4 Things Successful Academic Writers Do Pt 1: The Power of Time Control

Today I want to talk about one of the four essential traits that separate sustainable, successful writers from the rest: the ability to control their time. Over my six years of coaching academics across various disciplines and all over the globe, I've observed that the most effective writers share four common practices and I will devote 4 blogs to each of these in turn. In this blog, I'll delve into the first of these practices—time management, focusing specifically on the art of time tracking.

Why Time Tracking is So Crucial (And Why No One Wants to Do It)

Time tracking is a tool that is often overlooked by many academics, but it is the cornerstone of intentional writing. Why? Because it forces you to confront reality. Without data, we can easily fall into the trap of making excuses or rationalising distractions. "I just didn’t have the time," becomes a common refrain. But once you start tracking your time, you’re no longer able to hide behind these excuses.

This uncomfortable truth is why so many writers resist time tracking. We love the stories we tell ourselves about being "too busy" or "constantly pulled in different directions." But these stories are just that—stories. Time tracking strips away the comfort of these narratives, revealing the cold, hard facts about how we are actually spending our time.

I encourage you to try time tracking for just two weeks. It doesn’t have to be a lifelong commitment but the longer you do it the more you reap the benefits. The goal is to collect data, to see how much of your time is truly dedicated to writing. The results might be uncomfortable, but they will give you the clarity you need to make intentional changes. By seeing where your time is going, you’ll be able to make more informed decisions about where your focus should be.

The Power of Intentionality and Focus

One of the key benefits of time tracking is that it fosters intentionality. When you can see exactly how much time you’ve spent on emails, meetings, or other tasks, you’ll be forced to make tough decisions and if you don’t, you’ll be admitting you don’t want to write or prioritise writing. Do you want to continue spending hours responding to emails when your primary goal is writing? Is that why you got that PhD? Time tracking puts your actions into perspective, helping you prioritise writing and other essential tasks.

Another significant shift that time tracking brings is a renewed ability to focus. When you know what your time commitments are, you're more likely to stay on task. Time tracking helps to break the habit of constantly shifting between tasks—what I call "scattered attention." By focusing on one thing at a time, you’ll find that you complete your work more efficiently and with higher quality.

Time Tracking: The Tool for Tough Decisions

Time tracking doesn’t just help with daily planning—it forces you to make real, hard choices. You’ll start asking yourself: "Is this truly the best use of my time?" As an academic, you’re often pulled in many directions, but if your goal is to succeed as a writer, you need to take control of where you direct your energy.

For many people, it’s easy to be reactive: answering emails, attending meetings, dealing with admin. But the truly successful writers I’ve coached aren’t just reacting to the flow of the day. They are actively deciding where their time goes and what to prioritise. They don’t have less to do than you –they have the same abominable workload, but time tracking makes this process easier by providing clarity and enabling you to see what’s actually happening.

The Reality Check: Moving from "Should" to "What Is"

One of the most powerful effects of time tracking is the shift from "shoulds" to "what is." Many academics spend years working in ways that they think they "should" be working—perhaps based on habits built decades ago. But the job has changed, and your working habits need to change too. Time tracking forces you to confront the present reality of your work habits and the amount of time you’re spending on each task.

Once you have the data, you can start making adjustments. Perhaps you realise you’re giving too much time to low-priority tasks and not enough to the high-impact writing that you’re supposed to be doing. This revelation can be a game changer. You’ll find yourself more decisive, more willing to say no to distractions, and better equipped to maximise the limited time you have.

The Takeaway: Start Time Tracking Today

If you take away one thing from this blog, let it be this: time tracking is the key to unlocking your productivity as an academic writer. If i had to say the ONE thing I did that changed my entire academic writing game, it was this: time tracking. Whether you’re just starting out or are well into your academic career, tracking your time will bring immediate clarity to how you’re using your day. It forces you to confront hard truths and make the necessary decisions to work with intention, focus, and purpose.

In the next part of this series, we’ll dive into the importance of developing a writer’s identity. But for now, start by taking control of your time—track it, understand it, and watch how it transforms your approach to writing.

Are you ready to take the first step towards being a more productive and intentional academic writer? Time tracking could be just the tool you need.

Stay tuned for part two of the series, where we explore the power of having a writer’s identity and how to cultivate it.

Binge and Bust Writing

Binge and bust writing is one of the most common—and most destructive—writing habits among academics. The majority of my coaching clients come to me with this very issue, even if they don’t initially recognize it as their main problem. They procrastinate, write in frenzied bursts, and then crash after the deadline passes. If this sounds familiar, you’re not alone. In fact, it's the norm for many academics. But it doesn’t have to be.

Today, we’ll explore why binge and bust writing is so common, the negative impact it has on both your work and well-being, and how to break the cycle once and for all.

Why Do So Many Academics Struggle with Binge and Bust Writing?

The binge and bust pattern often starts early in an academic career. When we’re undergraduates, we’re conditioned to write last-minute essays, scrambling at the deadline. Many students fall into this cycle, where procrastination leads to a stressful sprint to finish before the due date. This habit, although stressful, gets us through the immediate challenge.

