Monographs...
The interesting thing about monographs is that the length and scope is comparable to a thesis, so I need plan that keeps my motivation and output as high as possible over a longer period of time. At the same time, the working situation is significantly different, in that I have different things (such as articles, conferences, teaching) going on and cannot dedicate all my power to this one thing. Moreover, monographs are less likely to have a given structure (although they often have a natural one) and they don’t have an inherent deadline unless the contract has been signed. I like to collect as much text as possible and take it from there. Therefore, I simply set myself a limit of X words per day (depending on the time slot that I know I will usually have available) and write until I have assembled the required number of words, which in most cases will be around 80,000. If I have about two hours per day only to write things down, I can make 1,000 words per day. So in theory, the first draft would then be finished after 80 days/sixteen weeks (it usually takes longer, though). Once that is done, I start to rework the structure and rewrite and rewrite until I find the result acceptable.