Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/fiddleoak/
under this licence: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/deed.en_GB 
Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.
HACK YOUR TIME. Some weirder tricks here: 1) If you wake up in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep, rather than tossing and turning in bed, get up and write. 2) Give yourself bizarre and unrealistic deadlines, and make yourself stick to them. 3) Ask friends to join with you on bizarre and unrealistically-deadlined projects for moral support. 4) Never stand in a line without a mobile device and work you can do on it. 5) Get hands-free bluetooth in your car, so you can make phone calls while driving. 6) Get a dictation app for your smart phone, so you can write while driving. 7) Do work for friends (preferably work they loathe doing) and then ask them to do work for you (work you loathe doing). 8) Use the dead time in between other things to do work – take shower, work while hair dries, call taxi, work while waiting for it to arrive, etc. 9) Keep written summaries or mind maps of major projects handy at all times and review them often. Newer and better ideas will occur to you at the strangest moments and you’ll find it easy to share these ideas and get useful feedback in chance encounters. 10) When you have no work implements at hand, work in your brain (train rides are good places for this).What else do you need to hack ?
Daniel said on November 26, 2013
Cool ideas, however, I’d be careful not to *use* the time too much. There is a need for incubation phases in creative work — which science inherently is. So, also hack your time to do “nothing” — take a walk, a bath, visit a (classical) concert, and the like — not with the intention to ‘use’ the time, but just to relax. And when the ideas come, use the tactics described in your post to capture them 🙂