However, when you move into graduate school or a professional academic role, the deadlines stretch out, and the lack of short-term accountability can make it even harder to stay motivated. You carry these bad habits with you into your career, continuing the cycle of procrastination and frantic bursts of writing.

As a junior academic, it might be easy to continue writing this way, but over time, this method becomes unsustainable. The intense stress during the binge phase leads to burnout, and the “bust” phase is a prolonged slump where you struggle to get back to writing.

The Dangers of Binge and Bust Writing

The binge phase is inherently stressful. You’re working under intense pressure, which means your work quality often suffers. You might meet deadlines, but you’re not producing your best work. The emotional toll of working under pressure takes its toll as well, leading to long recovery periods after each burst of writing.

Then comes the bust. After the intense sprint, you crash. There’s no energy left to continue, and the longer you stay in this phase, the harder it is to get back into a regular writing routine. This cycle wastes time, creates stress, and ultimately impacts your academic success. Worse, it builds burnout and erodes self-confidence.

The core issue with binge and bust writing is that it destroys momentum. Academic success isn’t built on working in bursts of frantic activity. Instead, it’s built on consistent progress, which requires a sustainable, daily writing habit.

Why Binge and Bust Writing Doesn’t Work

Binge and bust writing relies on stress to get you moving, but that’s not the ideal way to write. The real key to writing success is momentum—consistent, steady work that builds every day. When you write every day, you continuously improve your ideas. Your thoughts become more refined with each writing session, and the paper slowly evolves into something strong and well-constructed.

In contrast, binge and bust writing relies on pressure to push you through a short burst of productivity. But this doesn’t foster sophisticated thinking. Instead of refining your ideas gradually, you’re writing under duress, producing low-quality work and feeling stressed the whole time.

How to Break Free from the Cycle

To escape the binge and bust cycle, you need to shift your mindset and adopt a more sustainable approach to writing. It starts with creating momentum through consistency. Here’s how to do it:

1. Write Every Day: Start small, but make writing a habit. Set aside a certain amount of time every day—no excuses. This doesn’t mean writing for hours. Even 30 minutes of focused writing every day is more effective than sporadic, high-pressure writing sessions.

2. Time Tracking: One of the keys to building sustainable writing habits is tracking your time. By knowing how much time you’re spending on writing, you can manage your schedule more effectively and build momentum gradually. Time tracking also helps you see where you’re spending too much time, so you can correct inefficient habits.

3. Break Down the Writing Process: One of the hardest parts about breaking the binge and bust cycle is learning how to break a large project, like a paper, into smaller, more manageable tasks. When you can focus on small chunks of writing, you’ll stop feeling overwhelmed. Each task you complete adds to your momentum, and soon, writing becomes easier and more manageable.

4. Create a Writing Pipeline: You need a plan, and it needs to be structured. A writing pipeline helps you know when you’re going to write, what you’ll be working on, and when to expect deadlines. Having a clear pipeline helps you pace yourself, avoid procrastination, and produce higher-quality work consistently.

Why Writing with Momentum Leads to Success

By eliminating the binge and bust cycle, you not only improve the quality of your work but also set yourself up for academic success. Writing every day, tracking your time, and breaking down projects ensures that you’re always moving forward. This creates momentum, which leads to motivation and ultimately success in your academic career.

When you consistently write, your ideas evolve, and your work improves. Plus, you build self-trust. You stop relying on stress to get things done and start relying on discipline and consistency. You’ll produce better work, and the emotional toll of writing will be significantly lessened.

Ready to Stop the Cycle?

Breaking the binge and bust cycle doesn’t happen overnight, but with the right strategies in place, you can transform your writing habits. Start by embracing a daily writing habit, track your time, and break projects into smaller tasks. The path to academic success is built on momentum—not stress and pressure.

I’ve put together free resources to help you get started on this journey. You’ll find training videos and guides that outline the steps for building sustainable writing habits. These are the non-negotiables you need to set up your writing practice for success.

Take the first step towards a better academic career today by breaking free from binge and bust writing. You’ve got this!

(Writing) Career Trapdoors

In academia, the path to success isn’t always a straight line. While we’re trained to focus on research and writing, many scholars fall into the trap of administrative roles and other distractions that hinder their career progression. Today, I want to talk about the career trapdoors—those big, gaping holes—that could prevent your writing career from advancing. These are the common pitfalls that many academics fall into without realizing the long-term damage they’re causing to their academic trajectory.

1. Taking on an Admin Portfolio Too Early

One of the biggest career trapdoors in academia is taking on an administrative portfolio that is beyond your career stage. Whether it’s heading a department or managing a large academic project, these roles can be career killers for early-career scholars. You might be asked to take on one of these roles in your mid-career, but doing so before you’ve established a strong publication record can be detrimental.

The reality is that these positions consume all of your time. You’ll be trapped in endless meetings, handling paperwork, and putting out constant fires. With no time left for writing or research, you risk losing the critical habits and discipline that make you a successful academic. The people who succeed in these roles are often those who can work beyond their contracted hours, sacrificing personal time and well-being for the job. For most, that’s not sustainable.

Tip: Avoid these roles until you have tenure and have made significant strides in your academic career. Focus on publishing and building your academic reputation first.

