Speaker 1: This is how I would write an academic research paper on a weekend. Now, I am starting on Friday, Friday evening. It's my video. I can do what I want. But the thing about starting on Friday is that it gives you a whole night and a whole sleep to start thinking about things. Now, one thing I like to do when I'm writing a paper is I need sleep in between each section, in between each process so I can actually generate new ideas, come up with things. So I want to maximise the number of sleeps before submitting this article. So here I've got a sleep. Let's do a brain. That is a terrible brain. Here's another brain. There we are. Here's another brain. Oh, God. And here I'm making sure that I have plenty of good sleeping and resting time because as I'm sleeping and as I've had a break from the papers, I'm actually kind of like thinking about the next steps. So on Friday evening, it's really important that we don't sort of like get panicked and we start jumping around into loads of different things. This process is going to ensure that it's sort of streamlined, but also your brain is only really good at thinking about one thing at any given time. So on Friday evening, before I've even started writing, the one thing I want to do is make sure that I've got all of the information I need to enter Saturday ready to go. So by all the things I need, I mean figures. So I've made sure that I've got all of my figures and tables and graphs and everything that I need to talk about. So I've got figures such as bar charts, scatter graphs. I may have schematics like little diagrams of things that I want to talk about. Oh, look, it made a nice little square for me. But ultimately, these are the things that I need prepared before I start writing. Now, the way I tackle this always when I write a paper is I start with the figures first. So create the figures. It doesn't matter about like the formatting and stuff at the moment, but I need to know the data that I'm talking about. Otherwise, I'm sort of like jumping between tasks and I get really, really inefficient. So it's important that you prioritize this action based on complexity. If something is going to be harder for you to create, do that first. There's no point sort of like easing your way into it because you're just going to run out of brain power in the future when you go to tackle the harder thing. So for each of these days, you're going to start with the hardest things first. On Friday, not only have I've sort of like started to think about the figures, but also maybe I want to sort of like get any literature that I think is really good. Do I want to go through Mendeley or Zotero? And I want to find all of the stuff that's really important for my research. So literature, there we are. Okay, I got it. Like literature. Then also I want to sort of like start thinking. I'm going to allow my brain to be creative and I'm going to put down any dot points about the figures that I definitely want to talk about and that I definitely want to be part of the story, the research story that we're trying to tell. So I want to talk about any trends. I want to talk about what else? I want to talk about all of the kind of just, yeah, things that pop into my mind. Don't sort of like filter them and think, oh, it's not worth it yet. Just allow all of the dot points to kind of come out of your mind and then we're going to sleep on it. We're going to allow our brain to organize it. And you'll be amazed that on Saturday morning what we're able to achieve. So on Friday, that's what we're doing. Friday evening, which is the weekend. That's technically the weekend. My video, I get to do I want. Saturday, this is where it kind of all really kicks off. And because we don't want to jump around too much, one thing I want to do on Friday is maybe put my figures into a little bit of an order. But on Saturday morning, I want to make sure that I've got an absolute sort of like structure to my figures because those are going to be the backbone of my scientific research paper. Remember, we've got different sections. We've got the introduction. We've got the abstract. We've got the conclusions, got results and discussion. All of those things are kind of, you know, important to write, but the order is very important. I would write the results and discussion first. And the thing is, there's no sort of AI tool that will do that for you initially. So what you need to do is start with your research story. So here, we're going to sort of say, okay, we're going to go in this order for my research story because I'm going to talk about this schematic first, then I'm going to talk about this bar chart, and then I'm going to talk about this scatter graph. And if you're sort of like talking it out in your mind and it doesn't make sense, try rearranging this order. Also, go check out my other video, I'll put it here, where I talk about how to use ChatGPT Vision to help you structure your figures. It's amazing. Anyway, so that is a tool that you can use, but ultimately, you're going to use your intuition. Can you talk through your figures? And that's the story we're going to tell. Then on Saturday, the one thing we're going to do is under or next to each figure is we're going to just put the dot points that we want to mention for each figure. Okay, let's get rid of that line. And let's say, okay, on Saturday, what we're doing is, I want to talk about, for this figure, these three dot points. It could be the trends you see, it could be the important factors, the take-home messages from that figure, whatever it is, that's what we want. So we want at least three things, or it could be more or less, it doesn't really matter, but I always aim for at least three to five things about each figure that I want to address. And then we've got our structure. So on Friday, we're collecting all the information. Saturday morning, this is the structure. We're allowing our brain to just create that narrative naturally. Like I said, play about with the order if you need to. That's super