There’s a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from staring at a word count that’s meant to reach 80,000 or 100,000, knowing you’re only at 12,000. Or from looking at a journal article deadline that’s three weeks away when you haven’t yet written a single word of the results. For doctoral and early career researchers, academic writing can feel like pushing the proverbial boulder uphill while someone keeps adding more weight to it. You know it, right?

We’re socialised into an academic culture that only celebrates the big moments: the accepted journal article, the completed thesis, the book contract. And these are significant achievements that are worth celebrating. But in focusing solely on these experiences, we risk overlooking how academic writing actually gets done. It’s not often written in lightning strikes of brilliance during marathon writing sessions fuelled by panic and caffeine. Successful academic writers often write in small, unremarkable increments that are barely noticeable as they happen.

But it’s worth paying attention to these small successes. Not in some relentlessly cheerful way, but as a useful strategy for building a sustainable academic practice. Because if you only allow yourself to feel like you’ve accomplished what you ought to when you’ve finished something major, you’re setting yourself up for months – or even years  – of feeling like a failure. Oh, yes, those months and years will of course be punctuated by brief moments of relief. But that’s not really a recipe for thriving as a writer or a scholar.

So what might be a small success? Well, it might be finally getting the core argument of a chapter down in a single, clear sentence after days of going round in circles. It might be finding exactly the right quotation that crunches your point in ways you couldn’t quite manage yourself. It might be cutting 500 words from a bloated section so that the remaining argument emerges sharper and cleaner. It might be receiving feedback from your supervisor or co-author that makes sense of something you’ve been struggling with for weeks. It might even be opening the document on screen and writing two decent paragraphs on a day when you thought you had nothing left.

These small moments don’t come with a fanfare. They don’t usually appear on our to-do lists, let alone on any institutional metrics. But they are the actual substance of academic writing work. They’re what converts the overwhelming abstraction of “write a thesis” or “write a paper” into something achievable by an actual human being with limited time and energy.

There’s something else important here too. When you only recognise completed work as success, you inadvertently reinforce a particular relationship with your writing: one where the process is just something to be endured, a necessary unpleasantness between you and the credential or publication you’re after. But academic writing, especially for doctoral researchers, isn’t just about the end product. It’s about learning to think in increasingly sophisticated ways, to construct arguments, to engage with complex ideas, to develop your voice as a scholar. These capabilities don’t emerge fully formed. They develop gradually, through accumulation and practice, through all those small moments of getting something slightly clearer than it was before.

So please don’t torture yourself because you “only” managed to write 300 words in a day, as if that’s somehow shameful. Those 300 words might represent hours of reading, thinking, false starts, and refinement. They could be 300 words that clarify the entire direction of a chapter. They might be the beginning of an argument that will shape the rest of the thesis. The number 300 tells us almost nothing about the intellectual work you’ve accomplished.

So what would it look like to actually notice and celebrate these small successes? It might mean keeping a running note of good writing days, not measured by word count but by moments where something clicked or shifted. It might mean allowing yourself to feel genuinely pleased when you finally work out how to transition between two difficult sections, even if no-one else will ever notice that particular achievement. It might mean recognising that deleting an entire section because you’ve realised it doesn’t belong is progress, not failure. It might mean acknowledging that sometimes the success is simply showing up to your writing when you didn’t want to, and trusting that consistency matters.

This isn’t about lowering standards or accepting mediocrity. It’s about understanding that quality academic writing emerges from sustained engagement with ideas, and that sustained engagement requires you to find ways to keep going when the work is hard and the finish line feels impossibly distant. If you’re constantly measuring yourself against completed theses and published articles while you’re still in the messy middle of the process, you’ll spend your entire doctoral programme or paper/chapter/book writing time feeling inadequate.

There’s also something to be said for how celebrating small successes changes your relationship with writing itself. When the only reward is finishing, writing becomes purely instrumental, a means to an end. But when you can take satisfaction in a well-crafted paragraph, in finally finding the right conceptual framework, in making a complex idea comprehensible, it helps you to remember why you wanted to do this work in the first place. You – we’re all – here because we care about ideas, about contributing to knowledge, about understanding things more deeply. Those purposes are alive in the daily work of writing, not just in the final product.

The doctorate is long. Early career positions are precarious and demanding. You will spend far more time in the process of writing than in the moment of completion. If the only time you allow yourself to feel successful is when something is finished, you’re committing to years of feeling like you’re not quite good enough. That’s not sustainable, and it’s not true.

So here’s a thing: start noticing. Notice when you write something that says exactly what you mean. Notice when a morning’s work helps you understand your argument better than you did when you started. Notice when you push through resistance and write anyway. Notice when you make a connection between two ideas you hadn’t seen before. Notice when feedback helps rather than devastates. Notice when revising makes something genuinely better.

These are the building blocks of completed academic work. They are not consolation prizes for not being finished yet, but the real substance of scholarly writing. The big successes – the submitted thesis, the accepted article – will come. They’ll come because of these small successes, accumulated day by day, paragraph by paragraph, argument by argument.

And on the hard days, when the work feels impossible and you’re questioning everything, sometimes the small success is simply that you kept going. You showed up again. You trusted that the work matters, even when it doesn’t feel like it’s going anywhere. That’s not nothing. That’s it. That’s everything.