Skills Earth Sciences

Time management

Scientific writing can be a time-consuming process consisting of designing the project, reading and collating relevant literature, phrasing and visualizing your own results, discussing them, and fitting them into the framework of pre-existing research. Start your project by making a time schedule to determine how much time you think you will need for your research (literature review/field work/lab analyses), and make an estimate of how much time you think you may need to structure, write, revise, restructure, and rewrite your text. Remember that adapting your time plan along the way is part of the process. You may find yourself ‘writing to think’12 in your first draft, so it will be necessary to revise that text and organize it in a more structured way later on. Start writing as soon as possible (don’t leave it till the end!3), and keep at it (see General tips for the writing stage for tips on this, and the Self-regulated learning module for further information).