2. Ignoring What Really Matters in Academia

In academia, it’s easy to get caught up in the daily grind of teaching, administrative work, and student feedback. These aspects of academic life are important, but they are not what truly drives career advancement. If you want to succeed in academia, you must recognize that the key to your academic progression lies in your publications.

Too many academics focus on teaching and admin, thinking it will lead to promotion. The reality is that your institution cares most about how many papers you’ve published and where they’ve been published. To climb the academic ladder, you must prioritize your research and writing, regardless of how much the daily demands might distract you.

Tip: Disconnect from the noise. Focus on your publication record, as that’s what will truly advance your academic career.

3. Becoming Dependent on Collaborations

Collaboration is essential in academic work, but it’s important to also develop the skill of writing solo. Writing alone might feel intimidating, but it’s a crucial skill. Without it, you risk losing your academic voice and identity. If you only ever collaborate, it becomes difficult for others to discern your unique contributions to your field.

Collaboration should supplement, not replace, your individual work. While co-authoring can broaden your reach and provide valuable insights, it’s important to build your personal portfolio of solo-written papers. Having a mix of collaborative and solo-authored work gives you the freedom to shape your own academic identity.

Tip: Challenge yourself to write solo at least some of the time to build your academic reputation and solidify your scholarly identity.

4. Being a One-Trick Pony

It’s important to have a niche in your academic work, but being too narrow in focus can limit your opportunities for career growth. While it’s essential to establish yourself in a specific area, you should also allow your work to evolve and broaden over time. A too-narrow focus can make it difficult to build an international reputation, as it limits your scope and relevance in the academic world.

At the same time, don’t spread yourself too thin by jumping from one topic to the next. This “scattergun” approach can make it hard for others to understand what you stand for academically. It’s about finding a balance—maintaining a strong core focus while gradually expanding into related areas as your career progresses.

Tip: Build a consistent academic narrative that evolves over time. Stay focused but allow for growth and broadening of your expertise.

5. Relying Too Much on Book Chapters

Writing book chapters can be a great way to contribute to the field, but it’s important not to make them your primary form of academic output. While book chapters can be valuable for networking and visibility, peer-reviewed journal articles remain the gold standard in academia. If you only write book chapters, you risk limiting your career prospects.

Peer-reviewed journal articles carry more weight in academic evaluations, promotions, and funding applications. They are crucial for establishing your credibility and scholarly identity. While book chapters can supplement your academic work, they shouldn’t replace high-impact journal articles.

Tip: Don’t fall into the trap of writing too many book chapters. Aim to publish in top-tier journals to boost your academic reputation.

In Conclusion

Avoiding these career trapdoors requires strategic thinking and clear decision-making. The academic landscape is filled with distractions and pressures that can derail your writing career, but with the right focus and boundaries, you can navigate them successfully. If you’re early in your career, concentrate on building a solid publication record. Don’t let the demands of admin or collaboration pull you off course. And always remember that your academic identity is built on the quality of your work, not the number of committees you chair or the amount of admin you do.

If you’re already caught in one of these traps, it’s not too late to course-correct. Recognize where you might be off track and take steps to refocus on what truly matters—your writing, your research, and your academic future.

Academic Training (or lack of it)

In today’s academic world, many of us find ourselves overwhelmed by the sheer scope of our work. Yet, despite dedicating years to training, there’s a surprising gap in the foundational skills necessary for success. Imagine you’re training for a profession—let’s say as an electrician. But instead of spending your apprenticeship wiring homes, you spend it learning plumbing. Sounds absurd, right? Yet, this is how academic training often works. You might think a PhD prepares you for an academic career, but in reality, it doesn’t.

If you’ve ever felt like the academic system didn’t prepare you properly for the demands of the job, you're not alone. So, what can you do about it? Today, we’ll explore six critical areas every academic should be trained in, but often isn’t, and how you can start mastering them today.

1. The Consistent Writing Habit

Writing is the backbone of an academic career, yet so many of us struggle with it. The "boom and bust" cycle of writing—where you binge-write in intense spurts followed by burnout—doesn’t foster long-term success. Imagine if you wrote every day as easily as you show up to class. No drama, no anxiety, just consistency. Writing shouldn’t feel like a huge emotional hurdle each time you sit down; it should be a habit, a part of your routine. If you’re not there yet, it's time to build a reliable, sustainable writing habit. This is the bedrock of your academic career. Without it, everything else will feel unmanageable.

2. Creating Your Research Pipeline

In academia, you can’t afford to just react to the projects that come your way. You need to proactively construct your research pipeline. This means making thoughtful decisions about the projects you take on, based on clear criteria. Instead of waiting for opportunities to land on your desk, take control of your academic path. A well-defined pipeline allows you to focus on the work that aligns with your goals and career aspirations, rather than just scrambling from one task to the next.

3. Workload Management

Anyone who’s worked in academia knows that managing a heavy workload is a constant challenge. You’re understaffed, overworked, and there’s always more to do than there’s time for. But this isn’t something you can wish away. Effective workload management is a skill you need to develop. Without it, you risk burnout, stress, and feeling like you're always drowning in tasks. Start by creating systems for managing your time and responsibilities. This will allow you to work smarter, not harder, and maintain your well-being throughout the academic year.

