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+[[!meta title="Close the writing accountability gap with Emacs"]]
+[[!meta copyright="Copyright © 2026 Blaine Mooers"]]
+[[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/writing-nav)" raw="yes"]]
+
+<!-- Initially generated with emacsconf-publish-talk-page and then left alone for manual editing -->
+<!-- You can manually edit this file to update the abstract, add links, etc. --->
+
+
+# Close the writing accountability gap with Emacs
+Blaine Mooers (he, him) - Pronunciation: Mooers is spoken as "Mores", <mailto:blaine-mooers@ou.edu>
+
+[[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/writing-before)" raw="yes"]]
+
+This 20-minute talk introduces writing-schedule.el and writing-habit.el available on GitHub at MooersLab.
+These tools address the challenge of managing multiple writing projects in parallel and measuring adherence to the writing schedule.
+These measurements provide valuable feedback that you can use to close the gap between your planned and actual writing activity.
+You can use this to make your writing habit antifragile, growing stronger in response to disruptions.
+
+These tools address also address the seemingly unsolvable problem of managing multiple parallel writing projects in academia.
+This issue is also widespread in other walks of life.
+Emacs can address this issue.
+
+Writing projects can span multiple days, weeks, months, and even years before they are finished.
+Long-running projects need to move forward steadily, while shorter writing projects have many deadlines.
+You can focus on only one project at a time, but you can make progress on two to four projects in a day by adhering to a schedule.
+Scheduling recurring events with time blocks is a popular approach to handling parallel projects.
+However, setting time blocks on paper or in an electronic application (e.g., iCal, gCal, or Outlook Express) quickly becomes tedious.
+We harness Emacs to cut the time spent scheduling the upcoming week in half.
+
+The package writing-schedule.el uses an org-mode table to plan the week's writing.
+Single letters are mapped to specific projects and added to cells of the table to assign time blocks to specific writing projects.
+You can quickly reassign the letters to a different project if you will use similar time slots in the upcoming week.
+
+You can use a table from the prior year as a template because the pattern of discretionary time available for writing is likely similar from year to year.
+You can create template files to reflect seasonal fluctuations in discretionary time available for writing.
+Writing schedule tables can accommodate 1-7 day work weeks.
+The information in the org-table can be exported as a list of scheduled TODOs for org-agenda, to a PDF file in the time-blocking format advocated by Calvin Newport, and to an .ics file for importing into iCal, gCal, or Outlook calendar.
+You can shift the time blocks as the day progresses to reflect what really happened.
+
+The time blocks are assigned to different writing activities: generative writing, editing, and support activities.
+You can schedule these activities to match your daily pattern of alertness and energy.
+Morning larks can assign generative writing to the early hours of the day; night owls can assign generative writing to the late hours.
+Both groups do editing best at peak alertness, usually between 9:30 and 11:30 A.M.
+They can assign support writing activities to the afternoons.
+
+This is the ideal pattern, but real-life obligations disrupt it.
+The record for the past week is compared with the planned events to measure adherence to the writing schedule using the dashboard produced by the package writing-habit.el.
+The package provides several bar plots comparing time scheduled and time spent by project and by writing activity.
+
+About the speaker:
+
+Blaine Mooers is an associate professor of biochemistry and physiology at the University of Oklahoma Health Campus, where he specializes in macromolecular crystallography.
+His research focuses on RNA structures and protein-drug complexes important in cancer.
+An avid Emacs, LaTeX, Clojure, and Python user for many years, he builds tools that optimize scientific workflows, including writing workflows.
+In this talk, he shares writing-schedule.el, which brings time blocking to org-agenda, and the template system he uses to schedule a week in minutes.
+His aim is an antifragile writing habit that grows stronger through the disruptions of academic life.
+
+
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+[[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/writing-after)" raw="yes"]]
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+[[!inline pages="internal(2026/info/writing-nav)" raw="yes"]]
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