Productivity Guide: How to Write a Winning Master's Application Without Sacrificing Your Family, Career, or Study

Daria Levina

Many of the challenges people face when writing the applications aren't directly related to the applications themselves. Rather, they are related to motivation and productivity. Common problems include:

prioritization
building a realistic action plan
organizing yourself to you stick to the plan
staying motivated long enough to complete the task
dealing with procrastination
knowing what to do next
balancing application work with your daily life, so it doesn’t take your attention away from your loved ones and professional commitments

In this post, I’ll share how to plan your master of laws (LL.M.) applications in a way that fits into your existing schedule, without needing to completely restructure your life.

Treat Applications like a project

Planning an LLM application - especially personal statements and motivation letters - starts with treating it like a project.

What do I mean by that?

In my work, I use the definition of a project from David Allen's Getting Things Done:

A project is any desired result that requires more than one action step.

For a personal statement (or any part of your application) to function as a project, you need the following:

A clear desired result, or an outcome: For example, a finished and polished personal statement ready for submission along with other application materials.
A list of action steps: These steps will move you from point A (no essay) to point B (finished essay). Think of them as milestones.
A deadline: This will anchor your plan and ensure you stay on track.

For a project to take life outside of your head and be effectively implemented, it has to be integrated into your life.

Here's how to do that effectively.

There's no 'one size fits all' plan

There's no universal plan that works equally well for everyone, no ‘one size fits all’. There just isn’t.

You need to make the project fit your life, not the other way around.

If you try to squeeze your life into a new schedule that looks good on paper but isn’t adapted to your needs - or attempt to radically overhaul your life to accomplish this one thing - it will likely increase your stress and lead to disappointing results.

Plan for your worst self

A common mistake is trying to approach the project as your “ideal self.” Many people tell me they need to become “more proactive,” “driven,” or “hardworking” before they can successfully write their essays.

Don’t do this.

Don’t try to change your personality to fit the project—it won’t work. You’ll feel overwhelmed and may not even start.

Here’s how to approach it:

Avoid setting overly ambitious goals, like working three hours on your essays daily. It'll feel intimidating and soon become unsustainable.
Don’t plan for ideal conditions where you’re highly motivated and free from distractions. Don’t plan for when you’ll have all the time in the world, or feel supermotivated, or have nothing to do except for your applications (and can magically push all other commitments out of the way).

Instead, plan for your worst self:

Plan for days when you’re tired or overwhelmed.
Account for competing priorities and limited energy; plan for when you have more on your plate than you can accomplish and you need to make strategic choices about how, what, and in what sequence to do.
Make your schedule flexible and realistic.

find a schedule that works for you

How do you do that?

To make applications work with your life and schedule, ask yourself:

Under what conditions have I succeeded in the past?
What environments or situations allow me to perform at my best?

Use that to establish parameters for your project. Identify the times of day when you, given your current – not ideal – workload will work on your essays.

Consider:

Energy levels: When are you most productive and have the most energy?
Interruptions: When can you work uninterrupted?
Available time: What activities can you cut back on to create space? What time can you carve out for yourself? What activities can you dispose of to create that time? It doesn’t have to be hours. Whatever you can. Start with 5 minutes if that’s the only thing you can afford – and go from there.

Start small—5 minutes if that’s all you can afford—and build from there.

Mark your planned essay time in your calendar or use a tool you’re comfortable with (e.g., a notebook, Apple Notes, Excel) – anything that allows you to keep track of your actions and deadlines.

Look for “pockets of time” in your day:

Morning commutes to brainstorm ideas, to think through your background and identify stories you could use in your application.
Breaks between meetings to outline your essay.
Waiting in line at a supermarket to think through examples of achievements you can include.

You may also find that you are the first one at the office in the mornings and can use 30 min before everyone else shows up to work on your applications, or that after lunch you need a break from your high-demanding cognitive work and can make a little window for brainstorming your applications, analyzing your background for stories, etc. Try to find whatever works in the context of your life.

For example, during my graduate application process, I used time waiting for trains at Belorussky Train Station to brainstorm stories for my essays.

do a pilot week

Once you’ve created your schedule, try it for a week. At the end of the week, reflect:

Did the workload feel manageable? was it too much? too little?
Were your time slots effective, or do they need adjustment?

Course-correct based on your observations. Iterative approach is important because a schedule that looks perfect on paper may not be the best one when it comes to execution.

Experimentation is key. What you can experiment with to move your project forward to completion?

‍Try different durations (e.g., a 25-minute pomodoro to start) or different times of day. Explore what works in the context of your life.

Try to vary the duration of time you work on your applications. For instance, you can start with 1 pomodoro (25 min) a day and see if it works for you. If 25 min feels too easy, try increasing it to 40. If it feels too much, try 15 or 10 min. Decrease until you feel no resistance and train yourself to show up. It may feel deceptively little, but there is a lot you can accomplish in 10 to 15 min. The IKEA founder Ingvar Kamprad is known for dividing his days into 10 min chunks.
Experiment with times of day. Maybe you’ll work on your applications in the mornings when you are first at the office and don’t have urgent tasks to do, or maybe the evenings are best for you. It’ll be different for everyone.
Identify the ‘pockets’ of time you have in your life. Can you use the time you stand in a queue at the post office to think about ideas for your personal statement? Or maybe you can use the time on the bus to and from work? I did half of my graduate applications waiting for a train on the platform and commuting to and from work. What helped me was knowing that during those times, I had about 50 minutes exclusively for myself. This did magic to my brain – I felt very focused, like I had a container to think about my applications.