4. Ideation Training

Do you struggle with constantly shifting ideas during your research process? If your project ideas keep changing and elongating the research phase, you might need ideation training. This skill isn’t something that most PhD programs teach, but it’s essential for swift execution. Solid ideation allows you to hone in on your topic and keep moving forward. Without this clarity, you risk wasting time in endless cycles of reading and research without actually advancing your project.

5. Mastering the Drafting Process

Writing a paper isn’t just about sitting down and spewing out words. It’s about having a system in place. Too many academics fall into the trap of drafting in a way that they learned as PhD students—jumping from one idea to the next without a clear, structured process. The solution? A staged drafting process with defined stages, from rough drafts to polished pieces. By breaking the writing process into clear stages, you can work more efficiently, and your output will improve as you move from concept to completed work.

6. Elevating the Quality of Your Work

It’s not just about quantity in academia; it’s about producing high-quality work that stands out. How do you take an initial idea and turn it into something publishable in top journals? Elevating the quality of your writing and research requires continuous refinement. It’s about pushing beyond the basic draft and truly refining your ideas. To be successful, you need to ensure that your writing not only communicates your ideas clearly but also engages deeply with your academic field.

Reflect and Act: Which of These Six Areas Will Move the Needle for You?

If you’re feeling frustrated with your academic progress, reflect on these six areas. Which one do you think would make the biggest difference in your work? Perhaps it’s building a consistent writing habit, or maybe it’s learning how to better manage your workload. No matter which area you choose, these are the foundations of an academic career that doesn’t just survive but thrives.

Let me know which of these areas resonates with you most. Is it something you wish you had learned during your academic training? I’d love to hear your thoughts, so feel free to share in the comments or reach out on social media. The journey to mastering these skills starts with identifying the right place to focus your energy—and if you want me to guide you through it, you can find this training using my S.C.R.I.B.E Framework, inside the Writer’s Collective.

What Academic Success Means to You

In academia, the path to success can feel like a maze of competing expectations and pressures. So often, we’re told what success looks like—climbing the academic ladder, publishing frequently, becoming a professor. But what if that vision of success doesn’t resonate with you? What if success, to you, looks more like having a balanced life, being fulfilled by your research, and contributing to academia without sacrificing your well-being?

Today, I want to talk about what it truly means to be a successful academic—not based on titles or positions, but on what it takes to thrive in your career without burning out or feeling overwhelmed.

1. What Does Academic Success Mean to You?

Academic success isn’t one-size-fits-all. Some may strive for prestigious titles or leadership positions like becoming a professor or vice chancellor, but the reality is that not every academic has that as their goal. Many of us enter academia because we love learning, teaching, and researching. The goal is not always to climb the ladder—sometimes it’s simply to enjoy a fulfilling, balanced career.

When you think about success in academia, don’t adopt someone else’s definition. Your vision may be different from others’., but it is important that YOU know what is right for YOU. Maybe it’s about work-life balance, meaningful research, or teaching subjects you’re passionate about. Whatever your definition is, it’s important to take ownership of it. Once you define what success looks like for you, it becomes much easier to work toward it.

2. Creating Work-Life Balance in Academia

When I started my academic career, I was handed toxic advice: “You must work all the time. No days off. No holidays. It’s the only way to succeed.” This notion that academia requires non-stop work is still prevalent in some institutions, but I firmly disagree.

For me, success means having a balance between my work and personal life. Academia is an incredible opportunity to learn for a living, but it can easily consume you if you let it. To prevent burnout, I focused on becoming efficient in my work. I developed systems and processes that allowed me to get more done in less time, so I could enjoy my weekends and take vacations without guilt.

Tip: If you’re feeling overwhelmed, assess your work habits. Are you working efficiently, or are you succumbing to the pressure to work endlessly? Creating systems can help manage your time better, allowing you to disconnect and recharge.

3. Focusing on What Matters: Publications Over Titles

While many of us get caught up in the idea of earning a title or position, the truth is that what matters most in academia is your research output. When I started my career, financial stability was a big motivator for me, and I wasn’t focused on becoming a professor. I needed enough money to live, pay my bills, and pursue my interests: make sure my work had impact. The truth is, the financial gap between the professor and other academic levels has significantly decreased over time, so titles didn’t (for me anyway) hold as much weight.

What truly drives your academic career forward are your publications. The more you focus on writing, publishing, and contributing to your field, the more you’ll build your reputation and open doors for further opportunities. Without this baseline, opportunities do not come.

Tip: Shift your focus from titles to results. If you’re aiming for promotions or new opportunities, your track record of publications is what will matter most.

4. Characteristics of Successful Academics

Now that you’ve defined success for yourself, it’s time to adopt the behaviours that will help you achieve it. Successful academics have a few key traits:

• They write first: writing is their top priority. They don’t start their day with emails, meetings, or prep work. Instead, they dedicate their best hours to writing. By doing so, they set the tone for their day and ensure they’re always progressing on their research.

• They set boundaries: successful academics know when to say no. They protect their time and energy, ensuring they don’t overcommit to tasks that don’t align with their goals.

• They manage their workload effectively: successful academics have systems and processes in place to handle their workload efficiently. They don’t feel overwhelmed because they’ve developed the discipline and systems necessary to manage their tasks without burning out.

