How to get unstuck

What do you do when you get ‘stuck’ in your writing? This is a common writing malaise that I deal with often as a writing coach. The first thing we do is figure out the source of the ‘stuckness’. I generally categorise this into 4 different areas: Habits, Processes, Ideas, Pace. Once we have located where you are stuck, and why, then the solution is pretty quickly found.

Whilst I have spent a lot of my coaching time focusing on processes and habits - because without these we are all stuck - I talk less about the other two areas where writing can suddenly feel like an uphill struggle and the joy has gone. Being stuck in ideas does not mean being stuck for ideas - quite the opposite with academic clients. They have too many ideas, too complex and convoluted with multiple connections and nuances….too few ideas: never.

The idea can be bound up with emotional baggage of course (back to habits and processes here), but sometimes there has not been enough time spent on ideation…or should I say ideation with a side serving of scalpel.

We need to shape our ideas to the right scale and scope for them to be executable, and when they have become unwieldy and sprawled beyond what we can handle we end up stuck. Not able to move forward or backwards because we cannot see the problem is the idea, we start to question our abilities, our craft, our commitment, our motivation. We come up with a lot of reasons why this thing is not getting done and the actual scope and scale is not amongst our go-to explanations. This is obviously a problem that you will then keep returning to again and again and again…because it is fundamental.

One solution here is to go back to ideation and ask these four clear questions: What is my question/problem? What is my answer? What is my contribution? To what knowledge base/conversation am I contributing to? If you can answer these four things, and the scope and scale fit the publication outlet, you will become unstuck pretty quickly. There are lots of techniques for working out these things, but this is a basic starting point when you start to dread or avoid your project, or you turn up and just can’t move forward.

If you would like to access a free training I did on how to get unstuck, click below.

Writing a Monograph

How to write a monograph? With Joy!

How do you write a monograph?

Many of my 1-1 coaching clients are Academic Coach are in fact writing monographs, so this topic is ever present in my mind. The first answer to how to write a monograph is: joyfully. Embrace the freedom it brings. You will never be as free in your chosen subject matter, you style of prose and your ability to really say what you stand for as you are in the monograph format.

Writing a monograph is free from the obligations, restrictions, and conventions imposed on you by journal editors and reviewer 2 who act as constricting forces on your expression - and let’s face it - sometimes massacre your original idea in service to their ego about how they would have written it, or questions about why is their work not cited and so on. Of course book proposals are reviewed, and must conform to rigorous research and writing standards: books are reviewed, but there is an accepted freedom in the monograph that you will be exploring what you want to talk about in depth and the way you want o treat that subject matter is entirely up to you. You are as free as you will ever be within academia to write what you think.

Monographs are joyous, freeing things and should be embraced.

Why isn’t everyone doing one?

There are all sorts of reasons why you might not want to do a monograph. You don’t get credit for it in the REF where one book equals one paper; 100,000 words is given the same gravity as 6000. Not in the formal rules perhaps but cretainly in the informal departmental rules, so why should you write a book? I hope many of you are not subjected to this rather arbitrary measuring stick.

Maybe your discipline is not really a book discipline (science) and there is no promotional reason to do it: papers rule the world, multi authored, and you only ever write 1 section (at best) of the 23 papers you ‘author’ each year.

Maybe your discipline is a book discipline but you are afraid to write one. Maybe you cannot even begin to imagine how you could possibly write that amount when you struggle to push out one paper per year. If you are in the latter category, I want to talk about book writing and why this should be in your publication pipeline.

Books make a contribution

Books require the most writing you have done since your PhD. If you can write a book, it is official, you are a real writer. Books can convey things a paper or even a series of papers cannot, and at a certain point in your career, you should have enough to say to fill a book, probably several. Books are still the go to place if some in-depth knowledge on something complicated, detailed, wide ranging and academically challenging. Rigorous, difficult research needs a book sized contribution to let the ideas breathe and connect, to connect disciplines and knowledge bases, and to really give a deep analytical, thoughtful account of something. Books not only teach others about the subject matter, it teaches you a lot about writing and communicating your ideas over a long word count. A book is a place to grow as an academic, and as a writer.

But really though how?

Obviously I am going to tell you to plan it. Get a publication pipeline where you can plan out where and when you will tackle the book project - on sabbatical perhaps besides multiple other things - and in term time also beside other sequential writing projects (ie not more than two on the go at any one time, including the book).

You need to break down the whole into paper sized parts (the chapters), plan your arc, and then set about writing one bit at a time. Give yourself milestones and put deadlines and rewards against them to keep you motivated and on track. Spend time on the thinking about your take home message, your contribution and the best way to tell this story over multiple chapters; this is the quickest way to execute your book. Many people just start writing and work this out as they go, but this takes longer. Much longer.

I think everyone should write a book or two. Having just returned to book writing myself, I feel a special kind of joy that is just not there writing papers. I want you to experience that too.

If you want a planning outline that will get you started, you can find one here.

Professor or bust? No, go your own way

One of the programmes I run here at Academic Coach is a 6 month intensive programme called Elevate: it is a writing and career mentoring programme.  The first question I ask people on this programme is to define early on what success means to them in very concrete terms. It might mean promotion to Professor or beyond, it might mean impact in the real world with their research, it might mean having more time for their family, their hobbies, their dog: it could mean many different things. We each have our own ideas of success, and they are limited only by our imagination. This got me thinking about all the different things that clients come to me to achieve, and also about a question I got asked in response to my post about why I quit my academic position.

I was asked: 'did you quit because you didn't make Professor?' at which point, I laughed merrily, because of course, how could this person know my career history, my circumstances and what my idea of success was? I don't say it anywhere, and I suppose it never crossed my mind this was a question that might need answering.

So in this post I wanted to both tell a bit more of my story, and get you to think about what success means to you.

I was promoted from brand new baby Lecturer A to Reader* in 6 years: Lecturer A, Lecturer B, Senior Lecturer, Reader, Professor was the ladder at that time. That's right people - you read it correctly. I blasted my way up the promotional ladder at a time when it took most people ( and I mean single, white men obviously) 8-10 years to reach the level below this - Senior Lecturer - and most women, much, much longer.  This in a department that notoriously didn't promote anyone, ever. I got beyond that in a blink of an eye. Within 2 years of this I was approached by another University to become a Professor, and within a further year, I was first asked, then told, to apply for Professorship in my own University. It was getting a little embarrassing that people with less exciting CVs were applying for Professorship, and besides the department had a woman problem (there were none, and then hardly any, women professors) and I was passing up an opportunity to right that wrong. Thanks HR! Lovely. Then I was almost forced into becoming Head of Department, wherein Professorship was part and parcel of the deal (this is a whole other story which deserves a small novella, so I won't get into it here).

So why did I refuse, deflect, dodge and deny these wonderful 'opportunities' to advance? Isn't this what everyone wants? To be called Professor? When someone offers you advancement/promotion, don't you have to want it/take it? Well no, actually. It is cool if you do, and I can help you make that happen. Have I helped other academics become Professors? Yes! But if you don't want that, that is also absolutely fine. You do you. 

Why didn't I want it?

I didn't need it, in any sense of that phrase. I didn't need the title, I had never dreamed of becoming a professor: as they say in Westworld, 'it doesn't look like anything to me'. I had gotten to a level of salary where I was comfortable and I was satisfied.  Also, many, many other reasons, but here are some basic math ones: Professor would pay me £5000 gross more than I earned already. I would lose 50% of that in tax (2500) and then another hefty amount for my pension deduction. It would in the end mean less than £100 per month in my bank about. But the downside was I would be made (a) head of department or (b) given some truly awful huge admin role (because no women anywhere) that would require me to be on campus each week sitting in endless meetings, talking about things I didn't care about including, crucially, spending time on campus out of teaching term. That didn’t suit me.

You see my life was great, and I liked it the way it was. Here is the important part. I was already incredibly successful. The things that mattered to me, both personal and professional had been achieved. I had travelled, I had written lots, I had a research career that had impact in the real world - it mattered, it changed things, and that gave me great satisfaction. I was recognised as THE expert in my area, nationally and internationally. I had all the esteem markers a person could want. I liked teaching and I did a lot of it. I was 'attractive on the market' and if I wanted to change jobs, I could. I did all that without that title. I was already as successful as I wanted to be. Climbing higher in the administration was not my ambition. I wanted my life to be exactly as it was, personal and professional.

