% Summary and Analysis of Writing Practices\
    Brief Daily Sessions
% Norman Ramsey\
    The Engineering Method of Technical Writing
% Fall 2016

This handout explains how to demonstrate that you have met an
essential objective of the course:  you can work in brief, daily sessions.
Your demonstration should be based on contemporaneous data from your
lab notebook and from your analysis of the results you have produced.

Please review your lab notebook for the following intervals:

  - Monday, November 3, 2014 to Friday, December 5, 2014

  - Monday, January 12, 2015 to Friday, March 13, 2015

Please begin with this information:

  - Number of weeks for which you have data

  - Number of weeks in which you wrote

  - Number of weeks in which you did not write


Next, please identify some time periods to analyze in more depth:

  - Your best week^[You decide whether "best" means "most productive"
    or "most comfortable" or something else.  Explain how you chose
    your best week.]

  - Your worst week (among weeks that you actually wrote)

  - The week that is most representative of your typical week

  - The week in which you most closely approximated the ideal of
    working in brief, daily sessions

  - The three-week period during that represents your experimentation
    with working in brief, daily sessions^[The period recommended on
    the course calendar was the three weeks beginning November 3.]

Having identified the weeks, please gather these data:

  - The *start times* and *durations* of your work sessions for all of
    the weeks under study

  - For each week under study, a statement of what your goals and what
    you produced

When prewriting, drafting, or editing, you produce tangible artifacts;
when waiting actively, you produce only thoughts.  Either way, knowing
what you produced is more informative than a simple statement or
numerical summary of how productive you felt during the session.  For
this reason, information about goals and production is probably best
conveyed narratively.

Please put the start times and durations in a single master chart,
graph, table, or other visualization.  The visualization should show
your work patterns at a glance, and it should make it easy to compare
what happened in different weeks at different times.  Please refer to
the visualization and answer these questions:

 1. Where is data missing?

 2. Can you identify a two-week or three-week interval that shows
    consistent practice with brief, daily sessions?

 3. Overall, what does the pattern of start times look like?

 4. Overall, what does the pattern of durations look like?

 5. How do your work patterns compare in your best week, your worst
    week, and your most representative week?

 6. What, if any, is the relationship between work patterns and production?

 7. What, if any, is the relationship between work patterns and satisfaction?

Some of this information will be in the letters to your future self
that you have written earlier in the year.