These behaviours are foundational to building a thriving academic career on your terms. They help you stay focused, avoid burnout, and continue making progress on your research without sacrificing your well-being.

5. Overcoming the Need for External Validation

Many academics feel that without the right mentorship or institutional support, they can’t succeed. While a great mentor can definitely help, it’s not a prerequisite for success. I’ve worked with numerous clients who came from non-academic backgrounds (like me) and made successful careers for themselves by focusing on what they could control—writing, publishing, and finding their own path to success.

Tip: You don’t need a prestigious mentor or external validation to succeed in academia. Focus on building your skills, your network, and your body of work. Success will follow.

6. WORKING WHERE YOU ARE, NOT Where you want to be

Success in academia doesn’t come without its challenges, especially if you’re working within a system that doesn’t always align with your personal values. However, recognizing and accepting the realities of academia—without romanticizing it—will help you stay grounded. This isn’t about wishing for academia to be different; it’s about accepting it for what it is and finding your way to thrive within it.

Tip: Be realistic about the academic landscape, but don’t let it hold you back. Find ways to work within the system that allow you to achieve your own definition of success.

In Conclusion

Academic success is deeply personal and can look different for everyone. Whether it’s about research, work-life balance, financial stability, or the pursuit of personal interests, defining success on your own terms is crucial. Once you’ve defined it, the next step is to align your actions with your goals. Write first, set boundaries, and manage your workload. Prioritize your publications over titles, and don’t let external pressures dictate your path.

What does success look like for you in academia? Take some time to reflect on this and start taking actionable steps to create the academic career that feels fulfilling and true to your values.

Do You Write To Think?

In a recent coaching session, one of my clients brought up the idea of “writing to think.” She had come across one of my training videos where I had dismissively said, “Don’t talk to me about writing to think – this is bullshit.” It was clear that this comment triggered something in her, and she decided to bring it up during our coaching session.

This got me thinking that it might be useful to share why I often dismiss the concept of writing to think, and why I believe it’s something worth unpacking. Let’s dive into the topic.

What Do We Really Mean by “Writing to Think”?

When people talk about “writing to think,” they typically mean using writing as a way to organize and clarify their thoughts. Of course, writing is a process that involves thinking – that should go without saying. We don’t just think in one place, stop thinking, and then mechanically move on to the next task. Thinking and writing are intertwined.

But when people refer to “writing to think,” they often use it as an excuse for avoiding a structured, step-by-step writing process. These are the people who struggle with the drafting process because they try to write, edit, and create all at once. Instead of drafting and moving forward, they get stuck in one paragraph, polishing it endlessly, even though they don’t have a clear sense of where the piece is headed.

This is what I take issue with when I hear “writing to think.” If you're sitting there, staring at a single paragraph for hours on end, hoping the right words or thoughts will come to you—you're not writing to think; you're avoiding the real thinking that should be happening during your writing process.

The Right Way to “Write to Think”

Now, successful and prolific writers often use the phrase “writing to think” in a different way. What they mean is that, as they move through their drafting process—from ideation to gathering information, to creating a rough draft, and finally editing and polishing—their thoughts become more refined and sophisticated with each step.

This is how writing should work. As you work through your draft, your ideas get clearer, sharper, and more nuanced. It’s a natural part of the writing process to become more thoughtful as you refine and revise your text. But that’s not what people mean when they use “writing to think” as an excuse to endlessly tinker with a single paragraph.

So, if you hear someone you admire say, “I write to think,” understand that they’re not sitting there, obsessively working on one paragraph. They're pushing through their drafts, moving from one stage to the next, and refining their thoughts as they go.

Avoiding the Resistance to Process

One of the biggest obstacles to effective writing is the resistance to a structured process. Many people fear that having a process will limit their creativity or make their writing feel too rigid. But writing is a technical task, especially in academic settings, and the best way to communicate complex ideas is by following a clear, step-by-step method.

When we allow ourselves to get stuck on one paragraph, hoping for inspiration to strike, we’re not engaging in the real process of writing. We’re stalling. Successful writers understand that drafting and redrafting, even if the initial ideas are rough, will always lead to a sharper, more coherent final piece. It’s through this process that we truly “think” about our topic, not by endlessly tinkering with the same sentences.

The Bigger Picture: Academic Writing and Thinking

As academics, we need to focus on thinking through our ideas thoroughly and systematically. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of writing to think—believing that the act of writing is itself a form of thinking—but this often leads to procrastination, frustration, and a lack of progress. Instead, approach your writing with a clear plan: start with an outline, create drafts, and refine those drafts step by step. This is where the real thinking happens.

If you're finding yourself stuck in the “writing to think” trap, I encourage you to step back and examine your writing process. Are you stalling? Are you resisting a structured approach? Or are you genuinely moving through each stage of the drafting process, allowing your thoughts to evolve naturally as you progress?

By embracing a clear, organized process, you’ll find that your thoughts become more sophisticated and your writing will improve in ways that simply aren’t possible if you’re stuck on that one paragraph.

So, next time someone says, “I write to think,” ask yourself: are they really writing to think? Or are they avoiding the hard work of following a structured process?

