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 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.

How is a PhD structured?

This is another blog in response to reader requests. If you have a request for a blog, please visit the Facebook page and write a request there.

What does a PhD thesis look like?

This is a question I find myself answering a lot. On social media, in direct emails to me, and from clients that I coach. Sometimes this comes in the guise of asking questions about editing, sometimes it is more direct.

As an academic coach, I am involved in coaching students from a wide array of fields: from various fields within social sciences and humanities, to STEM, to the creative arts. Coaching is not of course the same as supervision, although there is a massive overlap between the two when PhD supervision is done properly. Alas, it is sometimes a little lacking in various ways.

I obviously do not have an in-depth subject knowledge of all the students I coach/supervise: this is not what students really require, and once they have surpassed their supervisor’s own knowledge on their particular original contribution to knowledge (usually by the second year), it won’t be what they are getting from their supervisor either. What students do need however is writing advice, and this advice is rarely forthcoming from their own supervisors for a variety of reasons.

In my coaching practice, I ‘supervise’ traditional big book theses, PhD by publication theses, and artefact and exegesis or practice-led theses. Disciplines vary widely; from economics, to anthropology, from geography to digital communication, from politics to dance. Not to mention, of course, law theses (my own field). As such, I am probably one of a few academics that see a wide variety of shapes and sizes that a PhD might take. It is a privileged position to be in and I see such an array of amazingly brilliant work. Because I work across disciplines, I know there is no one-size fits all, that is for sure.

Start with the basics

I always make sure that students read multiple finished and recent PhDs in their department and if possible their sub-field. You can’t bake a cake, if you have never seen a cake, tasted a cake or even have a recipe for a cake. Often, this is what supervisors expect students to do - write a PhD, with no advice as to HOW (not what), never having seen one before. Inexperienced supervisors may have a very narrow view of what a PhD should look like (their own, for example, that was done 20 years ago), and may be nervous when a student strays from the path, or starts to question the advice being given about chapter structure and so on.

So, like most things, my advice is first do your research as to what a successful PhD looks like. Be aware though that the finished PhD that you are looking at doesn’t tell the story. It doesn’t tell you whether the student rescued their PhD through the viva, or whether they had major or minor corrections and so on. It might not be a perfect template. Doing interdisciplinary work is especially challenging as there will not be an exact fit between your project design and someone else’s. A clear introduction justifying structure and methods is key here, as well as smart decisions about the external examiner. But reading an already completed PhD is at least a place to start from.

What is the right size and shape?

There is no one answer here obviously, and much will depend on your discipline, but there are a couple of things to keep in mind. Try not to front load your PhD with too much ‘throat clearing’ material. So here I am talking about the methods and literature review chapters and if you do have a lot of this, make sure it is part of your novelty.

In some disciplines, the structure can be a bit like this. There might be an introduction chapter, a literature review, a contextual and/or background chapter, and then empirical chapters (and if practice led, then an artefact). This has a fairly long lead-in before the ‘meat’ of the PhD is arrived at, but if it is a PhD by publication you might need this long lead-in to tie together the individual publications that make the ‘meat’ of the PhD. In other disciplines (and depending on your puzzle and research design), you might condense your introduction, methods, and literature review all into one chapter, and get straight into the ‘meat’ immediately. Other disciplines prefer a solid introduction, literature review and methods chapters as separate entities. But do you have to do it like this every time? Well, that depends on where your novelty is best expressed, and this comes down to your research design.

how much of this material is novel and how much is derivative?

Badly written literature reviews are entirely derivative and can cost you minor or major corrections. Your literature review needs to do more than be a litany of x said this and y said that. That is a masters level synthesis of material, and is not a review. You have not done anything with it to qualify as a review. If this is where you construct your theoretical lens however, and you are explicit in that construction, then you can claim novelty here. Same with methods - is this a novel method you have invented? Or are you employing a bog standard method to something new or through a new lens? If it is bog standard, don’t spend precious word count on it other than explaining the basics and why you have chosen that method. Don’t bore your examiners with things that might go in the appendices. Tell them what they need to know to understand your original contribution.

The test of a PhD is: have you made an original contribution to knowledge?

This means derivative material should be kept to a minimum to convince the examiner of your originality. Of course, you build on the work of others and reference it accordingly. You have a literature review to map the field and show (a) you have mastery over it and (b) where your scholarship will fit in and fill a gap or move knowledge forward. But you have to do something with it. Not just recite it. Same with the method - do something, or be brief.

