Power up your productivity!
Take a deep dive into your writing habits with this 6-week online course for academic and professional writers who want to write more prolifically, efficiently, and with greater confidence and pleasure. Join international writing expert Helen Sword and fellow writers from around the world as we try out an array of research-based strategies for writing powerfully, productively, playfully, and without fear.
Next Productivity Catalyst: Oct 25 - Dec 11, 2025
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What is the Productivity Catalyst?
Across six weeks of writing workshops, experiments, and prompts, Helen will introduce you to six core elements of productive writing — time, space, flow, craft, community, and joy — and work with you to develop strategies for integrating each of them into your everyday writing practice.
Weeks 1-6: Modules
Every Saturday morning for the six weeks of the course, you’ll receive an email with a link to your Productivity Catalyst module for the upcoming week. This course has been designed to add value to your precious writing time rather than sucking it away, so you’ll be encouraged to integrate each module into your daily work life:
Week 1: Time
Week 2: Space
Week 3: Flow
Week 4: Craft
Week 5: Community
Week 6: Joy
On Wednesday mornings, you'll receive an email prompting you to reflect on the week's activities and to recalibrate your goals for the weeks ahead.
Every week: Gather with writers from around the globe for Live Writing Studio sessions themed to coordinate with each module. Check our calendar to see the timing of these twice-weekly sessions displayed in your own time zone.
Meet your facilitator
Greetings! I’m Helen Sword — a scholar, poet, teacher, and the author of six research-based books on writing and writers.
I’ve spent the past two decades studying the behaviors and emotions of successful academic writers. I can’t wait to teach you everything I’ve learned about how cultivating new habits of mind can help you shift your everyday writing habits.
My mission is to help you build a writing practice grounded in pleasure rather than pain, in joy rather than self-judgment, based on research-based principles that really work. Let’s get started!
Productivity Catalyst curriculum
1. Take time
Identify your personal time traps and acquire a toolbox of powerful techniques for spending time, befriending time, and bending time to your will.
2. Make space
Design a nourishing physical and emotional environment where you can write new words, invite new ideas, and delight in new knowledge.
3. Find flow
Discover the varieties of optimal experience as you try out new rhythms, rituals, and routines for finding and maintaining flow.
4. Cultivate craft
Diagnose your weak points and sharpen your style as we focus this week on the pleasures, frustrations, and challenges of wordcraft.
5. Cherish community
Learn how to identify, establish, or revive a supportive community of writers committed to nurturing each other’s writing practice.
6. Spark joy
Infuse your writing with pleasure and passion by reframing negative emotions about the writing process and reclaiming your positive ones.
Why you’ll love this course
Is the Productivity Catalyst right for me?
Whatever your personal and professional goals as a writer, the Productivity Catalyst can help you get there! Join Helen and an international community of writers dedicated to learning how to:
write more productively
Develop robust research-based habits for writing more prolifically, efficiently, frequently, freely, confidently, creatively — or simply more.
write more Playfully
Experiment with new ways of writing, open up to new definitions of success, and interrogate your assumptions about “writing as hard work.”
Write more joyfully
Transform your writing practice and nourish your intellect by cultivating a symbiotic relationship between productivity and pleasure.
Frequently Asked Questions
Don't see your question answered here? Contact us for more information.
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The Productivity Catalyst has been designed primarily with academic and professional writers in mind: for example students, faculty, research fellows, lawyers, business writers, and government employees — in other words, anyone whose livelihood includes regular writing. However, the course materials can be adapted to suit virtually any writing genre. All writers are welcome!
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We recommend that you set aside at least 1-2 hours per week for the workshops, experiments, activities, and online discussions, plus an additional 2 hours per week if you plan to attend the Live Writing Studio. Needless to say, the more time you put into the course, the more you will get out of it!
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We run two Live Writing Studio sessions each week throughout the course. Please check the calendar and choose the sessions that best fit your time zone and location.
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We’d love to see you at the Live Writing Studio sessions, but they’re entirely optional. Even if you can’t make it, you’ll still have access to all the resources you’ll need to benefit from the course.
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Once you’ve enrolled in the Productivity Catalyst, you’ll have lifetime access to the course materials, so you can catch up on any of the modules you’ve missed.
Former participants are warmly invited to re-do the live course each year. Many of our alumni return year after year!
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WriteSPACE members get a 10% enrollment discount, and WS Studio members and Catalyst alumni save 20%. To qualify for the WriteSPACE discount, please note that you must commit to maintaining your paid membership throughout the duration of the Catalyst course.
A limited number of scholarships are available (conditions apply). Most of our scholarships go to members of our WriteSPACE community who have demonstrated a clear dedication to improving their writing but are unable to access institutional funding for this course.
Residents of New Zealand and Australia may apply for discounted pricing via our Enabling Better Writers Australasia program, whereby the fee is charged in the local currency: AUD or NZD+GST.
If you would like to be considered for a scholarship or regional discount, please contact us.
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Helen will facilitate group discussions as part of the Live Writing Studio, and she will monitor the Comments portal throughout the course and provide global feedback each week. For a more personalized coaching experience, we recommend that you consider enrolling in the Stylish Writing Intensive or one of Helen’s in-person writing retreats.
Power up your productivity!
Next Productivity Catalyst: Oct 25 - Dec 11, 2025
We’d love to see you there!
Please see our Terms & Conditions here.
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Image credit: Collage by Helen Sword