How I create accountability for my research and writing

0:00 Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast, where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. As clinicians, we spend a decade or more as trainees learning to take care of patients. When we finally start our careers, we want to build research programs, but then we find that our years of clinical training did not adequately prepare us to lead our research program. Through no fault of our own, we struggle to find mentors, and when we can't, we quit. However, clinicians hold the keys to the greatest research breakthroughs.

0:40 For this reason, the Clinician Researcher podcast exists to give academic clinicians the tools to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. Now introducing your host, Toyosi Onwuemene. Welcome to the Clinician Researcher podcast. I'm your host, Toyosi Onwuemene, and it is such a pleasure to be talking with you today. I want to thank you for taking the time to listen to me. It is the reason I keep speaking, because you keep listening. So thank you for keeping me going. And so about a day or so ago, I talked about the way you can accomplish any of your research and writing goals by creating structure.

1:29 And one of the questions that was posed to me was about how do I get accountability for my writing goals? How do I get accountability for my writing goals? And I want to share with you how I create accountability for my research and writing, especially with regards to my writing goals. And this is important because when I first started, I was a binge writer. Oh my goodness, binge writing. That's a problem. But I was a binge writer. I would literally wake up one day and vomit on paper or in a Word document for seven or eight hours at a stretch. But I, you know, to be honest, you can do that. Sometimes I would even pull an all nighter.

2:09 It sounds funny to me to do that now, but it really was my go-to strategy and it was working. Things were moving forward, but I learned something that changed my mind. I learned something and I'm going to share some of what I learned with you. But the one of the most important things I learned is writing is a daily habit that you do every day. And it's like, whoa, writing every day? I mean, yeah, I'm writing my patient notes. It's like, no, writing for your research. Do it every day. Minimum of 30 minutes a day. Don't even try to do more than 30 when you start. Just do it every day. And that really changed. It transformed my writing. It transformed my writing. I have explosive, huh, explosive productivity. It's like, what does that even mean? But let's just say relative to where I used to be, because what you can create sitting down in one spot for eight hours, maybe every couple of months, is different from what you can create sitting down for 30 minutes every day, daily without fail.

3:02 And when I say daily, I do not write on the weekends. I mean, honestly, I have my own personal writing projects, but I don't write for my research on the weekends. I'm very much a Monday to Friday writer, and sometimes, actually, it's really Monday to Thursday. But, yes, daily writing. It's a keystone habit. OK, I'm giving away some of my secret sauce here, but let me start. Number one is I have writing goals. I have writing goals. And remember, I had an episode recently, you should check it out, where I talked about creating a strategic plan. And the strategic plan is really a summary of my research and writing goals for the quarter. And so I own my plan.

3:43 I think about it. I say, what do I want to accomplish this quarter? And I especially focus on the things that no one is going to force me to do. I have no accountability unless I create accountability for myself. And so I write them down. The first thing I do is I write down my writing goals, and I write it down as part of my strategic plan. And whether you create a strategic plan or not, writing down your goals is so key, it's so important, because the moment you commit them to a Word document or pages, whatever you use, the moment you commit them to paper, you've kind of made like a compact. I mean, is it reversible, only if you choose?

4:27 But you've made an announcement, you've declared that these are my goals. And all of a sudden, you kind of are accountable to the thing you've already put down on paper. And granted, that's not going to be enough. I'm going to show you a little bit more about how you get accountability, because writing it down is one form of accountability. But you got to go beyond the accountability of you, because you have accountability. The moment you write something down, it's become real. You've made it real, but only you've seen it. And depending on how well you keep compacts with yourself, you may or may not think it can be broken. But the first step, the very, very first step, is to actually have writing goals and to write them down.

5:16 That's number one. Number two is now the accountability piece. I share my strategic plan publicly from my accountability group to see. Now we have a forum, we have a site that we go to, and we write using tools on that site. And my accountability group, it's kind of like our home base, and so we can see documents that are posted, things like that. And to be honest, I don't know how many of the members of my peer mentoring group, there are four of us, I don't know how many of them go to look at my strategic plan. And granted, they've looked at it in the past, so I know that they could. But now we've done the process enough times, gosh, we've been doing this now for at least four years now.

6:01 So and that's four years times four quarters, is it three quarters? Yeah, four times four, it's 16. And so I think now we've done it often enough that we're not necessarily going to look for each other's plans, but we still do. Anyway, the point that I'm making is that it's a publicly posted plan so that people can hold me accountable for it, so that people can look at it and say, well, this is what you said you were going to do. How is that going? And I will tell you, you know, these things are not written in stone. They're not like written in blood. They can change. And invariably, what I find is that I've kind of overdone it. I've overshot. I've been very ambitious, and I like to be very ambitious and then be disappointed that, you know, I was overly ambitious.

6:46 But you know, so sometimes I say these are the grandiose things that I have planned and they don't all work out exactly. But you know what? Some of them do. And in writing them down and declaring them, making them public, that's the pathway to making sure that they move forward. And so I make my writing goals public. And that is number three. And here's the thing. Oh, what did I say? Yes, I share my strategic plan public. That was number two. Now I moved on to number three without announcing that it was number three. But every week I make my writing goals public. And part of what I do is that in our writing accountability group meetings, we all, you know, check in with each other.