You don’t want your examiner to have read 40,000 words and have not encountered anything novel; they start to write notes saying: ‘I can’t see why this is original’ and once that idea is planted, it is hard to shift.

This is how PhDs fail. Original contribution to knowledge is the standard and that is the standard regardless of your discipline. You showcase this at every possible opportunity and in every chapter your write - that is the commonality of all good PhD theses, regardless of shape and size.

If you want to know more about macro (size and shape) editing, and micro (chapter, paragraph, sentence, word level and title) editing, check out these two online webinars in the Academic Coach shop.

How to do a peer review of an article

This blog once again comes as a request from readers, and surprisingly, it is something I see again and again on social media forums.

In the past, when dinosaurs roamed the earth and I was a junior scholar just starting out, there was a thing called ‘mentoring’. Not the kind your institution writes about on a REF submission, but the real kind where senior scholars actively tried to help and ‘train’ more junior scholars into the mysteries of academic life. One of the things they might have instructed you in, is the secret art of how to do a peer review for journal articles.

It seems that time is long past (for many and various reasons I will not rehearse here). So, instead, I will provide some pointers on how (and crucially how not) to do a journal article peer review.

First principles

A decent and well run journal should send reviewers a review template which should guide your review. Not all do this, and perhaps when they do, these guidelines can be a bit wooly. In the absence of such a guide, there are some cardinal rules of good reviewing:

1. Don’t take too long to return it. You know what I mean - someone is desperately refreshing ScholarOne every 30 seconds to see what is happening to that paper. If you can’t do it briskly, don’t take it on.

2. How long should it take to do the review itself? Not long. 2 hours to read the paper (10,000 words) and construct feedback. Get on with it, you are not scouring the earth for the last Airbender. Move on with your life.

3. How long should your review be? Maximum 2 pages and preferably shorter. If you are writing more than this, you have fallen into asshole territory and should stop and check yourself. Nothing screams ‘insecure junior scholar who knows nothing’ more than someone who feels the need to write lengthy reviews to demonstrate the extent of their own brilliance. DON’T DO IT. Also know that senior editors are unimpressed by your posturing and you look like a fool.

Content rules

1. The question you are answering is: is this paper worth publishing?

   • Is it well researched? Are the appropriate scholarly articles/areas included? Is the referencing sufficient, careful and complete?

   • Does the author do what they claim to do - do the composite parts add up (abstract, introduction, middle and conclusions)?

   • Are any claims made properly substantiated?

   • Is it rigorous and does it display originality? Does it bring a new angle or way of thinking about something? Or is it addressing a pressing issue, or filling a gap by updating something?

   • Does it fit the brief of the journal (the editors should have already desk rejected anything that doesn’t, so this isn’t really your area to comment on unless something has gone very wrong).

   If the answers to the above questions are YES, then you should recommend that the article is published.

2. What do you do if there are minor infelicities in the language or errors (I mean errors in the literal sense) or some of the things listed above are there, but could have been articulated in a clearer fashion?

   • Send it back with minor revisions pointing out exactly what could be better articulated with the above list in mind, and construct that advice with word count restrictions in mind.

   • Be concise and specific.

3. What do you do if there are major problems with the piece (i.e. the list above has not been met)?

   • You can send it back with major revisions, indicating what these revisions are. If this is ultimately a new paper, it is not a major revision.

   • If you do this, be prepared for a second round of reviewing. Do not indicate major revisions if you cannot be bothered to do this again. It is rude beyond belief and a massive pain for editors.

   • Finally, and exceptionally, you can reject the piece.

Reasons to reject a piece in good conscience:

• It is not well researched. The appropriate scholarly articles/areas are not included (with the word count limit in mind). The referencing is insufficient, sloppy and incomplete.

• The author does not do what they claim to do - the composite parts do not add up (abstract, introduction, middle and conclusions).

• The claims made are not properly substantiated.

• It is not rigorous and it does not display originality. It does not bring a new angle or way of thinking about something.

• It is a partial piece of research that has been ‘salami sliced’ too many times from a bigger project so that it no longer really contributes something meaningful in its own right.

How do you construct your feedback?

Just like we are told to do for students, it should be a feedback sandwich. You know just how much effort that poor academic has put into that paper. They have wept, they have bled.