The bottom line is, there are no hard rules. The only way to ensure success is to integrate this new project into your life, not radically change your personality to fit the project. At the end of the day, it has to work in the context of your life and your life only.

Examples of how you may go about it:

a former colleague of mine worked part-time when writing her applications for the master of arts in Australia (she was successful, getting admission and a full scholarship).
a friend of mine, with a high-demanding job, worked on the weekends and closer to the deadline took a week of vacation to finish her applications for a master’s of law and finance (she was admitted and negotiated a discount for the tuition fee).
for my applications, I carved out time around billable work that I had to do at the law firm. Plus, as mentioned, I found that thinking through my essays while waiting for a train at the Belorussky Train Station worked well for me, especially for ideation and thinking through the stories I might want to use.

Connect your vision to your daily actions

To ensure progress on your applications, link your big vision for the final outcome (ie, a polished application ready for submission) to your daily actions.

You can do this by:

Include your application work in your running list of projects & tasks. This will help you treat it as valid as your other projects. Plus, if you have it on your projects list, you’ll be less likely to forget about it or deprioritize it.
Review your project list and action list daily. I usually keep track of projects and actions for each project separately and advise doing that for applications as well.
Do a weekly review. During the weekly review, ask yourself what’s going well and what you’d like to improve. Iterate where needed. The time you spend on your applications will probably vary from week to week, and that’s ok.

Troubleshooting & FAQ

What if the applications feel so overwhelming I don’t even start?

If you feel overwhelmed, don’t start with large time commitments.

Committing huge chunks of time right away to your applications is likely to make you feel like there is too much friction, and this friction will prevent you from starting.

Instead:

Start small: Commit to one pomodoro (25 minutes) a day or even less if necessary. Do one task related to your applications. It can be research on the web, reading examples of successful applications, ideating on your personal statement, thinking through the structure of your essays, talking to someone else about their experience, revising your CV, filling in the application form, or anything else you need to do to move yourself closer to a finished application.
Focus on the habit, not the outcome: Aim to spend a little time on the application each day, whether it’s brainstorming, researching, or revising. In the beginning, don’t commit to a result. Don’t promise yourself that you’ll do all of the idea generation today, or that you’ll write your first draft on the weekend. Commit to a habit of spending 25 minutes a day on your applications. Once time is up, consider that you’ve succeeded in completing the habit. Train yourself for the habit of showing up, not for the end-result.
Reduce friction: If 25 minutes is too much, reduce the commitment until you feel no friction. If it needs to be 5 or 2 minutes, start with that. You might think that 2 or 5 min is nothing but that’s not true. When you do this even for a symbolic duration of time, you practice something incredibly important: you practice keeping promises to yourself.

By doing that, you tell yourself that your goals, dreams, and ambitions are important. This is no small feat.

Whatever you start with will be better than not starting at all.

Do this until you get used to this type of tasks in your life. Then increase the commitment.

To habituate this behavior faster, reward yourself after you complete the habit.

A note on rewards:

Rewards are important (see, eg, on the importance of rewards in changing behavior BJ Fogg, Tiny Habits). The mainstream culture teaches us to believe that success is earned through pain, struggle, and overcoming, and you probably have years and years of conditioning telling you that ‘no pain-no gain.’ It’s often presented as the only way forward.

The thing is, it contradicts the science of motivation. You repeat what you like, and you avoid what you don’t like. That’s how the brain works. You can choose to work against it, but you’ll have to accept the consequences, ie, that it’s going to be an uphill battle to succeed if you force yourself to move through pain.

It is different from the idea of facing challenges and hard work. You do need to work hard to achieve a big life transformation. However, working hard does not equal permanent struggle and pain.

If you want to succeed in your applications’ journey, you need to learn to associate it with joy. Rewards are one way to do it. In the words of one of my favorite creators, Justin Welsh, ‘you can’t scale being miserable’.

There are two types of rewards: intrinsic and extrinsic. [1]

Extrinsic rewards can include:

Physiological (have a snack, drink tea, take a short break, go for a walk)
Psychological (check into habit app, cross off a day on calendar)
Social (text your accountability partner, talk to a friend, share to social media)
Physical (do a fist pump, a victory dance, or smile)
Verbal (praise yourself, say a phrase like 'way to go!', sing a song)
Audial (playa favorite song or sound that makes you feel good)

Intrinsic rewards can include pausing for one minute immediately after the habit and reflecting on the:

Physical feeling in your body (What feels differently from before?)
Mental feeling (Are you calmer, more focused, or more inspired?)
Satisfaction of completion (How do you feel about yourself?)
Pleasurable aspects of the habit (Can you experience them more fully?)
Subjective experience of the habit (What was different this time?)

Choose whatever reward(s) you like. You can try all of them and decide which one works best for you. Keep in mind that intrinsic rewards are usually stronger and more sustainable than extrinsic rewards.

[1] Credit for the part on the types of rewards goes to Chris Sparks, his ‘Experiment Without Limits’.