It is your career

All this to say, don't let anyone TELL YOU what success means. It is different for all of us, and it changes over the course of our lives.  Early on I had no money, and I needed it, and I needed to get promoted to pay rent and put food on the table - so promotion was my goal. Not for the title, or the recognition (whatever that is), or some idea of advancement up the hierarchy, but cold hard cash. Then, afterwards, it seemed entirely redundant to me. And that's another thing no-one might tell you: once the carrot of promotion is removed from your vista (by yourself) you become impervious to bullshit claims about how taking this next thing on will improve your chances for promotion. None of that exists anymore, and you can do your job in the way you want to do it, not constantly dancing to someone else's tune. You worry less about playing the game, and spend more time doing what you really want to do.

So when you set your goals for 2023, and think about what you want to take on and why you are doing it; really think about whether this is what you WANT to do, or what you are expected to want to do, in some stranger's idea of what success should look like for you? Don't fall into that trap: there is no greater misery than to be in pursuit of something other people dream of. Your definition of success is specific to you, and the most useful thing you can do, is have a very clear idea of what that is before you fill up your list of things to get done in 2023.

*For my US readers, Tenure (permanence) was granted after 3 years probation in the UK if you have a permanent (TT for you) contract, so I had tenure at Lecturer B in UK terms.

Getting Published in Academia: Pitfalls and Perseverance Part II

One of my most popular blogs in the series is my own story of trying to publish a particular article that, for many and various reasons outlined here, was problematic and took quite a long time. Since then I have coached over 800 clients on writing, and a good portion of my clients have come to me to work up journal articles into a publishable format, or want to become more efficient and faster at publishing article after article and are looking for better systems and processes of production. As a result of the demand for this service, I distilled all I know in a course called How to Write and Publish a Journal Article which also includes fortnightly coaching with me for 12 months. You can find some free training on this here on YouTube if you are interested in seeing a tiny portion of what that course contains.

Looking back at my original post, I notice now that something was missing - or not missing exactly, but not really dealt with in perhaps the kind of detail a reader might want to know, and that is picking the right journal. The first thing I talk about in that blog is the problem of inter-disciplinary research and getting the right journal fit, but once I had returned to my ‘law only’ version of the paper, I totally abandon this point altogether. This might give the impression that getting journal fit is an interdisciplinary problem, and that is not true. It’s an every-single-article- you-write problem that should always be considered.

Accidental advantage

The reason this vital, critical, first step was not talked about in my original post was that I took it for granted (always a mistake) that everyone knew this was a thing. Once I had stripped the interdisciplinary out of the article, journal fit was not an issue for me. That is, I had an accidental advantage I took for granted, that my research area - my law only research area - is what you might call foundational to my subject matter. It is a thing undergraduates are lectured on as a matter of course, it is fundamental to my subject. So, of course, a lot of the older, prestigious journals are interested and have a history of publishing on this topic because it is so foundational. One thing I did not need to worry about was audience once I returned to my legal fold. This was not in any way niche. It was fundamental, foundational, core, central to anyone who was broadly in the area of EU law and in this particular case, anyone who was into the much broader topic of the rule of law (i.e. all public lawyers everywhere).

After coaching hundreds of clients across disciplines, I now know just how lucky I am in terms of being a constitutional and public law scholar and how many journals would be interested in publishing any of my pieces.

So I thought it might be worth a revisit here, dwelling here on the importance of fit for your chances of publishing success, and publishing quickly.

Targeting the audience

You have probably heard that before you write a word you should know the destination of that piece, and have a selection of journals that would be a good fit. This is not a matter of casting a wide net or vaguely gesturing [any of these]: it is the opposite. Detailed, targeted research on your prospective publication outlets is a step many academics do not do for a variety of reasons:

• fear (that no-one is interested);

• fear (that someone has already written it);

• fear of distraction (they start to read journals and never stop);

• time scarcity mindset (fear that they should be writing and this is a waste of time);

• delusion (it will all be alright on the night, i.e. it will just magically work out)

• delusion (what they have to say is such a game changer everyone will want it)

• delusion (new data is intrinsically publishable, someone will take it)

I understand the origins of these reasons and why many of us feel one or all of the above or just can’t face it. But it is false economy. Perhaps ECRs starting out may actually have an advantage here as they might see this as natural and inevitable step. They know that they don’t know much about the journal architecture of their research area, so will research it, but more established scholars who widen or change tack or become more niche also need to be aware this is something you need to return to again and again.

Ideally you need to have 5-6 or more possible options across the different tiers / rankings. When your inevitable first reject comes, you can send it to another good journal with your feedback on board and incorporated. Of course, you may occasionally hit the holy grail of getting accepted first time, and that in itself speaks to what a great job you did at targeting the right journal. But you should not expect it and certainly not bank on it. The journal world is fickle and even with the right fit, you might get rejected for one of the four other reasons.

Rejecting for lack of fit

Of the top 5 reasons for rejection, rejection for lack of journal fit is perhaps the most frustrating because it was all in your hands. The others are about your writing skills (which I would argue are also all in your hands, obviously, if you know what you are doing, but it does involve random opinions too) but this is purely down to you and your journal fit research. I see this reasonably often, and it is especially galling when the author can’t quite see why it doesn’t fit. Let me give an example. Journal A is interested in the question ‘why are carpentry nails pointy and long?’. Your article is about pointy long nails, and so you think, perfect fit. NO. That journal is only interested in carpentry nails and their pointy-ness and length, not nails in general. Similarly, if your article is about carpentry, they won’t be interested either, because they are only interested in carpentry and pointy nails and length of nails, and probably from a post colonial perspective to boot. You might think your piece on why short nails are the best brings an interesting counterpoint, but again, it is unlikely to survive the desk rejection red button.

Let’s think about this from the journal perspective. Their mission is to shed light on why the best nails are pointy and long. That is their stated mission in the journal descriptor but when you read recent iterations of the journal, you find the only discussion on the table is carpentry and postcolonialism employing a quant methodology. You find the editorial board is largely quant based scholars. Whatever the original founding mission, the journal has now entered its own rabbit hole of obscurity. There is zero point bringing a paper on nails that are long and pointy, in carpentry using postcolonial theory with qual methodology. Zero. That is not what the audience is interested in, not what they understand, not what they want to hear about. They don’t want their horizons broadened in general, so save yourself the hassle.

Where it goes wrong is you and your genius can see the connection between question A and question B, but those pesky editors just can’t. Or maybe the editors have 1000 submissions directly on point, using the right language and theoretical perspectives for their audience, and yours is slightly off and it is a way of culling the masses. This is a way to make it easy for them to reject you. This is frustrating I know, but nonetheless, reality. There is a box out there for you, you just have to find it.

If you can’t fit in the box EXACTLY it is not your box and you run the risk of desk rejection.

The generalist journals

Of course there are generalist journals that cover a multitude of things in every discipline. Take a journal named something like law and society. Such a journal could in theory cover a wide horizon of material, but again, there will still be lines within which you need to colour, or a new obsession in a field that has captured the interests of the editors or: REJECT. In some ways, generalist journals tend to be the most prestigious and you are really up against a wide range of scholars tackling lots of different subject material, and so it is harder on the sheer numbers and subject variety to get published in such a journal.

The more niche you are the harder this is and the easier this is

There are tens of thousands of peer review journals out there, but finding the one that fits your niche requires work. It is research. It should go without saying - but I will say it - the people you are referencing in your paper and the journals they are publishing in are your people, and that is where you should aim to publish. You should not submit a paper to a journal where you have no, or only one or two references, from that journal in it. Immediately, this tells editors, this is not really our guy. But what if your niche is in a low ranking area and you are under pressure for metrics to submit to high ranking journals? Change your niche, or broaden the scope so you can reach beyond this small subset of people. Reframe, reframe, reframe. Learn the languages of other disciplines and journals so you can make it fit: this is the hardest publishing work of all and you will suffer multiple rejections based on fit alone. There is no easy way to say this - it is essentially making your work interdisciplinary and that is very tough in terms of publishing (see my original blog).

If though your niche research area happens to be one catered to by the top/ many journals then hooray - you are at a competitive advantage because your fit is easy to find, and there are plenty of journals to choose from. Your people recognise you straight away. You are writing about pointy long nails in carpentry from a postcolonial perspective and they know you and see you are their person. Your very niche-ness makes you instantly recognisable as who they want in their journal, because their journal is that niche. Jackpot.

All this is to say there is no one narrative of how something gets published or not, but there are some absolute rules that apply, and one of them is that you can make the publishing journey easier or harder depending on the type of piece you write and the ease with which this fits in with what your audience will expect.

If you want some free training, check out my YouTube video:

Breaks in the writing process

One of the things that writers struggle with is momentum. Keeping your writing flowing, day after day, can be a real challenge especially if your processes and systems of writing depend on big blocks of uninterrupted time. The thing about your life - and your job - is it is full of interruptions. Work interruptions, family interruptions and ALL THE THINGS can get in the way of a writing practice that feels like one where you make consistent gains every time you sit down to write. The answer?

