Close the writing accountability gap with Emacs

Blaine Mooers (he, him) - Pronunciation: Mooers is spoken as "Mores", blaine-mooers@ou.edu

Format: 20-min talk ; Q&A: BigBlueButton conference room Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-writing
Etherpad: https://pad.emacsconf.org/2026-writing
Status: Waiting for video from speaker

Description

This 20-minute talk introduces writing-schedule.el and writing-habit.el available on GitHub at MooersLab. These tools address the challenge of managing multiple writing projects in parallel and measuring adherence to the writing schedule. These measurements provide valuable feedback that you can use to close the gap between your planned and actual writing activity. You can use this to make your writing habit antifragile, growing stronger in response to disruptions.

These tools address also address the seemingly unsolvable problem of managing multiple parallel writing projects in academia. This issue is also widespread in other walks of life. Emacs can address this issue.

Writing projects can span multiple days, weeks, months, and even years before they are finished. Long-running projects need to move forward steadily, while shorter writing projects have many deadlines. You can focus on only one project at a time, but you can make progress on two to four projects in a day by adhering to a schedule. Scheduling recurring events with time blocks is a popular approach to handling parallel projects. However, setting time blocks on paper or in an electronic application (e.g., iCal, gCal, or Outlook Express) quickly becomes tedious. We harness Emacs to cut the time spent scheduling the upcoming week in half.

The package writing-schedule.el uses an org-mode table to plan the week's writing. Single letters are mapped to specific projects and added to cells of the table to assign time blocks to specific writing projects. You can quickly reassign the letters to a different project if you will use similar time slots in the upcoming week.

You can use a table from the prior year as a template because the pattern of discretionary time available for writing is likely similar from year to year. You can create template files to reflect seasonal fluctuations in discretionary time available for writing. Writing schedule tables can accommodate 1-7 day work weeks. The information in the org-table can be exported as a list of scheduled TODOs for org-agenda, to a PDF file in the time-blocking format advocated by Calvin Newport, and to an .ics file for importing into iCal, gCal, or Outlook calendar. You can shift the time blocks as the day progresses to reflect what really happened.

The time blocks are assigned to different writing activities: generative writing, editing, and support activities. You can schedule these activities to match your daily pattern of alertness and energy. Morning larks can assign generative writing to the early hours of the day; night owls can assign generative writing to the late hours. Both groups do editing best at peak alertness, usually between 9:30 and 11:30 A.M. They can assign support writing activities to the afternoons.

This is the ideal pattern, but real-life obligations disrupt it. The record for the past week is compared with the planned events to measure adherence to the writing schedule using the dashboard produced by the package writing-habit.el. The package provides several bar plots comparing time scheduled and time spent by project and by writing activity.

About the speaker:

Blaine Mooers is an associate professor of biochemistry and physiology at the University of Oklahoma Health Campus, where he specializes in macromolecular crystallography. His research focuses on RNA structures and protein-drug complexes important in cancer. An avid Emacs, LaTeX, Clojure, and Python user for many years, he builds tools that optimize scientific workflows, including writing workflows. In this talk, he shares writing-schedule.el, which brings time blocking to org-agenda, and the template system he uses to schedule a week in minutes. His aim is an antifragile writing habit that grows stronger through the disruptions of academic life.

Questions or comments? Please e-mail blaine-mooers@ou.edu

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