Run your own

The shape of a session

Three and a half hours: thirty minutes of goal-setting — with a themed discussion in front of it if you want one — then three pomodoro work blocks with real breaks in between. The discussion is the draw; the pomodoros are the point.

The topic is optional and always was. Plenty of good sessions are just the loop: turn up, commit, work, report. Run it bare for a few weeks and add a topic when you have one worth thirty minutes.

The session timer runs this plan, and a classic 25-on/5-off version for shorter sittings.

Ground rules

• Phones away during pomodoros. Breaks are for talking; pomodoros are not.
• Goals must be specific. "Draft 300 words of methods," not "work on thesis." Verb + deliverable + size — if a stranger couldn't say whether it got done, it isn't a goal yet. This is the one rule worth being fussy about.
• No judgment on missed goals. A missed goal is data about how long things take, which is the single most useful thing a research student can learn.
• Drop-in is fine. One pomodoro counts. So does turning up for the break. Attendance rules kill these groups faster than anything else.

What actually makes it work

• Food. Coffee and something to eat at the breaks. It is not a frivolous line item — it is what makes people come back and what makes the breaks social rather than furtive.
• A visible board. Three columns — To do, Ongoing, Done — with one sticky per objective and a colour per person. We used Miro; a whiteboard and real sticky notes work just as well, and the board here works on a shared screen. Moving a sticky to Done is a small real reward at the exact moment the work finishes.
• A facilitator who also works. Post your own goals, report back honestly, admit when you missed one. It sets the tone faster than any rule.
• The same room, on a schedule. Alternate morning and afternoon slots if you can — it doubles the number of people whose calendars fit.
• A themed discussion. Genuinely optional, but it's the thing that gets people through the door the first time. The topics here are ready to run, slides included — or invite someone to talk for fifteen minutes about what they're stuck on.

Your first ten minutes

1. Ask the room: "What's your biggest barrier to protected research time?" Do not open with slides. The answers are the session.
2. Explain the loop: commit, work, report. Thirty seconds.
3. Everyone writes three objectives and posts them — verb + deliverable + size.
4. Everyone says one out loud to the person next to them.
5. Start the timer. On time, even if people are still arriving.

You might not have to start from scratch

Shut Up & Write! has been running free writing sessions since 2007 — a nonprofit with groups in more than eighty countries, in cafés, libraries and online. Their format is almost exactly the loop above: everyone says what they're working on, then writes in silence for a set period, then checks in at the end. No critique, no instruction, no cost.

So before you book a room: see whether there's already one near you, or online. And if there isn't, they have a well-worn path for starting one — become an organiser and you get their network and their materials rather than only these.

What a WAG adds on top is the research-degree end of it: goals written as verb + deliverable + size rather than "write", a report-back that treats a missed goal as calibration data, and the option of a themed discussion about the parts of a PhD that aren't writing. If your group is all researchers, that's worth having. If it isn't, Shut Up & Write is the better-supported answer.

Take the slides

There's an intro deck for the first meeting — what a WAG is, the loop, and how to write a goal — and every topic has its own deck attached at the bottom of the page. Change the names on them and run them.