• Start by saying how much you enjoyed reading it, and list some positive aspects of the paper and inquiry. It costs you nothing and it must have something positive about it or it would not have been sent out for review.

• Then move on to any critique and weigh your words carefully. Imagine you were reading this review on your own paper. Phrase it professionally at all times. Don’t be an asshole (I’m looking at you: ‘this sounds more like a newspaper editorial than a scholarly paper’). Reader: I was published.

• Finish the review with something positive about the project in general and why it is interesting.

Things you must never ever do

1. Reject a paper because it is not the paper you would have written. This is bullshit scholarly backstabbing and should not ever be entertained. Why don’t you go ahead and write that paper yourself, and leave this poor creature to publish the paper they have actually written?

2. Write endless reams of feedback to demonstrate just how smart you are. Yes, we are all smart. Get a life. Short and structured in deference to the word count is professional.

3. Request minor revisions but really you are asking for a whole new paper (a different paper, i.e. the one you would have written). This is impossible for the author to do in the word count available to them. If you want something included, why not point out the things that could be cut to make room. If you can’t find anything, you are being as asshole again. Everyone needs to respect the word limit, including reviewers.

4. Get personal. Don’t be snarky, snidey, supercilious, hectoring or patronising. Be professional. Someone has spent an awful lot of their (probably unpaid) time writing this piece of research. Respect the author.

Reviewer 2 is a thing because we make it one. Don’t be that person.

Self promotion versus engagement in brand building

Today I want to talk a little bit about the idea of your academic brand vis a vis the concepts of engagement and self promotion.

Building your academic brand is a minefield because it requires you to carefully traverse the terrain of being an insufferable ****** on social media who everybody hates, and someone who genuinely shares things to engage and inform a relevant audience about your research or ideas.

Twitter I think is probably the most difficult platform to manage in this regard. First you should be on Twitter. But how you use Twitter should be consonant with building your professional brand. If you want to re-tweet cat videos, probably get a personal account for this.

Twitter can be a valuable information source for your own research and it can be a good place to share your research, especially if your followers are people in your field (or connected) who might actually read and engage with what you are tweeting.* However, it can seriously damage your mental health too, so it pays to think before you Tweet, and also, think before opening Twitter.

I tend to use a social media management platform (I use Hootsuite, but others are available) to manage Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc). I am not just randomly hanging about there, because it is not a good place to be hanging out.

I am mindful of my social media health and you should be too.

Engagement

When you use social media to engage, you are sharing valuable information that other scholars might find useful. This can be a direct self promotion - here is a link to an article I have published on X. You can @ particular scholars who might find it helpful. This is of course telling everyone you published (hoorah) but it also serves a community purpose. It shares useful information. This is a good use of Twitter. This is engagement. You have built a following (or follow specific people) who are relevant to your research and field and you have given them a heads up on something they might find useful. You are building a community and a brand. If you are a senior scholar (but not the head of school) you should absolutely promote the work of junior scholars you think is interesting and useful via referencing it and its content. Use your platform to pay it forward. Be a generous and kind mentor.

You can even Tweet about being at a conference if you have something to say about it, the panels and the papers. Share what you have heard, or presented. Thinly veiled ‘it was great to be here’ references are pretty pointless. It is like writing ‘I WAZ HERE’ inside the toilet stall. With your name attached.

Grandiose self promotion

If all you do on Twitter is promote your CV (I was here, here, here and here, and also here; I did this, look how important I am, LOOK AT ME) you are one of those people I have to mute. I’m pretty certain others are muting you too. Similarly if all you do all day long (it appears) is Tweet things (such as calling out stuff) also know I have you muted too. So when you do Tweet something useful (if you ever do) I will absolutely not be reading your work, because you were muted.

This head mashing, screaming into the void tells me a couple of things about you. I might not want to work near you, and I might think twice about hiring you, if you appear totally self absorbed in relation to your social media posting. You might not be giving out signals that appear very collegiate or community building orientated. So it is worth considering how you use social media to engage peers.

Be aware of the signals your Twitter feed is sending out about you and the kind of colleague (and scholar) you might be. Navigating the line between building your brand and sending out the kinds of tweets that annoys everyone because they are grandiose acts of self promotion (or worse, the humblebrag) is something you should pay serious attention to. This is not the same as building your brand.

*If you are looking for tips in managing algorithms on Twitter and getting more followers, please see @careerconversations who has really excellent technical advice.