important. Then, Saturday morning, I'm going to sort of like stop after I've done this for about an hour. The one thing I like to do is, throughout this weekend, is I will be using deep work kind of processes to make sure that I stay on track. So, this is going to take me about 45 minutes. Then I'm going to have another break. There we are, 45 minutes. Then I'm going to have a break, and then I'm going to try something else. And I'm going to do this for as much as I can. In that break, I want to make sure that I'm thinking about nothing else. Sorry, no, not nothing else. I'm thinking about anything but the research. So, go take a walk, watch something if you want. Anything you find energizing, don't just scroll on your phone because I find that just saps my energy. And then, what we're going to do is, we're going to take this results and discussion. So, results and discussion, R&D. And we're going to flesh out all of the things that we want to talk about, that research story where we use the figures to kind of structure what we're talking about. Now, you can use ChatGPT to do this. Go check out that video that I talked about before where I said, hey, to ChatGPT, I said, hey, these are the dot points, and I actually put in the figure, turn this into a paragraph suitable for a research article, and then it'll actually give you your first draft for you. The thing about this is, you cannot use it as your final draft. It has to be your first draft. But if you want to do it the old-fashioned way, you can just flesh out these dot points. It doesn't take too long, to be honest. So, then we're turning these dot points into full paragraphs, and we're referencing figures and all that sort of stuff. So, we're saying, you know, in this figure, you can see blah, blah, blah, this is important because, and yeah, we're using that to kind of structure what we're saying about each thing. Then, you've got your results and discussion section. Do that in 45-minute blocks until it's finished. That'll normally take you two or three hours, if not a little bit more, because we've done all the prep work, we've got the bullet points. Now, it's about just fleshing it out. If you're using ChatGPT, it could be a little bit shorter, which is great. The next thing we want to do is make sure that we have got the information we need for the next sections. This is for Sunday. So, once we've got our research and development, sorry, research and development, we've got R&D. This is the same, isn't it? Once we've got results and discussion done, the last thing we want to do on Saturday, so we're going to do this in 45-minute blocks as long as it takes, so each one's 45 minutes, and just set a timer on your phone for that one. But the last thing we're going to do here is we're going to make sure that on Sunday, we've got the ability to write the introduction and the abstract and those sort of things, because that's going to be our final thing. We're not worried about final drafts at the moment. We're going to look over everything on Sunday evening. We're going to do the editing stuff, and when you can use AI tools to do that, or we can just read over it and edit ourselves. That's absolutely okay. But here we want to make sure that we've had a look at literature, and we're just refreshing our minds with the sorts of things we want to put in the background of our research story. So that could be the latest results, the latest studies. Don't start too far back, but you want to say, in my field, it was like OPVs have the potential to, and then some generic references to talk about that. You can use, maybe not at this point, but on Sunday morning, you can use services like Cite and Jenny to produce your introduction. So Cite and Jenny are AI tools that allow you to find references, and Jenny is like an automatic writer as well. So Jenny, IA, AI. There's also You, You, Me, I think it's called, or You, You, Moo, something like that. It's in one of my videos. These names are getting so mental. But yes, these are AI writing tools, and they will allow you to sort of like generate that first introduction, which really speeds things up. If you're trying to do the two things at once, which is find literature and write the background, this will help you do it. So Jenny AI really helps, You, You, Me as well, and then Cite will help you find all those references. And then this is, yeah, so we're going to sort of like allow our minds to think while we're sleeping, and we're going to go here, and oh, look at that arrow, that's horrible. And then we're going to say, okay, well, there we are. That's us prepared for Sunday. The first thing on Sunday, once again, we're going to get up, we're going to do the hardest thing first. So we're not going to look over anything. We're going to start generating content. The first thing you want to do every day is generate content, do those hardest things. And so we're going to look at the introduction, and we're going to sort of write a simple introduction using these tools or the literature that we've sort of like got from our past. That's also okay. Then we're going to do this for 45 minutes. Again, if you can, maybe at this point, you feel a bit more enthused, you can do up to an hour, but anything more than about an hour and a half in a block, my mind just starts to wander, and you have to work with what your brain is doing at any given time. So that's Sunday morning, the first bit, we're going to look at writing a simple introduction using AI tools or the literature that we've gathered throughout our research. And then what we need to be doing is thinking about the rest of it, which is taking our results and discussion and coming up with the conclusion section, and we may at this point have an abstract, have a go at an abstract. So there are simple structures that you can use to write an abstract. Go check out my ebook, The Ultimate Academic Writing Toolkit, where I talk about the structures for creating all of these things. So I'll put a link to that in the description below, but it's