Besides changing your systems and processes of writing so they do not depend on big uninterrupted blocks of time, a short, quick fix is to have a reliable 'power down' system in place so that when you are out of time, you take 1 minute to write down the following instruction to yourself:

• Where am I right now in the text?

• What was I thinking?

• What do I need to do next when I return?

Putting this in the document, highlighted so you can see it, will save you having to re-read the thing all over again when you do return to writing, thus dispensing with the 'warm up' routine of many inefficient writers. It is a simple, quick and effective intervention, and whether the interruption is one of hours, days or weeks, it is much easier to return quickly to the core of your task with this in place.

This one practical intervention will stop those ripples of interruption endlessly spooling outwards.

Who needs a coach?

Who are my clients?

My clients are just like you. They are based all over the world, and come to me for a variety of different types of coaching interventions. Let me give you some examples:

• Tenured experienced professors looking to step up in their careers: they are taking on new challenges and roles and want to develop the skills and strategies to get the most out of their career

• Mid level academics who are looking for something specific: they have gotten stuck with writing (for a number of different reasons) and want to get back to producing work with less angst and drama so they can create more time to do other things

• ECRs who are ambitious and don't want to hang around waiting 20 years to learn the hard way - they need to get on with their careers fast

Let's talk about Maggie* who went from being stuck and unable to produce ANY work on sabbatical to getting out 3 papers, restarted the book project she was on and returned to conferencing with confidence. All within 1 year - the turnaround is dramatic!

Or let's talk about Paul* who had always operated on a deadline driven basis until tenure and then, with the axe removed, found himself stuck and unable to finish papers and plot his career strategically. With coaching, he submitted that nagging paper, started another one and plotted his pipeline for the next 12 months, with intention, so that he was actually committing the time to projects that get him where he needs to go.

The reason I *anonymised my clients names is worthy of a post all by itself, but needless to say, in a competitive and cutthroat profession, many people that need help feel like they should already have the answers and are afraid of being 'found out' in some way if they go to a coach. The truth is, everyone needs help. Some people get it informally through mentoring at work or home, but others need to seek it out. My coaching space is confidential, although I try my best to encourage as much group coaching and peer sharing as possible to normalise what each client feels only they are going through. Your problems are everyone's problems, but no-one talks about it.

So if you are looking for some help in getting back on track, you can book a free writing strategy call with me in the new year and let's have a chat about the ways in which I can help you.

How to manage disappointment in academia

This week’s blog comes by request.

What disappointment do i mean?

I think it is first important to define what we mean by disappointment in academia because honestly there is a lot of it. Your boss can disappoint, your colleagues and co-workers, your mentors, your students, rejection of promotion or job applications, and rejection from publishers in the form of journals or book publications can disappoint. You can disappoint you, and often you do - the paper was not quite what you wanted to say; that class went badly; I could have handled that disgruntled student better; that research project did not go quite how I intended it to…the list is endless.

Honestly, academia is one profession where your opportunities for disappointment surround every single aspect of your daily job, and I can’t think of another quite like it. It is why people like email so much - a refuge and safe harbour from disappointment. The one thing you need to do to thrive as a academic is first to accept you are in a job full of disappointments, both large and small and then work out a way to (a) rationalise that disappointment relative to your resources and (b) find a way to move forward swiftly. That seems like cold comfort I know, but it is best to get that out there first.

This request actually related to something specific and that was about funding, so that is what I will focus on here.

Disappointment or rejection from grant applications

For some scholars, the start of the new calendar year marks a moment where grant decisions are made, and success or failure is handed out in the form of (un)welcome emails. The majority of emails received will be negative decisions, so let’s get some context.

In 2022, the main grants for ECRs in the humanities in the UK had a success rate of: 21% (ESRC); 20% (BA); 26% (AHRC -but this is whole grant ecosystem); and if you can even still access this in Brexit UK, 16% ERC.

This should make for sober, yet informed, reflection. Your chances of success are relatively small and - this is anecdotal as i don’t have the figures to hand - the same applicants, in my experience, tend to get grants from the same bodies over and over again. You see it all the time - some people get grant after grant after grant and barely appear in the classroom their entire careers, and others never get a single grant funded. The system favours the repeat players, who have found the language and happen to be in the research vein that is consistently topping the agenda for that research body, or indeed those scholars who look first at the agenda of the grant awarding body and make that their research interest.

Those who get a grant are hardly ever first time applicants - and those who do get grants have usually been heavily supported by:

• sight of past successful grant applications - several if possible - for the same grant they are applying to;

• a well resourced and effective research support office who help with drafting;

• intensive and useful grant writing workshops, run by people who know the scoring system and give individual review of your application;

• and/or someone who is employed by a University as a grant writer - this is all they do, over and over, and are the ultimate repeat players;

• a University infrastructure primed to win grants over and over again

What does this look like? Swift internal decision making in a one-stop shop; publication of grant opportunities to staff in a targeted and logical manner; and deadlines advertised well in advance. The opposite of a supportive grant application environment is rounds upon rounds of internal reviews that give the applicant only 1-2 weeks to draft a grant from start to finish, when the actual interval needed is 6 months at least; and prioritisation of bureaucratic quality control review systems that neither introduce quality or control. Back end systems - such as adequate financial control and disbursement, swift recruitment processes and teaching relief so that researchers can actually do the research they are paid for - are all necessary to produce an environment conducive to winning grants.

So the first thing to consider in managing the disappointment is to ask - to what extent did I have access to this support? What were the chances of my being successful in the environment I currently reside? Did I have sight of successful applications so I could copy the language employed? It is not all down to the single lone scholar’s brilliance, or how deserving their project is. How many times have you tried and received good feedback from the grant provider that you incorporated next time? You might need 10 applications to get 1 grant. Did you address the reasons given last time out? Do you yet have the back catalogue of publications that serve as a proxy for research reputation in that area of study?

As someone who has been behind the scenes and acted as a grant reviewer, I am always surprised by the relative weight given to each element of the application, and scoring the project idea is a relatively minuscule element of the overall decision scoring process, contrary to what most applicants think when they are writing out the application. It would be much more help if the scoring sheets were made public, rather than the somewhat generic guidance put out there by funding bodies in their stead.

Moving on

Once you understand the likelihood of getting a positive funding decision in context, I think it is easier to swallow the rejection and decide: what can i do about it? Now I know all the things I need, where do I go to get them? Does it mean tapping into networks, getting a different job, moving to somewhere that has the support mechanisms - if this is what you need for your research career, this is a serious question to answer. Ultimately, given the list of things that increase my chances, what can I do to acquire them?

Taking action, taking the appropriate steps to understand rejection in its context, feedback and the context in which it occurs, is how you move forward and improve your odds next time out. This is to me the best way to cope with disappointment, not a passive stage of licking your wounds and feeling bad - though you are entitled to do that for a day or two - but taking action and moving forward knowing the odds of success increase each time out if you learn from the feedback you are given.

Rediscovering your writing identity

Have you lost your scholarly identity and THIS is what is holding you back in your writing?

Writing is a confidence game and that is why momentum is key. When you are doing it all the time, writing becomes easy, routine and dare I say it, pleasant and for some even joyous. Can you imagine that?

When you stop doing it and have no momentum, doubt, imposter syndrome, procrastination and a whole host of unhelpful writing narratives raise their medusa heads and freeze you in place, stopping you from making any progress on your writing projects.

So what to do? Well, first let's take a step back. Why did you stop? This can sometimes be something you don't want to admit to for self protection reasons, or have not thought deeply about, or refuse to see. Deep down though, if you examine it hard enough, you will find the reason, or combination of reasons you stopped writing. It is rarely just one thing, though for sure, one thing usually dominates.

It could be a whole host of reasons, but let me give you some examples from my own clients:

• Writing is hard and everything else you do in your job is easier, so you chose the easy

• Change in role - from Professor to Head of School - and thence to Dean

• Change of teaching: more classes, new classes

• Change of admin role/responsibilities - whether chosen or forced

• The apocalypse and on-line teaching, and you never recovered

• Refusal of promotion, study leave or something that you sought 

• Refusal of grant / other funding you felt were crucial to support your research

• Rejection from a journal / publisher

• A collapse in the alignment between your job and your values

• A recently diagnosed neurodivergence, physical illness or change of life circumstances which has left you questioning everything and in particular how you work

• You collaborative partners have moved on (physically or intellectually) and with it your accountability and motivation to write

• You don't like the project you are working on because [insert any number of reasons] and now you associate writing with this particular project and refuse to do any, because stuck between knowing you have to finish this thing, and not wanting to write, you refuse to write anything at all

This list is just indicative, not exhaustive, but I wanted to give you an inkling as to what you should be looking for if you are in this situation. Some of these reasons are about time, and your relationship with it, some are about your feelings being hurt and how you deal with criticism or rejection, and some are about your motivations. All of these are curable, with the right assistance - frameworks of task execution, coaching around and reframing your motivations and developing new ways of working in new environments. 