Building an academic brand

Immediately some academics will recoil at the title of this blog. Brands are for Nike, Starbucks, Coca Cola. Not for academics. But I’m afraid this is a rather old fashioned view. Like it or loathe it, the need to curate your brand is real.

You can either consciously curate your brand, or leave it to the vagaries of the internet to curate it for you. I would rather be in charge of mine.

What is your brand?

Your brand is what you stand for as an academic. It is more than your skill set (I know R!). It is more than whether you are a quants or qual person. In fact, it is not really any of these things at all. Your brand is not really your skill set per se. Lots and lots of people have these skills. Your brand is (a) what you are THE expert in (b) what your USP is and (c) what professional image you have created for yourself outside of your institution.

Your brand is not where you work

Academics change workplaces a lot for a wide variety of reasons. Thus your brand is not where you work. Your brand goes with you. Your brand is not what your close friends or even your immediate colleagues think of you. Your brand is not the ‘bio’ that gets trotted out at conference introductions by the Chair who has never met you and has not read a single thing you have ever published. It is not the awful three sentences at the beginning of edited collections that trot out your name, title and affiliation.

Your brand is the shop front. The logo.

Creating your brand

Brand creation happens in your professional interactions with others outside your department. These interactions can be with other academics, stakeholders, policy makers or industry. These interactions can be on In Real Life, or on Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, SSRN or any number of other social media platforms.

You have the power to create your brand, or let it be created for you. Managing your interactions, especially on social media, is critical to how you will be perceived by others who may one day recruit you for a job, research, expert advice or other work related opportunity.

What are you THE expert in?

Being an academic requires a lot of flexibility. Even in so-called research intensive, research-led teaching Universities, the reality is oftentimes we do not teach what we are experts in. We might teach on the edges of our wider expertise (if we are lucky). We might simply be required to teach an enormous compulsory subject that all undergrads must take because someone has to. So we can say we know quite a lot about a range of topics. We have flexibility. This is not the same as not having a brand.

Indeed, this is one reason why your brand is not located inside your employing institution. Whatever research excellence you were hired for is long forgotten in the handing out of teaching, which is a process of sticking fingers in a leaking Dam. Constant exposure to this ‘flexibility’ can make you doubt you have any expertise at all. But you do. This is your brand. If there was an imaginary rolodex* in someone’s hand, where would your name be located? What would someone say about you in answer to: ‘Who do I need for this? Oh, yes [blah blah] is the person for x’. Consciously build this brand by promoting this particular expertise through publications, impact and engagement work. And on-line (but more on this next blog).

What is YOUR USP?

What is your unique contribution to field X. Let’s say you are an expert on Brexit. This is a pretty big topic, even within one single discipline. There are by now literally thousands of academics claiming expertise in this area, even within one discipline. Even within one sub-sub-discipline within one country. Thousands. What makes YOU special? What perspective, contribution, and skill set do YOU bring to this topic that makes you more desirable than A, B, or C? And how have you summed this up as your brand identity?

What is your professional image?

What are you known for outside your institution in terms of attitude, or positioning. Do you occupy a specific disciplinary school to which you are an ardent disciple? Do you call out others on Twitter who do not agree with your position? Are you passive aggressive (or just plain aggressive) to those who are outside your knitting circle (obviously the answer to this ought to be NO). Are you a community builder or destroyer? These questions are important particularly when you are at any stage in your career that does not occupy the territory of being 3-years-from-retirement-after-a-40-year-career pigeon hole. And even then, it ought to be important if you are a decent person.

A brand is bigger than the one-trick-pony

Getting known for THE THING is clearly central to building a brand. But beware of becoming a one-trick-pony or talking head. This does not hurt your brand directly, but it hurts your academic reputation in a number of other ways, which in turn compromises your brand. Promotion, for example, requires you to show development of your skills and knowledge, a branching off into other (connected yet different) areas that complement your expertise. Development indicates growth and change, yet this does not warrant a scattergun approach of doing whatever is asked, whatever crosses your desk, whatever the next zeitgeist is. This starts to make you look like jack of all trades, and master of none. Flimsy. And flimsy is not a good brand.

Next week I will continue the academic brand theme by talking about self promotion and engagement.

*a rolodex is a round thingy containing business cards. Think Mad Men. It is how people in the olden days used to locate someone they needed outside their organisation.