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 explore ways of bringing more energy and joy to your writing life by deploying research-based strategies for writing powerfully, productively, playfully, and without fear.
Productivity Catalyst: Oct 25 - Dec 11, 2025.
You get a lifetime access to the course, giving you FREE participation in it year after year.
We’d love to see you there!
What is the Productivity Catalyst?
Across six weeks of writing workshops, exercises, and experiments, 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. You can also join weekly group discussions in our Live Writing Studio, with two sessions available each week to accommodate participants in any time zone.
Weeks 1-6: Modules
Every Saturday morning, you’ll receive an email with a link to your Productivity Catalyst workshop, resources, and prompts 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
Every Wednesday morning, we'll prompt you to reflect on the week's activities and recalibrate your goals for the weeks ahead.
Every week: Join Helen and other writers from around the globe for one of her Live Writing Studio sessions themed to coordinate with each module. Check our guest Calendar for the dates and times of the weekly sessions.
Meet your facilitator
Greetings! I’m Helen Sword — a scholar, poet, former professor, and the author of four research-based books on writing and writers, including Air & Light & Time & Space: How Successful Academics Write (Harvard UP, 2017) and Writing with Pleasure (Princeton UP, 2023).
I’ve spent the past two decades studying the behaviors, styles, 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!
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.
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.
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 discussions in Weeks 1-6, plus 2 hours for the Live Writing Studio sessions should you wish to attend them. Needless to say, the more time you put into the course, the more you will get out of it!
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Helen will facilitate weekly group discussions as part of her Live Writing Studio, with two sessions available each week. Please check the Catalyst 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 sessions, but they’re entirely optional. 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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WriteSPACE members get a 10% discount (save $55), and WS Studio members get a 20% discount (save $110). You can find the discount code in the Lounge in your membership area. To qualify for the discount, please note that you must commit to maintaining your paid membership throughout the duration of the Catalyst course.
Catalyst Alumni qualify for a 20% discount. Please contact us for the discount code.
A limited number of scholarships are available for this course (conditions apply). If you would like to be considered for a scholarship, please contact us.
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Helen will facilitate weekly group discussions as part of her Live Writing Studio, and she will monitor the Comments portal throughout the course and provide global feedback to all participants 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!
Join our Productivity Catalyst community and find out how to write more powerfully, productively, playfully, and without fear.
Productivity Catalyst: Oct 25 - Dec 11, 2025
We’d love to see you there.
Save 10% off the regular price! Join our WriteSPACE global writing community as a monthly or annual member, then return to this page to complete your enrollment at the discounted members-only price.
Better yet! Join the WS Studio and save 20% off all Writing Catalyst courses.
See also Terms & Conditions.
Image credit: A collage by Helen Sword created for the Productivity Catalyst.