capacity to pay attention is a finite resource, much like the energy we use each day. 

The daily management of this resource involves making conscious choices about the information we consume, the notifications we receive, and the media we engage with… 

By being selective, we create the mental conditions needed to focus on what is personally meaningful and important.”

Ultimately, protecting your mental space is really the first step in getting back into writing when you’re at low capacity.

So let me ask you—what do you want to limit to conserve your attention for the things that matter most to you?

Are you going to take the NYTimes app off of your phone, like one of my clients did?

Will you try setting a 10-minute timer when you scroll social media?

Perhaps you will commit to not reading any emails until after you’ve spent 30 minutes on your own work.

It all starts with intention.

Suggestion #2: Redefine What Counts as Writing

The second suggestion I have for writing when you’re overwhelmed is to redefine what counts as writing. 

It’s tempting to measure progress by things like word counts, completed or submitted drafts, or the hours you’ve spent sitting at your computer. 

But when your capacity is limited, progress looks different. 

Reading one article and jotting a few notes counts. 

Revising a single topic sentence counts. 

Even thinking over a question in your mind during a walk counts. 

You really don’t need hours to make progress. Instead of waiting for a wide-open day that may never come, I would encourage you to commit 15-20 minutes of focused work a day on your project. 

If you have broken things down into the smallest possible chunks, then there’s a good chance that amount of time will be enough to complete one of them.

And maybe you do 15 minutes, assess how you’re feeling, and then commit to 15 more. This is especially good for tasks that don’t require super deep thinking, like reading, taking notes, proofreading a document.

If you’re feeling too frazzled to type on your computer, try dictating a voice note instead where you brainstorm ideas for your paper.

These small actions keep your project alive without demanding too much.

 Suggestion #3: Measure Your Progress by Keeping a “Done” List

My third, and final, suggestion follows from the previous one.

And it is a simple practice of keeping a “done” list, which is a daily record of what you’ve done that day in service to your own scholarship.

Recently I’ve been talking to a lot of clients about how they feel like they are working non-stop but making progress at all on their research. 

This is really demoralizing. It’s also untrue, as people aren’t giving themselves credit for the things they HAVE actually done to move their research forward. 

So, at the end of your day—or even after a short writing session—take a minute to record what you did towards your research. No matter how small it seems, it counts!

They could be things like:

“I reread the introduction to my article and tightened two sentences.”

“I located one citation I’ve been meaning to track down.”

“I opened my dissertation file and reread the Intro chapter.”

“I took notes on an article related to my next project.”

These are the kinds of tasks that rarely make it onto a to-do list because they don’t feel big enough. But together, they are the foundation of scholarly progress.

And when we are feeling overwhelmed, it’s the smallest things that count the most.

A “done” list helps you see that, even in a packed week, your research hasn’t disappeared entirely.

You’ve stayed in conversation with your own ideas, keeping the thread alive even when time and energy are scarce.

FYI, I created a version of one of these that I call a “daily wins list” that I’ll link to on my website where you can download it for free.

It’s a daily reminder of how, in the midst of all the craziness, you are still a scholar with important things to say.

Summing Everything Up

So let’s sum everything up!

Having low capacity is just a fact of life for academics right now. 

I’ve given some suggestions for how to keep moving forward in your own scholarship when everything feels overwhelming.

Suggestion #1: Practice attentional hygiene. 

Create some ruthless boundaries around where you will put your attention in order to center your own priorities and values. 

Suggestion #2: Redefine what counts as writing. 

This is all about bringing down your own impossibly high standards and embracing process over outcome. 

Suggestion #3: Keep a “done” list.

Writing an article or an entire book is a marathon, and marathons are comprised of about 55,000 steps. 

Each one is necessary to reach the end. So track your work at the end of the day and intentionally acknowledge the steps you took. 

The goal is to not stop taking small steps, even when things are hard.

We are living through an uncertain period of history, but so did our ancestors before us.

Writing is resistance against tyranny and fascism. It’s a way to fight back by using our ideas to help birth a different and better future.
 
 

Let’s be reminded that joy, hope and progress always exist alongside cruelty, oppression and despair.

And on this note, I want to end things a little bit differently today.

I will leave you with a short prayer taken word-for-word from a gathering I recently attended with liberatory business coach Simone Seol.

Her words really resonated with me, and perhaps they will with you as well. She said:

“I thank those in countless previous generations, as well as those alive now, who have tended and are tending to the Earth in each of our locations all over the world, so that we could stand on it today and do the work we’re doing today.

I thank the ancestors, elders, teachers, and fighters who have taught us by word and example what it means to show up with courage, love, and clarity—who have taught us how to access joy and beauty even in the most difficult circumstances—for it is on their shoulders we stand.

I ask for the wisdom that flows through us when we gather in community and get plugged into something infinitely larger than each of our individual selves.

May we move with imperfection, grace, and a sense of humor.

And may we leave this gathering not as we came, but as who we are being called to become—for our communities, for the Earth, and for our descendants.

In gratitude for what has been, in presence of what is, and in radical hope for what can be.”

Take care of yourselves and others this week. 

And if you haven’t joined my listserv, you can do so here!