If this is you, and you want to make a change, the first thing you can do is - honestly and without judgment  - investigate the origin of why you stopped. Write down your feelings about it. Journaling has been shown repeatedly by research to provide the safe and critical reflective space to help you answer these questions. Once you know, then you can work out how to begin again and recover your writing identity.

How to speed up your writing process

Feeling the need for speed

One lament a writing coach hears alot is ‘I feel I am too slow at writing’. It is a consistent theme, and something many of my clients feel they want to ‘fix’. First, I wonder what they mean, and on further inquiry it seems like they feel they don’t ‘do enough’, get ‘through enough’ ‘publish enough’.

I wonder ‘what is enough?’ Have a think about that first. What would be enough for you? Because whatever that means, that is what I am here to help them achieve through coaching. We all have different lives, different aspirations, and different requirements in our job, so ‘enough’ differs wildly. Sometimes publishing requirements are made explicit by your employer, and sometimes they are rumour mill and peer pressure driven. Sometimes you decide your own targets, created by any number of factors.

But let’s think through, this not ‘enough’ feeling. It is probably not really externally set, but internally framed. Usually clients eventually talk about speed. Speed of delivery. Speed of progress. Speed of execution.

It’s the leak in the pipe

When we explore in more detail, I find out a number of things. My writers are collapsing the writing (text creation) into the editing (crafting), with the thinking (intellectual development of their ideas), with the research and note taking (the foundation of their research), with the OUTPUT. Well. All of this added together is a fairly long process and it should be. It becomes longer than necessary when these processes are out of sync - if you even have a process - and you go round and around and around what should be distinct stages of exciting your writing.. In fact, you probably don’t really see them as distinct aspects of ‘writing’. This means there are inefficiencies in your approach, but slowness, speed, is not the issue. The issue is the leak in the pipe, and it is my job to find and repair that that leaky process.

Speed comes from reducing friction

Once the leak in the pipe is remedied, though what next? Through training, workshops, courses or 1-1 coaching, we start to refine your execution. It’s basic physics. Where there is friction, things slow down. Where there is a smooth, unimpeded journey, things pick up speed. Momentum carries you through even when the odd speed bump presents itself. That is what we try to create in a coaching relationship. Friction reduction, and solid reliable processes that remove leaks in the pipe.

If you are looking to increase your speed in ‘writing’ then, have a think about where the real inefficiencies lie. Is there a better way to collate data? Sometimes, you don’t know, what you don’t know. No-one ever showed you, or told you about other ways to do things and you are still doing the things you have always done because ‘that is just how I do it’. But could there be a better way? Is there a faster way to assemble your research material and make extraction of the important things both quick and reliable? Do you turn up to writing without a plan or notes (or ideas)? Are there barriers to writing that are deeper, and manifest themselves in procrastination, imposter syndrome and perfectionism?

Once you have a clear idea of what your ‘enough’ constitutes, you can start to examine the mechanics of writing and find the friction.

We all feel the need for speed, but locating the leaks in the pipe, and the identifying the causes of friction, are the first steps to achieving it.

The Writing Sprint Club

Bringing people together

One of the core missions of Academic Coach is to bring people together to write, and to help people who feel that coaching is either not for them, or they would like it but feel that is completely unaffordable. Research on writing productivity (eg Boice, amongst many others) tells us that social writing - that is regular writing amongst others - results in more outputs. It is that simple. It has been measured time and again. It also fuels positive emotions around writing and creates additional social benefits beyond the time spent writing. Writing clubs become organic engines of support outside of your department, your discipline and your country, and you are engaged in a common endeavour with people who truly understand. Paying a small amount of money actually increases the effectiveness of social writing because it creates the pressure to show up when you otherwise might not feel like it.

I have always advised all my clients to engage in social writing in all its forms, yet I did not provide an environment for that to actually happen, here at Academic Coach HQ. So here it is! This year I have set up the Writing Sprints Club. This is a gateway to accessing many of my coaching resources for free. Become a member of this club and get access to thousands of euros worth of free coaching throughout the year.

How does the club work?

You block book six weeks worth of sessions in one go to hold yourself accountable and to make sure you follow through. You turn up each week with what you need (I provide a guide to this) and we meet up through Zoom every Friday 1.30-3.30pm (UK time) to practice the art of the writing sprint. I will show up and facilitate these sessions, and I will write with you. Don’t know what a writing sprint is? I have a video here explaining it and why mastering this skill is key to being a happier writer.

You will be provided with €500 worth of coaching material upfront on signup, and we will have a private resources hub that I will drop free coaching into throughout the year, just for Club members. So if you think coaching is not for you, or that you can’t afford it, the Writing Sprint Club is the best way to dip your toe into the writing pool for maximum value for money. I know these things can sound a bit daunting, but this is a supportive and friendly environment open to academics and PhD students alike.

New Year Planning

January planning

January was always my favourite part of the academic calendar for many reasons. In my department, we had year long courses out of synch with the rest of the University. This meant when everyone else was toiling with grading and exams, we were blissfully free of student responsibilities for most of this month. January was a time to think, to plan and to connect with my inner control freak, relatively free of grinding administration. I like to plan. I am a planner by nature. But, I was not a very good planner. I planned, in the sense that I listed my (writing) goals for the year, but this was honestly more akin to a wish list rather than a plan of action.

The science of planning

In Atomic Habits, James Clear talks about planning as ‘motion’. We feel as though we are moving forward by planning, but in actual fact, this is illusory. Listing goals gets us precisely nowhere - as he rather bluntly puts it, winners and losers all have the same goals. To win. Planning as motion is not enough, but rather we need to move from motion to action. What kind of planning does that take? In fact, does the action take place through planning, or is it separate and unconnected? I was pondering these thoughts in preparation for the usual January planning workshop and realised that I would radically alter the way in which I talk about planning from now on.

Planning is important, and it is the bedrock of a good writing habit. I love planning. But there are plans, and there are PLANS.

From motion to action

If you have made many a plan in January, for it all to go to hell by March, I see you. Planning is neither is a magic bullet (alone), nor is it a straightjacket . It will not solve your problems nor will it keep you rigidly to a path that can never change. Anti-planners have many reasons they don’t plan - it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t feel good, other people ruin them, I fail at my plans, and so on. This negative self talk is already defeating the aim of planning, which is to provide a guide, a roadmap, not a prison.

I have talked before about understanding your own psychology when it comes to planning. Are you the type to shoot for moon and settle for the stars, or are you the type that wants - at all costs - to feel successful? If you are the former, plans are stretching and ambitious, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t execute all of them. If you are the latter, any type of miss or failure will derail your entire year, therefore your plans are more modest, reasonable, doable, achievable. When failure is derailing, rather than a positive learning experience that is the inevitable result of aiming high, it is better to set your sights lower and enjoy some positive reinforcement of the things your do achieve.

Planning starts from a place of hope, and that is a good thing. This is the place of motion. What we want to do is move it to a place of action, where things actually happen. There is a whole bunch of work - some of it quite deep - to understand how we move ourselves from motion to action through planning, but it begins with understanding how we have framed our core identity and belief systems so that we can work with rather than against them.

If you would like to get better at planning your publications, you can join us in Activate your Publication Pipeline where I help you construct a meaningful publication pipeline and then for 12 months I support you in implementing that plan.

If you want to plan alone, and move from motion to action, ask yourself this: what part of your core identity are these plans going to work with, or against? Changing belief systems is hard, an understanding which belief systems routinely derail your plans is even harder, but this core work is crucial if you are going to make plans that stick.

The December writing slump

The December writing slump is all too real. This is the time when you have had a tough term, and any writing vibe you might have going on has been truly depleted by NaNoWrMo - the National Writing Month - where committed writers head full pelt into a writing extravaganza for the whole of November.

Term is nearly over. A couple more weeks and you are hanging on with your fingernails. Welcome to the December writing slump where all your hard won progress over the last couple of months - against all the odds - can disappear in the blink of an eye.

Alternatively, there is a bunch of you who have done no writing all term and are now seriously panicking about that. It is not too late - the December writing slump is hard for everyone, but a little of refocusing on what you can actually achieve - however small - on your writing project between now and Christmas will make that holiday break even sweeter.

December is in fact the best month to get your writing vibe on. Stay with me, I know this seems ludicrous, but if you get something started or something moved along now - when all the stars are aligned against you, you will know, you absolutely know, you can do this anytime. The temptation is to think it is just all too much, but heading into that two week vacation time over Christmas and New Year is all the sweeter if you put that foot to the accelerator now. Or, more realistically, slowly push that ball forward one small micro movement at a time. What matters is keeping that ball rolling, however slowly. Guilt free relaxation can be yours. A whole fortnight (at least) without thinking or stressing about writing and research not done. Heaven.

