Becoming a Productive Writer

How do you get to the point where you can start and finish writing projects efficiently? Many people who have attended my workshops ask that question or some variant of it. Those same people already know of the vast self-help literature on the topic: a search of an online bookseller will turn up pages of listings, many offering "tips" and activities guaranteed to turn readers into writers.
My experience teaching writing for 35 years and running workshops for both students and instructors tells me a different story. For a recent workshop and podcast, I decided to look at the problem of academics who are having trouble getting their writing done from a different perspective. I took as my jumping off point Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Successful People: 25 million readers couldn't be wrong, could they? I then combined his ideas with Helen Sword's Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write. Finally, I added insights from research in writing studies about what kinds of knowledge writers need to have to succeed, drawn from Anne Beaufort's College Writing and Beyond.
Here are Covey's habits with my translations of them for writing in parentheses:

1. Be proactive. (Start writing today.)
2. Begin with the end in mind. (Know what you want to write.)
3. Put first things first. (Prioritize tasks that result in text.)
4. Think win-win. (Establish group contracts early.)
5. Seek first to understand, then to be understood. (Spend time planning your writing.)
6. Synergize. (Build trust with co-authors; be open to new interpretations/positions.)
7. Sharpen the saw. (Take care of yourself.)

Helen Sword reports that she identifies 4 categories of habits that successful academic writers use:

1. behavioral habits, like Covey's advice to be proactive;
2. artisanal habits or a bias toward ongoing improvement, akin to Covey's sharpen the saw habit;
3. social habits that involve working with others productively, not unlike Covey's admonition to synergize; and
4. emotional habits that create pleasure and growth through writing, which I'm not sure that Covey directly addresses in his book.

But good habits are not enough. They presume two things: first, that writers know what they are writing about in some depth; and second, that they know how to write about those topics. Anne Beaufort reports that good writers need five kinds of knowledge about writing:

1. writing process knowledge (how to get started and how to finish);
2. rhetorical knowledge (how to address a specific audience; how to present an argument for that audience)
3. genre knowledge (what social actions can the document you are writing accomplish?)
4. subject matter knowledge
5. discourse community knowledge (what does my organization value? what counts in my organization as knowledge?)

You need to know something, and preferably quite a bit, about your organization and the kind of document you are writing in order to write productively. Habits will help you, but knowledge about how to proceed comes first. If you're looking to improve your productivity, you will need to pay attention to your habits and how you spend your time, but you'll also need to obtain key information about the writing task at hand and how to produce that text.
Good luck!