Dear readers and listeners,

In this episode of the Works in Progress podcast, we discuss our experiment 6: writing buddies. We describe what happened when we spent a few minutes each day updating one another about our writing, and responding to one another’s updates.

Topics include:

Why we loved being writing buddiesWhether it’s a good idea to share early drafts of fictionWhat to look for in a writing buddyHow much we love each other

The episode is 30 minutes long, and you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you prefer, here’s the transcript for episode 6.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Love, Noah and Indigo

Dear readers and listeners,

In this episode of the Works in Progress podcast, we discuss our experiment 5: engaging with uncertainty. We describe what happened when we spent a few minutes each day focusing on the uncertainties we were feeling in our lives and in relation to our writing.

Topics include:

The importance of uncertainty to the creative processHow uncertainty can lead to feelings of more freedomUpdates on what has stuck with us from previous experiments

Noah mentioned that he was reading and listening to some resources about uncertainty, and we will post about those next week.

The episode is 20 minutes long, and you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you prefer, here’s the transcript for episode 5.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Love,

Noah and Indigo

Dear readers and listeners,

In this episode of the Works in Progress podcast, we discuss our experiment 4: the writing journal. We describe what we noticed about the journal, what we liked, what we didn’t like, and whether the journal influenced our writing progress or habits.

Topics include:

Complaining about and also praising using numbers to represent how you feel about something (e.g., how we used ‘1’ to represent not wanting to write, and ‘5’ to represent really wanting to write. These are also called Likert scales)How we organize our writing notebooks and documentsAdapting the writing journal to suit the needs of different kinds of projects

The episode is 33 minutes long, and you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you prefer, here's the transcript for episode 4.

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Love,

Noah and Indigo

Dear readers and listeners!

WHOOPSIE!! We’re back, and we have more questions that we needed to talk about regarding Experiment 2. If you’re just tuning into our little circus here, we strongly recommend that you go back and listen to Episodes 1 and 2, and take a look at our blog, so that you know what the heck we’re talking about.

After recording Episode 2, Indigo realized that something was bothering them about how we had conducted Experiment 2. Indigo felt that our questions - Did you get up every 30 minutes? and Did you stay up for 5 minutes? perhaps OVERSIMPLIFIED what was actually going on. They seemed like they were straightforward questions, but in practice were not as straightforward to answer as we thought. When we reached the analysis stage that we’re in now, we started to realize that although we were focusing on breaks - we hadn’t clearly worked out what breaks meant to us, and that made the experiment complicated.

We just forged ahead - because we were excited about what we were doing, and because we wanted to make sure we were hitting the deadlines we had imposed on ourselves, but in hindsight we were setting ourselves up for some research hardship. We hadn’t clearly defined our OBJECT OF STUDY - what we were looking at - and we hadn’t really worked out an OPERATIONAL DEFINITION for what a break meant to us in the context of this experiment.

As you can hear in the supplementary discussion we have in this podcast - that led to some confusion and complications for our analysis. In the data, we talk about both BODY and BRAIN BREAKS, but hadn’t clearly defined what those were. We did our best to keep track of both, but our data collection wasn’t nuanced enough to capture the data we were hoping to - particularly about BRAIN BREAKS. This led to a flaw in the design of our data collection process.

Listen to our conversation, where we unpack where we think we went off the rails, why that might have happened, and how this kind of starting and stopping and readjusting is a very important part of the research process. For chunks of Experiment 2, we think that we were trying to impose a framework that didn’t quite fit our experience (research is often not quite accurate). We were also feeling a time pressure to make the deadlines (that we have imposed on ourselves) - THANKS, CAPITALISM.

We have decided to build in a checking mechanism into our experiments moving forwards - which is why you’ll start to see us talking about a PILOT period. We’ll try out the experiment, see how it’s working, and adjust things so that we can actually explore the questions we want to investigate and not rush through or barge through the experiment to meet a deadline. We think that this might help us to test out the experiment and help us to design experiments that really help us write and create more freely.

The episode is approximately 20 minutes long, and you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

Here is a transcript for the show. 

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Love, Noah and Indigo.

Dear readers and listeners!

Welcome to our data analysis episode for experiment 2! We recorded this episode after we had each spent a few days immersed in our data. In the podcast, we discussed the patterns we’ve been noticing in the data, and figured out which of these patterns we want to write more about as we sum up the experiment in the next few days.

Highlights of our discussion include:

Overview of experiment 2: the question, the experiment, and the data we collectedWas two weeks enough to make taking breaks a habit? Yes and no.Key factors that influence whether we take breaks or not: does the work ‘feel like work’? We were more likely to take breaks from ‘work that felt like work,’ than ‘work that felt like a hobby.’ We were more likely to take breaks when working independently than during meetings or collaborative work.How doing the experiment together added accountability, and helped us take breaks more seriously. Our breaks tended to be longer than 5 minutes: is this a problem?

We had planned to post our summaries and recommendations for experiment 2 over the next week of so after recording this episode, but a few days after we recorded this episode, we realized that our data collection method was flawed. We decided to record another data analysis episode to capture our conversation about the flaw in our experiment. We’ll post it in a few days, followed by our summaries and recommendations for experiment 2 over the next couple of weeks!

The episode is 29 minutes long, and you can listen on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, TuneIn, Stitcher, or wherever else you get your podcasts.

If you prefer, here's the transcript for this episode. 

As always, we welcome your feedback!

Love,

Noah and Indigo

Dear readers - and hopefully soon-to-be-listeners! Noah and I have decided to start a podcast companion to the blog. This is our introductory episode, to introduce listeners to our research process.