How is this possible? what magic is this?

Well like most writing advice, it is not magic, more recalibration. Turning our mind away from ‘well, there’s no point starting anything now, term is nearly over / Christmas is nearly here / I’ve only one week or two…’. Sound familar? Turn that into : what can I do NOW? What small thing can I do this week? I have a whole 5 working days to make a change. What will that be?

For those of you out of the writing habit, start super slowly as follows.

• Week 1: Block out 30 minutes every working day to sit and think and make notes from your thoughts. Don’t read, don’t look stuff up. Think. Every single day. About your project, where it is, and what you want to say in it. Doodle notes and mind maps and make lists - long lists. Get that stuff out of your head and onto paper.

• Week 2: Block out 45 minutes every day. Review the lists and notes you have made, and start collating these into a rough outline / or a more specific and focused list of next steps to take. Carry on thinking.

• Week 3: Block out 1 hour of your day. Start working down the list of things to do.

• At the end of week 3, make a detailed note of where you were, what you were thinking, what comes next.

Then it’s the holidays! Hooray!

For those of you in the habit, your list looks a little different.

• Week 1: Block out 1 hour of your time daily to make extensive lists of all the things remaining on your project. Think deeply about it. What goes where, the arguments that need tightening up, the sources you need to collect / analyse, and so on. Think in this time. Do not write.

• Week 2: Block out 1 hour of your day to write, working down your list every day. By the end of this week, you might still be on task 1 (you have not successfully broken things down into small enough chunks - this takes practice! And coaching!).

• Week 3: dedicate 1 hour 30 minutes per day to tackling those writing tasks on the list.

• At the end of week 3, make a detailed note of where you were, what you were thinking, what comes next.

Then the holidays! Hooray!

You can rest, relax, knowing you have moved that project forward in tangible ways. You won’t forget where you were because you made extensive notes at the end before wrapping up for Christmas.

December need not be the month where your writing energy slumps to zero. It can be the month where you take control of a semester gone out of control. Consider joining a kickstarter weekend (I run these, just to put you back on track), or make those small commitments outlined above. Focus on the small manageable tasks that must be done to complete the project - this will keep you moving forward.

Time, and the seduction of meetings

Meetings: where productivity goes to die

I love this image. The image of an empty meeting room, with the sign ‘Do Good Things’. This says everything I want to emphasise. Good things happen when meeting rooms are empty, not when they are full. This should not be news. The business world has long since understood that meetings are an absolute - categorical - waste of time. Academia - despite producing research that tells the business world just that - does not want to internalise this knowledge. Nothing productive happens at meetings. In fact, nothing happens at meetings.

Academia is full of what I think of as ceremonial meetings. Meetings where things USED to happen, but have long since stopped having any decisional making power due to restructuring of faculty and university power structures. Let’s take that great ceremonial: exam board meetings. In the old days, exam boards used to have decision making power - now, computer says yes or no and grade. It has all been decided before you step foot in the room, but because some University rule from 1922 - when exam boards last decided things - still says that exam boards must confirm the students’ results, we all sit in a room for 5 days hearing someone read out the equivalent of the football results. All numbers, all anonymised, no voting or decisions to be taken. What a giant waste of a week’s salary. Sitting in that room for one week - I actually did the calculation, combing and dividing the salary of colleagues present came to about £900,000 a day (without overheads) and I could not help but think there were better ways to spend this money. But these are not the only meetings that have become largely ceremonial. Boards of study meetings (all decisions taken elsewhere, these are now ‘informational’ one way stream to communicate things already decided). Ditto, school / faculty meetings. What about standard committee meetings, like ethics or research committee or teaching committee? Often what needs to be decided is minimal and as we learned in a pandemic, can be done both remotely and in about 30 minutes if everyone is concentrating. Not 3 hours.

What about really important meetings such as, say, academic promotion meetings? First, these happen once a year, not once a week, so a little time given over to this important service role is justifiable. They are predictable, you can schedule them at the beginning of the year. You can thus schedule your writing time around that meeting. There will be pre-reading which you allocate time for. Well, you ought to. If everyone has read the applications before hand, and there are clear criteria, this should not be the 5 hour marathon it has become. Ever seen someone start to read the applications in front of you for the first time? Let’s just say: preparation maketh the meeting. It maketh it much shorter than 5 hours.

What about research meetings amongst collaborators? Well, again, how many of these have no, or poorly defined, agendas (‘let’s have a catch up’) that can go all day or turn into some mega whine about all the things? What are the three things you need to decide? If there are any more than that, bump it to the next meeting. Short, focused, and on task. This is not a comment-more-than-a- question type of event, for the love of god, people have actual work to be doing.

No agenda, no meeting. Say it with me. No agenda, no meeting.

Frankly most meetings are not for decision making. They are for already-decided-decision-communication, and that can be done in an email, which people can read in due course, as scheduled.

People who got to a lot of meetings don’t write

Fact. If you have more than one meeting a week, you are not writing, or not writing as much as you should. I don’t mean students here, they have their allotted hours already for personal tutee meetings, and naturally you meet them in the classroom. I mean staff / University / research / stakeholder / funder meetings. All the meetings that do not involve students. People who go to meetings feel busy: they are busy, attending meetings. Any lingering guilt about not writing is assuaged by that ping of the calendar announcing yet another meeting to go to. You can fill your whole week with teaching and meetings. Boy you feel super useful, and perhaps, a little bit important.

How many meetings are too many? This depends on where you are in the pecking order. If you are running the department, this advice does not apply to you. You should probably be in a fair number of meetings - this is literally what you get paid to do, having given over most other parts of the job. Otherwise, it totally applies.

I feel any meetings are too many, naturally, but maybe you can’t get away with that. One per week: too many. Two per month? Acceptable, better for it to be two per term. Perhaps we have service roles and other faculty commitments, but if you have so many of these you ned to attend more than two meetings per month, you have too many roles, or it time to understand you can’t be at all of the meetings, all of the time. Share them out. Decide if you need to go to endless meetings to fulfil your roles or do your part. What are you actually doing there? What about PhDs? Well no-one needs to spend more than 30 minutes a week with their PhD student in general - are you feeding back on their work every week - otherwise, why are you meeting them? Again, this is not an opportunity to whine - this is not what PhD meetings are for. If you want to catch up - get many in a room and do it all at once. For 1-1 deep supervisory meetings, these should happen once a month, once every six weeks, when the student has had an opportunity to do some work and turn it in for comments.

And if you chair meetings, please have an agenda - a short one - with 3 things on it, and move through it like a hot knife through butter. Spare everyone the unnecessary pain. In my previous life I was Chair of the Postgrad Exam Boards and for boring reasons there were four of these suckers per year. FOUR. But I got them done in 30 sweet minutes, and it was glorious for everyone. This required some prep on my part obviously to check for any error in the papers, grades and so I was not faffing in the meeting. Not a problem, happy to do it. As chair is was my responsibility to fully prepare, and not waste other people’s time.

What about those meetings that ‘just pop up’? Well they don’t, not for you, because you already scheduled writing in that slot. If you had a class scheduled in that slot, there would be zero qualms about saying you could not make it. Same goes for research. It is not disposable at the whim of others. People who hold meetings that just ‘pop up’ (a) don’t write (b) are trying to dump some unexpected work on someone, and it can’t be you if you don’t go to the meeting (c) have badly thought through their time and you should not pay the price for that.

Remember, there are other ways to communicate with colleagues. Whilst meetings are seductive, they are also the number one indicator of someone who does not write. Shorter is better. Time is precious. And always, always write first.

The tyranny of email

Email: It sucks (time)

There are many things I can become quite righteous about in relation to time. Things I have little sympathy for because I feel like these are self inflicted wounds: the tyranny of email is decidedly not one of them. Email: it sucks, and it sucks your time away and it is very difficult to discipline yourself about it for a multitude of reasons. I feel this pain, although I suspect for slightly different reasons than many of you.

Email is a replacement of the letter, not snapchat. It is not a text. It is not an instant medium, yet we seem to have forgotten this very basic starting point. You SHOULD NOT be replying to emails immediately. It is not that kind of medium. Email is a very big waste of time, most of the time. And yet, and yet, oh, so addictive. I want you to visualise a dam that has burst - that is email. It is a wide open gate for the world to access your labour, unconstrained by contractual arrangements and pay. And that water never ever stops flowing in. Ever. Academics get asked to do a lot of work that is not even from their employer!!!! Can you even imagine that in any other industry? I don’t think so somehow. Yet you see every possible approach via email as something YOU MUST DO, even stuff you are not paid for and is not from your employer. You don’t have to, really.