7:29 We'll say, how was last week? What writing did you accomplish? And what goals do you have for your writing next week? It's the question we always end with. We always ask also, like, what are you celebrating? But we always end by asking, what are you doing next week? And sometimes we haven't thought about what we're doing next week. And so when they ask, what are you doing next week? Then it forces you to sit and say, well, what am I doing next week? What makes sense? And then you begin to share goals that now someone else has heard. And so you know that next week someone's going to ask you, well, how did it go? How did these goals go? And so every week I publicly share my plans.

8:11 And even when we're not able to meet, because our group is not always able to meet every time, we make it public on the site where we're all going back to so that somebody is aware of what the writing goals are. And so every week I make my writing goals public. The next thing, number four, is I share my wins. And so when I succeed, I say, hey, hey, this is what worked. This is why it worked. This is how amazing I felt because it worked. I share my wins. And the reason I share my wins is because when I share my wins, I have to make explicit what is in my mind, what is implicit to me.

8:51 I have to make explicit what it was about the win that made it a real win. And because of that, I kind of like solidify it in my mind of why it's a win. You know, because your mind plays tricks on you and it tells you you haven't accomplished anything, you haven't done anything. You've been done with your whole week. Your mind will always do that. And so by sharing a win, I tell my mind, no, no, no, you're wrong. This was amazing. And this is why it was amazing. And so sharing my wins with my accountability, my research and writing accountability group, enables me to really see what I've accomplished. And it just fills me full of joy. So it also drives me to want to do more.

9:33 So every week I make my writing goals public. That was number three. Oh, wait a minute. I keep going backwards. That was number four. I share my wins with my accountability group. Okay. All right. Number five is, you know, it's great to share wins, but then, you know, there's some stuff I missed. And so number five is that I explain what happened with the other things that didn't work. So invariably, I list, perhaps in the week before I said, okay, I'm going to do these five things. And then I come back and I'm like, these three things, I did them. Oh my gosh, so awesome. And my group is like, rah, rah, rah, great job. And they're like, but you had five things.

10:14 What happened to the other two? And this is the opportunity where I say, hey, well, what happened was maybe I overdid it. And they're like, well, how could you do things differently next time? And it's a great group. It's a peer, it's a peer coaching group. So we're coaching each other. It's really beautiful. But I share my wins and then I explain what happened with the stuff that I didn't win at and it's okay. You know, it's not a place of judgment. It's not a place of pointing the finger. It's just helping me again. This is about me processing in my mind. So what didn't work? Why didn't it work? What could you do differently next time so that it does work? And that's the power of going through the process of documenting what happened and why things didn't work like they were supposed to.

11:00 Number six, and I believe it's the right number six this time, is I set my intention for the following week. I say, hey, this is what I did last week. It was so awesome. This is what didn't work out. That's why it wasn't so awesome. But next week, I'm going to go with four things now, not five. I'm going to go with four because I know I can make four. I set my intention for the following week. And again, in setting that intention, it is a public intention, and I have a plan in my hand to move forward with in the next week. And number seven is I execute. I have a plan, and I go do it. I go do it writing every day because I know, I know that next week somebody in my group is going to say, what happened to this goal?

11:49 I know that I will need to give an account of my plan, like how did it work? Why didn't it work? And because of that, I go execute. I go do the writing. I go do the work I said I was going to do so I can come back and share more wins. And that's a really awesome thing. So I have just given you seven things, seven ways in which I get accountability for my writing goals. I talked to you about my keystone habit of writing. I actually have the writing goals. I make the goals. And I share my strategic plan publicly for my group to see so everybody knows what my plan is for the whole quarter. And then number three, each week I make my writing goals public. I say, hey, these are the goals that I'm going to accomplish.

12:32 And I share my wins with my accountability group. That's number four. And then I explain what happened with the wins that I didn't have, with the goals that I missed. And then number six, I set my intention for the following week. I say, I'm going to make this happen. I decide. I decide. And then I go do it. And I go do it because I know people are looking for me and they're going to ask me. And because I value their opinion and their respect, even though they're not there to judge me, I execute knowing that I'm going to need to explain to them how come it didn't work, if it didn't work. So those are my seven ways that I get accountability for my writing goals. And I want to invite you. How do you get accountability for your writing goals?

13:14 What does your writing look like? I want you to think about your writing. Whatever it is today, even if it's awesome, it could always go to the next level. So don't say, oh, this is not me. My writing is great. Even when your writing is great, it can always go to the next level. So I invite you this week to think about your current accountability structures for your research and writing and think about how could they improve? How could they be better? Or maybe you're in a place where you're like, oh, I don't even have any anything at all. I have no accountability for my research and writing. I do the binge writing thing every once in a while. Or maybe you're just not sleeping night after night during this binge writing thing.

13:55 Think about how you could create structure and accountability for your research and writing. And as you find things that I didn't tell you because I only gave you seven and there's so much more, come find me and tell me about what your plans are about what you've been doing to create accountability for your research and writing. All right. So that's the end of today's episode. And I want to remind you that we have webinar coming up next week, Monday, November 20th at 6 p.m. and I will tell you about how you too can transition successfully from clinician to a research leader. I look forward to seeing you there. Please share this episode with somebody else who needs to hear it.

14:36 It's been a pleasure. Have a great day and thank you for listening. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Clinician Researcher podcast where academic clinicians learn the skills to build their own research program, whether or not they have a mentor. If you found the information in this episode to be helpful, don't keep it all to yourself. Someone else needs to hear it. So take a minute right now and share it. As you share this episode, you become part of our mission to help launch a new generation of clinician researchers who make transformative discoveries that change the way we do health care.

15:25 Thank you very much.