5 Things I Wish I Knew As a Junior Academic

…And 5 Things That Served Me Well

When I first entered academia, I thought I was walking into a meritocracy — a world where hard work, intellectual brilliance, and dedication would naturally be rewarded. I was wrong.

Here are the five things I wish I’d known when I started my academic career and five lessons that might just make your path a little smoother.

1. Academia is a strategicocracy, not a meritocracy

When I started, I assumed the smartest people, the hardest workers, and the best teachers were the ones who got ahead. I believed that quality would be self-evident. But academia rewards strategy, not stamina. The system runs on overwork, overcommitment, and constant demands. There’s always more to do than there is time. So the people who succeed are the ones who are strategic about where they place their energy.

They focus on high-leverage work: the activities that move the needle on their careers. They understand that “doing everything” is a trap, not a virtue.

2. Work in the institution you’re actually in — not the one you wish you were in

It’s easy to fall in love with an idealised version of academia. One where everyone collaborates, workloads are fair, and good work naturally rises to the top. But every institution has its own culture, politics, and hidden hierarchies. If you want to thrive, you have to understand your university’s real operating system; how decisions are made, what’s rewarded, and what’s quietly ignored. Wishing things were different drains energy that could be used to work effectively within the system or to plan your escape from it.

3. Work allocation is not about equity

This one took me far too long to learn. I used to believe that workload was distributed fairly and that leaders had a clear overview of who was doing what. In reality, your head of department is juggling a dozen hot potatoes and they’ll hand them to whoever seems available. Not because they’re malicious, but because they need the pain to stop.

If you say yes to everything, you simply become the easiest person to offload onto. Learning to say “no”, calmly, clearly, and without apology is one of the most powerful skills you can develop in academia.

4. A PhD doesn’t train you to write as an academic

This might sound shocking, but it’s true: PhD writing habits don’t translate into the professional writing life. As a doctoral student, you have unlimited time, a single project, and someone giving you feedback. None of those conditions exist in your academic job. If you don’t develop new skills around writing process, planning, and consistency, your productivity will stall. Learning to write strategically, that is, to create, refine, and elevate your work through structured drafting is the foundation of a sustainable academic career.

5. Build your intellectual network early

The most successful academics don’t work alone. They have a network: a circle of trusted peers who share ideas, read drafts, and collaborate without judgment. This network keeps your research alive when your department feels like a desert. It offers accountability, intellectual stimulation, and protection against burnout. You need colleagues who get your work and who will tell you when it’s brilliant and more importantly, when it’s not there yet. Build those connections before you need them.

The personal traits that helped me thrive

When I look back, there are a few qualities I brought into academia that helped me stay sane and progress fast. I had strong boundaries. I didn’t open email before writing, and I protected my time fiercely. I understood that academia was a job, not my entire identity. That distinction gave me freedom. I also grasped, fairly early on, that time management isn’t about being busy, but rather, it’s about being strategic. Knowing what matters and executing it efficiently.

The takeaway

Academia can be thrilling, infuriating, and profoundly meaningful — but it isn’t fair, and it isn’t designed for your well-being.

If you can accept that and still choose to engage strategically, protect your energy, and invest in your writing and networks, you can build a career that’s not only successful, but sustainable. Because thriving in academia isn’t about doing more. Instead it’s about doing the right things with clarity, courage, and intention.

Why Your Monograph Isn’t Moving Forward—Even Though You’re Working on It

If you’ve technically started your book, but progress feels like dragging yourself through mud—this post is for you. You might have outlines, some chapters, scattered notes, maybe even 40,000 words. And yet, the project feels fragmented, elusive, and frustratingly slow.

It’s not that you’re not working. It’s that you’re not working in a way that creates momentum.

The Hidden Problem: Fragmentation

One of the most overlooked barriers to writing a monograph is fragmentation. It shows up in ways like:

• Writing disconnected sections without a coherent through-line

• Losing track of your argument across chapters

• Revising the introduction obsessively while other chapters sit untouched

• Switching between multiple projects, never really finishing one

You feel like you’re doing a lot, but when you zoom out, the book isn’t taking shape. And that’s not a productivity problem—it’s a process problem.

Academics are often managing huge workloads: admin, teaching, mentorship, and high expectations for output. That means writing gets squeezed into fragmented chunks of time.

You sit down, open a chapter, and think, Where was I again? You tweak a sentence here, a paragraph there, then run out of time. It feels productive, but it’s not progressing.

Over time, the project starts to feel unmanageable. And because no single piece seems to bring you closer to “done,” you start to dread sitting down to work on it.

What’s Really Missing: A Book-Wide Strategy

What you need isn’t more time or more effort. It’s coherence. A strategy that links your big ideas to your chapter structure to your daily writing sessions.

Ask yourself:

• Do you have a map for how your chapters interact?

• Can you summarise your book’s central argument in a sentence?

• Do your chapters each move that argument forward?

If not, it’s no wonder the writing feels scattered.

A Book Needs More Than a Collection of Chapters

Think of your monograph not as a set of essays, but as a narrative arc. Each chapter should build on the last and prepare for the next.

Most writers never get this bird’s-eye view until it’s too late—or they try to reverse-engineer it during final revisions, which causes more pain and wasted effort.

The most successful monograph writers I’ve worked with don’t wait for the book to magically cohere. They build coherence into the process.