Why is it this way?

Why do you spend so much time on email? Lots and lots of devilish reasons. You have all your notifications turned on like some Pavlovian dream. Respond on demand. The system is set up to have you perform like one of those rats trained to hit the lever to get a treat. Yet this rat is never satisfied, it keeps on hitting the lever manically to get its treat fix. Email is a treat because it is easy. It makes us feel useful (I am solving other people’s problems all day long! Hooray!), it makes us feel like we are contributing, and it provides that dopamine hit of quick wins. But crucially: it is EASY. Much, much easier than writing and research. The problem with this is those emails were not on your to-do list today or any other day. 10 other things were, and you did none, because you were on email, like the rat, tap tap tapping away.

I sympathise I really do. Although I was not an email addict, I was a compulsive solver of other peoples’ problems (that were presented, by email, as my problem - it is a wonderful sleight of hand no?). I was also someone likely to be emotionally derailed for the day as a result of a departmental circular of some kind, usually related to teaching or some new fiendish way of wasting my time invented by finance. That stuff BURNED. I was unable to discipline myself into not reacting this way, so evasive action was required. Divert, divert, divert. Do your work. Your actual work, which is on your actual list of things to do.

Controlling Email

Unlike time, you can control your email.

Most of the emails you get can go straight to trash and you should set up rules to make sure that happens. Unsubscribe rarely works, so just trash that stuff. Same with departmental and University circulars - set up folders, divert away from your inbox. Students - whilst in my opinion not the primary generator of email overload - should be directed by your signature (or in extreme circumstance, your out of office automatic reply) to the various avenues they can get the answer to their question - usually, the syllabus, or support staff, or the online learning portal, or course site, or discussion board. Wherever you collate your FAQs. You should have repeatedly made clear your email policy (don’t email me about …..) at the beginning of term. Come see me, ask me in class, post on the discussion board. I will not respond by email: that is OK - there are 700 of them (on this one course) and only one of you.

Most emails though can go straight to trash. If there are actually things you - and only you - have to action, you can mark these as to do, and make a slot in your diary to tackle them. Don’t do it NOW regardless of any stated deadline. If it was really that important (note, I don’t say urgent) they would have given you more than two days to respond. That is not your problem. Schedule and tackle accordingly. Remember: agency.

So once again, the secret is to schedule email, and crucially, schedule it after you have written. This will seem impossible for those with an email addiction so I suggest you work your way up to scheduling your email at 4.00pm, and start gently by scheduling email at 11.00am. Whatever you do, do not open email first. You should have scheduled slots to actually do the emails tasks if they are weighty. For the love of God, please do not reply all to anything, thus creating yet more emails for everyone. Keep your responses tight and short. Try not to encourage endless back and forth of never ending politeness that no-one knows how to stop except with the thumb up emoticon.

Email is tyrannical. It is time to revolt.

I can't find time to write

The next couple of blogs will be a series on ‘Time’, and the stories we tell ourselves about time. We wrap ourselves in these stories so we don’t have to face doing the difficult intellectual work of writing, but the key here is to recognise they are just that. Just stories. Not fact, not true, just things we tell ourselves (and for some, have heavily internalised as a defence mechanism to criticism).

Today I am going to start with the greatest lament of struggling writers everywhere - I can’t find time to write. Wrong. The whole premise is wrong. We don’t find time. We don’t create time. We don’t make time. We don’t lose time (it is not behind the sofa) and we don’t manage time. It is not an unruly toddler that has to be corralled.

Your whole attitude to time has gone astray right from the get-go here. We must see time instead as something we schedule. That is all we can do. Time unspools before us - we don’t create it, or find it. We can choose what we do with our time though, because we have agency - still, in these difficult times - we still have agency to schedule our time. Most working professionals do in fact possess this same agency. Of course, we have fixed slots for teaching, determined by the gods of timetabling, but after that, we decide what we do with our time and when we do it. Your synchronous teaching slots might account for 2-14 hours a week depending on you contract, position and location. That’s still a pretty small amount of a 40 hour working week.

We don’t find time. If you are working from a position of finding time, you have already lost. This is not hide and seek. Time requires us to schedule our behaviour into slots where we match task to be completed to a fixed time slot. We all know many academic tasks - especially teaching related ones - will take as long as you give them, so decide ahead of time, how long you are prepared to give to X task. Let your time allocation model be your guide. Be honest. And here is the rub - so often we are NOT honest. We don’t know how long something has taken us to do because we never set out with a particular goal in mind, and we have never timed ourselves doing it.

Let’s start with a benign example. You have to grade 100 1500 word essays. You are allowed in your time allocation model 10 minutes per essay. You set yourself a target of 30 essays this week, which requires 5 hours of marking on this calculation. That is what you must give it. Use a timer, move on, get quicker at this skill. Use rubrics, autofill comments on Turnitin, whatever strategy you need. You can give excellent feedback in that time, but it takes practice and some investment in working out how to create efficiencies that will pay you back forever. Schedule the time you require and stop when that time runs out. You should not sit for 5 hours grading - no-one should. This task should be spread out, hour to hour amongst your working week(s), to be fitted in around other tasks.

Then, move onto your next task.

That is where people go astray. They ignore the clock, the calendar, and simply continue until they run out of steam. They won’t assess how long that task took them - in fact it took them 5 hours to mark 5 essays instead of 30. That is clearly wrong. You are not paid to spend 1 hour per 1500 word student essay, and no amount of hiding inside some justification about quality will save you here. This was not a good use of your time, because you are paid to do many other things. This is exactly why agency scares people. You choose to spend your time this way. It is not that you could not find time to write. You chose to spend 5 hours grading 5 essays. You chose it.

The key to scheduling your time is to obey the schedule, and of course, put writing in the schedule to begin with. If you show me your schedule, I can find you 5 writing slots a week, guaranteed. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and I can absolutely guarantee you that. I don’t know how long they will last, but I do know, after a couple of weeks of coaching, your schedule will look radically different than it does right now, if you let me help you populate it. The first thing I ask clients to do is show me their schedule. Some are reluctant, some are a little sheepish, some don’t even have what I consider to be a proper schedule (classes written down on a bit of paper diary is not a schedule, it is a list of your classes). A few are wildly overcommitted, in life and in work, and their obligations have to be trimmed to match what they are paid to do; some clients have only a loose understanding of what is reasonable at any given career stage. Some have massive inefficiencies in their practice that can be streamlined to enable more writing slots to be scheduled.

I don’t think this is revolutionary but experience tells me this should be said explicitly. It is no good having a schedule if you ignore it at the first opportunity - the first time someone asks you for something, interrupts you, or an email pops in, or indeed, if you delight in writing a complementary essay of feedback on the student’s essay.

People resist scheduling for all kinds of reasons, but mainly, they resist it because then - when they scheduled 5 hours to write that week (a mere 1 hour per day) and they did not do it - they can have plausible deniability as the movies say. I just didn’t have the time: oh but you did, and it is RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SCHEDULE. You chose not to. And that recognition is the first step to unwiring these writing myths - the greatest of all being ‘I can’t find time to write’, facilitated by the second greatest myth which is ‘I have no control over my schedule’.

The self care narrative, gaslighting and academia

Today’s blogpost is something of a personal reflection on how academics can both protect themselves and ultimately flourish in what has become a sometimes hostile work environment that grates against the ideals of academic freedom, nurturing student potential through teaching excellence and contributing research excellence. This post was prompted following an exchange I witnessed on social media about the deification of the self care narrative as a solution to systemic inequalities, overwork, understaffing and a diminution of the academic mission as most academics see it.

Disclaimer: this is not an apology for a broken system

In the last few year before Covid, the self-care narrative was predominant in Universities. Over Covid, it has merely increased 100-fold, but it is not a new tune. Let me be clear what I mean: staff survey reports chronic overwork, unequal workloads, understaffing, an obsession with metrics that actually creates bad teaching, a dilution of academic autonomy and overbearing micro managing administration. Solution: here are some lunchtime yoga classes - do your downward dog daily and everything will be well. Obviously this is not something I am on board with - who can be? The problem and solution are unmatched. If the staff survey had proposed a universal condition of stiffness and bad backs, then the free downward dog would indeed be helpful. Alas, the cure and the disease remain strangers, not even kissing cousins. This kind of management response to systemic problems of overwork and inequality is rightly derided as a hollow gesture. It is gaslighting on a massive scale. Because the problem is money and inequity and they won’t spend money - Universities are in the money making business, not the money spending business - or solve the inequality that pervades all of academia. Downward dogs are cheap. This is the system: by all means, join a Union and fight the good fight. But what to do in the meantime before the revolution?