important that you don't just start writing from scratch. One thing I absolutely really recommend you do before you start writing an introduction, before you start writing a conclusion, before you start writing an abstract is get your mind into that mode by reading a couple of abstracts or a couple of introductions and just use it to template your own response or your own sort of like first draft. So one thing I used to like to do if I needed to write an abstract is I would read say two or three abstracts in the field that I'm writing about, and that will help me then get my mind into like abstract mode or introduction mode or conclusion mode or whatever it may be. So that's what I would do. So do some reading before each one of these sections on Sunday. And once again, you may want to spend 45 minutes producing each one. And yeah, you can use AI tools as well. You can put in all of your results in discussion and say generate an abstract that's suitable for this journal in this way. Use these abstracts as a structure. You can actually put those abstracts in to your chat GPT or perplexity, for example, and say, hey, use this as a template to create an abstract based on my work. So you can sort of like use AI tools, and it's something that I do all the time, and it's so super powerful. I really like it. And then on Sunday, the last thing we're going to do and after we've had a nice big lunch break, we're going to make sure that we do something that fills us with energy. We're not going to scroll on our phones like on Saturday, but we're going to make sure that here we've got plenty of time for reading over stuff. You're going to edit, you're going to self edit. And the editing is going to take the form of you reading it through. Then if anything doesn't sort of like, you know, sit right with you in the way something's phrased, you've got two options. You can change it there, right there and then, and say, yeah, I know exactly what I need to change it to, or just put a big old red sort of box around it, or highlight it red and just say, you know, a little comment saying, come back to this later. Sometimes I can't think of how I need to change it at that time, but if I come back to it at a later stage, which we're going to use Monday morning for before we submit this article, that is going to be really useful for you. So you don't have to change it right away. You want to keep that momentum up. If you can't think of something, put a red box around it, boom, move on, easy peasy. So here we're going to edit and we're going to review. And then we can use AI tools like ChatGPT to do that sort of process for us, where we can put in a paragraph and say, does this make sense? Is this suitable for journal? Give me some recommendations, or give me a score out of 100 on how this reports for accuracy, readability, that sort of stuff. And then you can sort of use that to sort of like give yourself feedback on how this actually sounds. I have used AI as an editor, as a reviewer, and it tends to work really well. It just helps you sort of like formulate your own ideas. And if you're struggling, if it's English as a second language, you can actually just say, you know, does this sentence or this paragraph make sense for this figure? And you can put in the figure, and then you can say, give me recommendations on how to improve this paragraph or this explanation of a certain figure, and then you're done. You can do that with your conclusions as well. And one thing I like to do with AI is just always continually like put stuff into it so it can formulate a response, understand what you need from it, and have that chat backwards and forwards with ChatGPT. If it doesn't give you an answer that you want, just say, hey, this isn't exactly what I want. I felt like it was a little bit too broad, a little bit too generic. Give me something that's more applicable to this figure or, you know, that sort of stuff. Have a chat with it. Normally after two or three, you know, question and answers or directions, it normally does very good at understanding what you want. So that's the Sunday afternoon. We're reviewing, we're looking over stuff. At this point, if you can, send it off to someone. Don't worry about perfection. It's not going to be perfect, but send it off to someone you know will be able to look at it over the next couple of days. If not, the best thing for us to do is once we feel worn out is we leave it. And then on Monday morning, we do that last check. So we read over our paper and we say, yes, I like this, no, I don't like this. And we have that last change. Importantly, again, we've got these sleeping moments where our brain is able to work on that subconsciously in the background. So then we come into it fresh again in the morning. Because at this point, trust me, your brain's going to be a bit fried from all of the work you've done on Sunday. But on Monday morning, we're going to do that last check. And then we're in to publication submission, which is great. So that's how I would write a paper on a weekend, given that I had all of the data, that I had everything I needed to go on Friday evening. And then it's about just creating that structure, going through, going through, giving yourself breaks, making sure you work in 45-minute blocks. Don't get scattered. You need a structure. If you start sort of like on Friday going, oh, I'll think about my abstract. Oh, I'll think about something else. No, no, no, no, no. Keep sort of like focusing on one thing at a time in this structure, and you will end up with a paper by the end of the weekend. And you can use AI tools. It's so great. The world of research has changed with the onset of AI tools. It's made things so much easier. Anyway, I'm waffling. That's how I would do it. If you like this video, go check out this one where I talk about how to use ChatGPT to write research articles easily. It's a perfect addition to this video, and it's full of actionable advice to make sure you know how to use ChatGPT to its fullest. Go check it out.