I had read a post somewhere here talking about the "parking on a downhill slope" idea, or leaving yourself a good starting point when you quit a longer task so it's easy to pick up the next day, so I decided to try it out as I work on my master's thesis.

As I'm sure many other writers here will attest from their own procrastination battles, the hardest part about writing for me is actually sitting down at the keyboard and starting to type. Usually, once I get one or two sentences out, it picks up momentum and I have a pretty good session. So in order to park on that downhill slope, now when I quit for the day I stop in mid-sentence, sometimes leaving an open quotation mark or an ugly grammatical mistake on purpose. Before, I used to wrap up nice neat paragraphs or section breaks, then when I started the next time I'd stare at it and fumble around with how to begin. Now, I jump right on the little mess I left for myself, and before I know it I'm writing away.

I just wanted share this little trick because it's been so helpful. My page count has shot up since I've started doing it, relieving all kinds of stress over missing deadlines and guilt about not working enough. It's a cheap trick maybe, but I need every little advantage I can get.