Uncomfortable truths

Any suggestion that there might be some strategies that the individual could adopt immediately becomes tainted by this yoga infused self-care narrative associated with downward dog solutions. Should anyone suggest to you that actually there are things YOU can do for yourself to survive and thrive in this broken system, they somehow become management stooges. This is unfair, frankly naive, and also, totally inaccurate. In fact, holding tight to that attitude - that the only way is universal overthrow and there is nothing anyone can do for themselves - actually perpetuates this current configuration of academia as we bend and comply and keep on propping it up whilst being convinced the revolution will come and save us. In the meantime, we keep on doing the work of ten men. Literally. And the meantime goes on and on and on and on and on and on….

When someone is looking for help with how to navigate this new-old University world, a coach can step in to help you. They do not tell that person to join a Union - systemic change is not the goal here - individual survival is. Immediacy is important for someone on the edge. Tangible results. Something they have individual control over. The truth is there are ways of being and doing academia that allows you to have a good career and a stable work life balance, but part of that solution is not constantly waiting for that magical systemic change to come around whilst holding onto debilitating beliefs that served you well in before times. The solution is to navigate better through the system that you are currently working in whilst ensuring you look after your mental and physical well-being.

These are treacherous waters and you need a new compass, a new way of thinking, and doing, academia.

changing belief systems

One of the things you can start to do for yourself is review your belief systems. We come into academia thinking it is one thing, and it has turned out to be something else. Perhaps when you came into academia is really was that thing - although I am suspicious of the good old days narrative - but that is not the reality anymore. When you start to see things as they are, rather than how you would like them to be, it is the beginning of making concrete changes in your behaviour that will help you to navigate this new world order more effectively and, as doctors say, with a better outcome. This is not about compliance: no-one would ever accuse me of that. We are talking about understanding the environment in which you work, not the one you wished you worked in. There is room on an individual level to create space that protects you from chronic overwork, burnout and physical and mental meltdown, but it requires some tough changes and ripping off a band aid of old beliefs that no longer serve you. You can do this by yourself or with support, but the message is: you can do this. There is space to put in place strategies that can help you thrive and the first place to start is untangling the idea that self-care, or other workplace coaching strategies, are somehow the enemy.

How to become an expert advisor

One of the things that I get asked to talk to PhD students about is how to leverage their PhD beyond the academy on the basis that I have had a career as an expert advisor to European institutions. We all know the academic job market is thin and precarious, and it is necessary to think about where you might want to go beyond your PhD if the academy does not work out (or indeed you have already decided it is not) for you.

I recently had the opportunity to give a short interview on the wonderful podcast The PhD Life Raft to talk about this topic, so I thought an accompanying blog might help PhD students to think through this too. Many of you will disbelieve your own expertise, and many of you might think this cannot possibly be a career option for you, but hear me out! I had no connections. I was first in my family to go to University, I was from a working class background with the wrong accent. I did not in short look like the type of person a European institution might use as an expert advisor, so before you count yourself out, please take a minute to consider this as a possible opportunity for you.

Why become an expert advisor?

In or out of the academy, it is important to move your research into the real world where it can make some sort of difference - to influence how policy makers or industry acts, and if you remain in the academy, this is also good for things like proving the impact of your work or engagement with relevant stakeholders. If you are looking for an academic job, these industry/outside links are becoming prioritised as Universities seek to prove their worth to the ‘real’ world. It is a competitive advantage to have these links. Good old fashioned money is also a good reason - depending who you eventually work with, these companies can provide an excellent income stream for you personally. If for no other reason, cultivating these contacts is a good way to future proof your career - who knows where you will one day end up looking to work and building strong relationships over time with industry partners can only be a good thing.

What does expert consultancy look like?

This obviously depends on your subject area but usually you are holding an expert advisory role in one way or another, for example:

• Advising professional regulatory bodies

• Advising legislators, governments and international organizations

• Advising industry (private companies or individuals)

• TV / Radio – become a ’talking head’ for media

• TV / Radio – make research programs / content

When can / should you do this?

You can do this as soon as you have your PhD, but it is important to start making relationships as early as you can. I made my relationships whilst still doing my PhD because I went to the institutions in question to conduct research and talk to as many people as I could, but not to make connections; simply to gather the information I needed for my PhD. I had no agenda, and that is probably a good thing. It is important to think early and make a conscious decision that this is going to be part of your research career, and that it is an important part. I was only ever interested in getting my research into the institutions to convince them my approach was the right one and influence them to make decisions about policy and legal change. You must, in the early stages of any relationship formation, be generous with your time. It is part and parcel of the give and take.

Be flexible in what you consider your expertise

Sometimes, in our insecurity, we can draw our expertise quite narrowly, and usually, when industry approaches you for advice, that advice is often rather wide-ranging, coalescing around the kernel of your expertise but perhaps not only on that ONE thing you consider yourself to be an expert in. Here is where we need to demonstrate a bit of confidence in our research skills and know we can get to grips with lots of things in a relatively small space of time. You need to be flexible and a little bit brave.

How does it happen?

It happens though two things: establishing your expertise in ways that matter and building relationships with those you want to work with. Traditional academic publications are obviously one way to demonstrate your academic expertise, and they are the baseline, but not the only way. You need to reach the audience you want to work with. If you are working for an institution like I was, they are reading academic publications because they are staffed by researchers. But if you are working with industry, they are more likely to be reading practitioner led / industry led journals, so you need a good publication strategy to reach these audiences. This is a different kind of writing too, so this requires some learning and flexibility on your part. You can also showcase your expertise by building a convincing brand online (where you can also showcase your research) but can demonstrate your expertise in any number of formats.

In terms of building relationships, you can network through professional organisations, conferences and workshops (you can organise a workshop and invite these people to speak!). Make these opportunities happen for yourself - don’t be passive, hoping the right one will come along. Maintaining a public profile (webpage, Twitter, LinkedIn) is pretty important and following the industry people where they interact - on LinkedIn for example. Once you make contact through research activities, maintain these contacts, and be helpful when you can. Sometimes this does mean providing a little free advice now and again, but beware of exploitation and ‘exposure’ payments.

If you want to hear more about this, please check out The PhD Life Raft for this and lots of other PhD related advice!

Losing your confidence as a writer

Many of the people that come to me for advice as a writing coach describe a state of mind which circles around the notion of losing, or having lost, their confidence as a writer. Many don’t use that precise expression, and mercifully, none have expressed the concept of writer’s block (which I simply don’t accept as a thing). But losing your confidence as a writer is a real and tangible problem: the first thing we need to do is find out why.

Reasons: You, or someone else.

It might be the case that you have gotten out of the writing habit, and by that, I mean very specifically the scholarly research publication type of writing habit. This is very different from the email, feedback, supervision, blog writing, presentation / speech writing, grant writing, text book writing or report writing habit, all of which have their own particular tropes and genres, and are very very different from scholarly research publication writing. If you continually eschew this type of writing in favour of all or some or one of the other types, there is no way that you can maintain your writing confidence in relation to journal articles and /or monographs. You might have gotten out of this habit on purpose (it is just so hard, I can’t face it) or by accident (you became an administrator-teacher) or by design (you were sidelined into other roles or your writing and research time was stolen from your workload matrix). We can take control of all these situations if we really want, but sometimes, we would all rather do the easy thing. The easy thing is not scholarly publishing.

Writing scholarly research for journals and monographs is considered the gold standard, is heavily policed, and is difficult to do. It needs to be a habit to maintain confidence in it like any difficult thing. And by a habit I mean regular soft and hard contact with it, day in, day out. If you have left it two months, or three, or 12 months or 5 years, it is an uphill mountain to climb. The longer the absence, the higher the mountain. It can be done, but without help, it will be painful indeed. The longer the absence, the more work you have to put in to unwire your now hardwired behaviours of avoidance to re-engage with the writing habit.

It might be the case that someone, somewhere in your scholarly life has (intentionally or not) destroyed your confidence through insensitive and unprofessional feedback, criticism or ‘advice’. When we are being subjected to such people - and we have all been subjected to such people - honestly, our bodily responses don’t lie. We know when someone is trying to help, but their words are bruising our egos, and we know when someone is behaving like an asshole. In the moment we KNOW it. But afterwards, it is easy to let that encounter settle, become authoritative, then fester, then be obsessed over (overtly or internally) until it undoes every shred of confidence we ever possessed. Sometimes, people really are out to get you in academia because they are painfully inadequate and insecure. Pity them. An honest internal inventory should point the way: real, or memorex? as those adds used to say.