There Is a Way Forward

You don’t need to throw away your drafts. You don’t need to start over. You need to take what you’ve already created and restructure your process around clarity, coherence, and cumulative progress.

That’s not about writing more. It’s about writing smarter—and giving yourself the structure your book has been missing.

📬 Want to Bring Your Monograph Together Without Starting Over?

My Monograph Programme is designed for exactly this stage of the process—when you’ve started, but the work isn’t moving. We build clarity, coherence, and completion into your workflow so your book finally takes shape.

When Writing is Your Hobby, Your Academic Career Dies

There’s a quiet tragedy that plays out across universities every single day. Brilliant academics who’ve spent decades training their minds treat writing as if it were a hobby. Something to get to after the real work is done. Something for the weekends. For the mythical quiet time that never comes. They teach. They sit on committees. They supervise, mark, review, advise, and administrate. And they write only in the margins; on borrowed time, stolen mornings, or those magical sabbaticals that vanish before the work has even begun.

And slowly, imperceptibly, their careers begin to starve.

The Hard Truth

If you treat writing like a hobby, your academic career will quietly hollow out. Writing is the career. Some of you will not like hearing that. It’s not an add-on, not an afterthought, not a bonus for when everything else is done. It’s the visible, lasting expression of your intellectual life. Without a consistent writing practice, your thinking stagnates. Your ideas never mature. Your expertise never quite lands in the world. And in academia, visibility matters. The system may be flawed, but it’s also brutally clear: publications, grants, and intellectual contribution are the currency that sustains your professional life.

Why So Many Smart People Fall Into This Trap

Because the system trains you to. PhD students learn to respond : to supervisors, reviewers, teaching loads, departmental needs, externally imposed deadlines. The culture - on the surface at least - rewards responsiveness, not depth. So you get good at reacting, firefighting, and delivering on other people’s timelines and objectives. You serve their projects.

Writing, on the other hand, demands sovereignty. It’s self-generated. You have to choose to sit down. You have to decide what matters. You have to withstand the discomfort of being alone with your own ideas. That’s why so many academics keep writing as a “nice-to-have.” It’s easier to stay in motion and to fill your days with visible, reactive work than to confront the quiet, demanding work of producing ideas that matter.

The Professional vs. The Hobbyist

Here’s the difference:

When you shift from hobbyist to professional, everything changes. You stop asking, “When will I find the time?” You start asking, “What will I protect to make time?” That shift alone can resurrect a stalled career.

The Feedback Loop of Neglect

When writing slips, confidence erodes. When confidence erodes, writing slips further. You feel out of touch with your field. Your projects stall. You start avoiding colleagues who ask, “How’s the book coming?” And here’s the most dangerous part: you start compensating with busywork, more committees, more students, more administrative responsibilities, because they offer an easy sense of productivity.
But that kind of work doesn’t compound. Writing does.
Every finished article, every new idea on paper, every draft moved forward; that’s how intellectual authority is built.

Reclaim Writing as Your Core Practice

If you want your career to thrive, you have to bring writing back to the centre. That means:

1. Scheduling it first.
   Build your week around writing, not writing around your week.

2. Saying no to low-value work.
   Not because you’re selfish — because you’re protecting your impact.

3. Investing in your writing process.
   Training, systems, accountability, and feedback are not indulgences. They’re infrastructure.

4. Writing even when it’s uncomfortable.
   You can’t think your way into writing. You write your way into thinking.

The Real Work

Your career doesn’t end when you stop writing, it just stops growing. The meetings will continue. The emails will multiply. Your calendar will stay full. But without writing, it all becomes motion without meaning. Writing is how you anchor your intellectual life in something enduring. It’s how you participate in the conversation that defines your field. It’s how you matter.

So this week, ask yourself:

“Am I treating my writing like the core of my career, or like a side hobby I hope to get to someday?”

Because the day you start protecting your writing like your career depends on it — is the day your career truly begins again.

The Art of Finishing: Moving Projects Over the Line

There’s a particular energy in beginnings. The rush of ideas, the novelty, the feeling that this time, this project, will be different.

But finishing — really finishing — is a different art form altogether. It demands a different energy. A different mindset. And for most academics, it’s where the whole system breaks down.

We start too many things. We overcommit. We polish forever. We stall, waiting for some elusive moment of readiness.

The truth? Finishing isn’t about waiting until it’s perfect. It’s about managing yourself through the messy middle to the finish line.

Why We Struggle to Finish

Finishing triggers fear. It brings visibility, judgement, and the possibility of failure. Once you finish, you have to show your work. If it’s done well, this work demonstrates that you stand for something, and that you had something to say.

So we hover in the safety of the almost-done. We tinker, we re-read, we “just need to add that one reference.” Perfectionism, imposter feelings, and cognitive overload all play a role. But so does something simpler: a lack of clear process for what “finishing” looks like.

The Anatomy of Finishing

To finish well, you need three things:

1. Definition – What does done actually mean for this project?

   • Is it ready for submission, for peer feedback, or for publication?

   • Be explicit — vagueness fuels avoidance.

2. Containment – Create boundaries for how much more you’ll do.

   • “I’ll do one more read for structure, one more for clarity, then I’m done.”

