Maximizing Your Summer Writing: Tips for Completing Your NIH R01 Grant
You don’t have to sacrifice a stress-free summer to write your NIH R01 grant. There's a way to approach this huge project without burning out or spending your summer toiling away at your desk only to emerge bleary-eyed in the fall with a grant you aren’t proud of.
The answer is efficiency.
It’s super easy to wave your hands and say, “Yep, I’m going to finally write my R01 this summer,” without putting anything concrete behind that. This method of writing without a plan is exactly what gets PIs into trouble when trying to finish their first R01 to meet the fall deadlines.
Mapping Out Your R01
To avoid getting to the end of summer without being able to claim progress on your proposal, the key is to tap into Project Management 101, where you can get really specific about what you’re doing and when.
Your R01 is a massive undertaking, so it’s really important to put a core structure in place for how you’ll approach the project. And my recommendation to help you start efficiently and finish strong (and on time) is to work backward from your deadline (like I said: Project Management 101).
Whether your deadline is self-imposed, the actual NIH submission deadline, or an internal institutional deadline, working backward will help you break down the number of weeks you have available to work on your application. You can even break this down further into the number of days and hours that you can commit to your writing.
Beyond that, what’s really important for you to think about is, even if you have protected a certain number of hours per week to write your R01, how you are actually going to be spending those hours. This is when you ask yourself, for those blocks of protected time, what is your goal?
Sticking To Your Efficiency Goals
A vague goal of “I’ll work on my grant today” isn’t going to cut it in the world of NIH grant writing. Unless you have a specific plan for each writing session, your time spent writing can become inefficient and you won’t make any real progress towards your deadline.
So this is where project management plays a crucial role: it ensures you’re prepared for each and every session of writing time instead of figuring it out as you go.
There is one caveat to all of this. If you’re new to this process, you might not even actually know what needs to be done. In this case, you’ll need to do some planning on the front end around what you’re getting yourself into. It’s a boring but necessary step to read the guidelines and familiarize yourself with the NIH R01 grant writing process so you can understand what you’re trying to do and ensure you have all of the pieces to the grant writing puzzle.
And if you’re lucky, you can lean on your connection to the research support office at your institution and get their help and guidance so that you don’t have to figure out all the bits and pieces of the grant writing process on your own.
Whether you have that support or not, the most important thing you can do during your summer writing sessions is to create not only a project management plan but a success strategy.
Your NIH R01 Success Strategy
Developing a strategy isn’t about taking time away from your writing. It’s about ensuring you’re eligible for the grant you are writing and that each element is in place so that your grant remains compliant at the very basic level.
The worst possible thing you can do this summer is waste your time writing your grant only to realize that it’s not going to pass the compliance review. So a basic strategic plan establishes, at the outset, if you’re eligible so you can be sure submitting an application is worth your time and energy.
After the basics of your strategy are in place, the next level is figuring out how you can make your grant as competitive as possible. This involves doing your homework so you can frame your application to make sure it’s aligned with the mission and the priorities of your target institute or center. This level of strategy also ensures that your application will end up in front of the right reviewers.
The last focus of your strategy is to consider how you want to get feedback on your application. You may think that feedback is something you worry about when your grant is all finished, but in reality, feedback comes into the planning side of things because you want to make sure you’re giving the people that you’re asking feedback from enough notice so they can block out time in their schedule to devote to looking over your materials.
Maximize Your Efficiency
These are the things you want to think about before you start your summer grant writing so you can maximize your time and maximize your chances of having a finished NIH R01 that is eligible and fundable.
If you want even more guidance on how you can make your summer grant writing a success, we have a self-paced course called the Grant Funding Formula that walks you through exactly how to write an R01 step-by-step. You will learn each phase of the process, including creating your initial strategy and creating a grant that is compliant and competitive. Make your summer grant writing a success!