Fixing it

Unpicking such damage is hard psychological work and has to be faced. Without it, at the slightest sign of difficulty, reluctant writers will fall straight back into their now well established patterns of behaviour and avoidance. Sometimes we can face this head on by ourselves, sometimes we need to approach it softly, over time, and with a certain amount of side eye. Nonetheless, face it we must. Only then can you really start to build new practices of engagement with your writing that will re-establish confidence. Establish that you will keep showing up. You will keep your word to yourself because only you actually cares about your writing.

Turning this around takes courage. It takes a lot of courage. Coaches can provide you with the tools to unpick this damage and reinstate your writing habit (one that actually works for you) but they cannot give you courage. That is yours alone, and so is the ultimate progress you make daily in re-engaging with the difficult task of scholarly writing. It is hard to take responsibility and decide to do things differently, but for many academics, it is harder still to give up on that side of their professional identity where expertise, voice, agency and making a contribution reside. Research is important - it motivates us, and is a real privilege of academic life to find out new things and tell the world about it. Don’t give this up lightly, and certainly, don’t let anyone take that away from you.

Small steps forward

If this sounds like you, please don’t try to run full pelt up that mountain this week or next. Like an endurance event, writing requires build up and small repeated ‘training sessions’ before you can start putting serious time in, lest you do yourself a mischief. You might be severely, moderately or lightly out of shape. So start by unearthing something half started, or if that doesn’t motivate you, start something new that feel excited by. Commit to new practices, new ways of researching and writing, schedule reading, writing and research sessions. Engage for small amounts of time every day, start out with the simple tasks, not the blank sheet of paper. Check out the free resources on this blog to give you ideas of how to do specific things like plan projects and execute them. There is lots of help out there to re-engage with writing, like writing retreats and groups. Just don’t forget to ask yourself how and why you became a reluctant writer. All progress starts from there.

Getting back to writing

It has been quite a year, and I know that some of you feel like robot zombie on-line teachers who cannot even remember the idea of research, let alone the process and feelings associated with that side of your scholarly identity. So how are you to try and reclaim the researcher, the scholar, the writer that has been left by the wayside?

First Principles

Rest. Rest. Rest. Book time off, take it, and I mean really take it. Remove your email from your phone. Do not connect into anything academic for a whole two weeks. Unless you are a surgeon, nothing is urgent. Literally nothing. Just stop and rest and do things you used to like doing. But mainly, rest.

When you are rested, I want you to remember. Remember what your research profile had looked like before the pandemic. What were your rhythms before then? What excited you about research, your project or article? Are there half finished pieces of research in the drawer? Can you rescue some of it, and should you?

Take a hard look at reality

Take your diary and cross through every day of marking resits, resit exam boards, the rest of your vacation days, and the two weeks (yes, you heard me) that you will devote to teaching preparation for next year. Decide now whether in fact you want to devote the precious little time you have left to pointless meetings and University open days. How many actual full days do you have left for research? If your answer is 3, or 5, or 10, then that is your answer. That is your reality and it is just better to know that now, then to wake up every day with the silent dread of once again not working on your research and berating yourself.

Writing every day that is not a vacation day

On my course, I equip people to continue writing when they are grading, when they are teaching, when they are doing admin, but I encourage them to be ruthless with their scheduling. So graduates of this course will not only have 3, or 5 or 10 days to write this summer, because they write every single day. The only time that is free of writing is vacation, weekends and outside your working hours. If this seems like a fantasy, please take the course. It works, and it will free you from the idea that you have NO TIME. You have time, but it might not be as much as you would like to have once those vacation days are in. Just like you have time to teach because it is scheduled, similarly you have time to research. Just not big blocks of time, or free days or weeks, or the biggest myth THE SUMMER. But you do have some time. The question is, what will you do with it?

Dramatically lower your expectations

There is no way to really describe the hell of the last year, so I won’t try to. Let’s agree, it has been difficult. We are not the people we were 12 months ago - it is going to take a minute to reclaim that scholarly identity.

Take control

Don’t wait for your employers to give you permission, or [laughs hysterically] encouragement to re-engage with research. Some may do just that of course, and that is wonderful. But some universities have realised this robot zombie teaching thing can be quite the moneymaker, and might not in fact be enthusiastic about supporting you to return to your research or life as we knew it pre-pandemic (if indeed that reality was one in which your research was supported). REF is done - it is another 5-6 years before research will be cared about once more by the higher ups. It is not their job to connect the dots between support now and research output later - they just don’t work that way.

It is up to YOU to decide to not allow this part of you to be taken away.

Reflect and remember

Schedule some time to have a think about how you have been treated in the last 12 months by your employer. Just think about it. Marinate in it.

Now, make some decisions.

Decide now the kind of scholar you are setting yourself up to be in the future, independent of what your external environment screams at you is URGENT URGENT URGENT every single day. Decide now to reclaim your research identity, your scholarly identity. You are not in fact a teaching robot zombie - this is not why you went through hell to get a PhD. There is just so much more to you than that.

Remember.

Then decide to do things differently.

What is 'enough' for a PhD?

I have had a number of requests lately about the end of the PhD. What to do about ‘gaps’ last time, or in this case, what is ‘enough’ for a PhD. In some ways I think both of these questions, obliquely, refer to the fear of finishing a PhD. For many people, the idea of being afraid of finishing the PhD might come as something of a surprise. The PhD is a long hard slog and is something we talk a lot about ‘getting through it’ or ‘putting it behind us’ - in other words, for many, we can’t wait to finish it! There is though a definite cohort who fear the end of the PhD, although they might not recognise that is what is going on, so today I want to work through this, and then answer the question: what is enough for a PhD?

Is it your fear talking?

If you feel hesitant about submitting your PhD, you might well have the following thoughts:

• This thesis will fail

• This thesis is not good enough

• I’m not good enough

• This thesis did not go as I wanted it to, so it is not going to pass

• I don’t think I have done enough

• What will I do once I press submit?

• What will I do for money?

• Who will I be once I submit this thesis?

• What will the future be when I am not writing this thesis?

Most of these feelings can be equated with the experience of ending anything. If you ever teach students across a programme of study, you will witness this feeling time and again. First years are full of optimism and excitement and insecurity, second years are bored, but ask final year undergraduates how they feel two weeks into the final year (9 months to go), they get this look of terror. Oh no, this part of my life is coming to an end and now I have to figure out what comes next. No more school. No more provided structure. The real world awaits and it is terrifying. They remain stunned like deer in the headlights right up to the pre-exam period where they work like their life depends on it. The fear of ending is unsettling, and it is no different towards the end of a PhD.

Check for signs

What should you check for to check if it is enough? Word count is the first place to start - have you literally created enough text (by this I mean the maximum word count allowed?). A short thesis is a light thesis and that is not a good sign. Is your structure correct? Have you spent time writing the PhD together as one coherent whole (the final editing)? Is there massive gaps in theory / methods /data or analysis that you have consistently refused to tackle because you think it is too hard? Is there a consistent bit of feedback from supervisors you have left unaddressed (this will come back to haunt you in the Viva)? Has it been properly referenced, and presented? These things cannot be ignored, and you absolutely need to do more work.

What should be there?

A PhD is an original contribution to knowledge. You need to make that claim, demonstrate it, and substantiate it. That is what needs to be there. You should be able to say why this work matters.

What does your supervisor say?

This is tricky and can be a double-edged sword.

Experienced supervisors will tell you the following things when you have done enough: you are ready; stop dragging your feet; it is time to submit. They will tell you that done is better than perfect, and that it will probably never be perfect, but you have done enough to get through. A PhD is not the Nobel prize. It is just a PhD and hopefully the poorest work you do as a scholar. Experienced supervisors will also tell you no: this is not done, you need to address X and Y before we are at this stage.

Unfortunately, inexperienced supervisors can become nervous (for you, but also for their own reputation) and stand in the way of submission even though you might have done enough. It is very hard for students to know the difference between these two types of supervisor, and that is when we need to listen to the supervisory team as a whole. An experienced supervisor who knows they have been telling you to do X from year 2 (you didn’t, and still have not, and this is a very BIG PROBLEM) is giving good advice, but an inexperienced supervisor might say similar things, when in fact, this comes from a different place - this is not the thesis they would have written. They don’t agree with it, therefore it is not done.

Toxic supervisors are on a whole other level, and they actively try to stand in the way of some PhDs completion, because they benefit from the PhD students labour.

Only you know what kind of supervisor you have, and the quality of the relationship you have with them.

Time to decide

Ultimately it is your PhD and you must make the call. Have you made, demonstrated, and substantiated an original contribution to knowledge? Is it well written and professionally produced piece of text? Have you abided by the regulations governing the PhD for your programme? Are you just fiddling around now because of fear, or have you run out of energy without having done the work you needed?

These are really tough questions to ask yourself, but the ones you need to ask to answer: is this ‘enough’?