   • Deadlines are powerful when you decide what’s enough.

3. Momentum – Finishing requires sustained focus.

   • Schedule finishing sessions where the only goal is closure: references finalised, conclusion written, submission uploaded.

Finishing isn’t glamorous. It’s admin, persistence, and emotional regulation — the least celebrated academic skill, but arguably the most important!

I spend a lot more time than I would like trying to get people over the line with their writing, and its not the writing I am managing but the emotional regulation of letting them know it is OK. It is time to move on.

The Mindset Shift

You don’t need to feel ready to finish. You need to decide to finish. That decision creates a cascade of action:

• You stop entertaining new ideas.

• You stop rewriting the introduction.

• You stop letting fear of rejection dictate your timeline.

Finishing is an act of courage. It says, “This is what I can offer now.” And then you let the work go and move on to the next thing.

A Mini Finishing Audit

Take five minutes to do this right now:

1. List every writing project you’ve started.

2. Mark each one as: active, stalled, or abandoned.

3. Choose one that’s 80% done and commit to finishing it this month.

Then ask yourself:

“What would it take to move this over the line?”

Not in theory — in practice. What’s missing? What’s in your way? What tiny, unglamorous actions would get it done? This kind of self-audit is powerful because it shifts your focus from guilt to action.

The Takeaway

Finishing is not about speed. It’s about closure. It’s how you build a track record, a publication pipeline, and most importantly, trust in yourself. If you want to change your relationship with writing, don’t aim to start more projects — aim to finish the ones you’ve already begun.

Because every finished piece — however imperfect — builds momentum, clarity, and confidence. So this week, I’ll leave you with one question:

What’s the one thing you could finish before Friday?

The Drainers and the Drivers: A 10 Minute Writing Hack

Academics often think about productivity as a matter of willpower: “If only I had more discipline, I’d be writing more.” But in reality, writing success isn’t about being superhuman. It’s about noticing what is draining you and what is driving you—and then adjusting your environment, habits, and mindset accordingly.

This quick check-in is designed to help you run a personal audit: where are you bleeding energy and momentum, and where are you gaining it? Because once you know that, you can stop fighting yourself and start working with yourself.

Why an Audit Matters

Academic life is relentless. You’re juggling teaching, supervision, admin, service, and research. Writing is the thing most closely tied to your career advancement yet it often ends up at the bottom of the list. That’s not because you don’t care about it. It’s because you’re caught in a web of “drainers” that sap your focus and leave you spinning.

On the other side, there are “drivers”: small practices, supports, and mindsets that lift you, energise you, and make the work flow.

Without clarity, you end up defaulting to survival mode and drowning in the drainers. With clarity, you can shift your week, even your day, so you’re investing more in the drivers and cutting off the drainers at the root.

Step One: Spot the Drainers

Drainers are the habits, contexts, or patterns that quietly (or loudly) sabotage your writing. Some are obvious, others insidious. Ask yourself:

• Time Thieves – Where does your writing time actually go? Endless emails, admin tasks that feel urgent, students dropping by? If your writing slot is constantly at risk, you’ve found a drainer.

• Mental Clutter – How often do you sit down to write but can’t concentrate because you’re carrying unresolved decisions, too many to-dos, or general overwhelm? Cognitive overload is one of the biggest productivity killers.

• Toxic Comparisons – Scrolling social media or hearing a colleague announce yet another publication can drain your energy before you’ve even opened your document.

• Pseudo-Productivity – The endless tinkering with references, formatting, or outlines that makes you feel busy but doesn’t move the text forward.

• Unrealistic Expectations – Telling yourself you should be able to “write a draft in a week” or “work like you did during sabbatical” only leads to guilt and paralysis.

• Burnout Creep – Low energy, cynicism, and lack of focus are not signs that you’re lazy; they’re signs your system is running on empty.

Write these down. Which ones show up most for you right now? Even naming them takes their power down a notch.

Step Two: Identify the Drivers

Drivers are the practices and supports that help you move forward with less resistance. They don’t necessarily make writing easy, but they create conditions where writing is more possible. Think about:

• Protected Time – Even 30-60 minutes of protected, non-negotiable writing time can transform your output. The consistency matters more than the length.

• Clear Next Steps – Knowing what your very next move is (drafting, revising, adding sources) prevents decision fatigue. Writing plans make writing flow.

• Micro-Wins – Finishing a paragraph, hitting 250 words, or making a decision on structure can feel tiny but builds momentum.

• Accountability – Sharing goals with a writing buddy, coach, or group keeps you honest and supported.

• Joy in the Process – When was the last time you noticed the fun of exploring an idea? Tapping into curiosity often flips writing from a chore to a driver.

• Rest and Recovery – Counterintuitive as it sounds, taking proper breaks is one of the most powerful writing drivers. A well-rested brain writes better.

Circle which of these you already have in your week. Then ask: which ones could you experiment with adding?

Step Three: Weigh Them Up

Here’s the real power of the drainer/driver check-in: put them side by side.

• If you’ve listed six big drainers and only one or two weak drivers, no wonder writing feels hard.

• If your drainers are minor but your drivers strong, you’re probably closer to writing flow than you realise.

• The goal isn’t to eliminate every drainer (some are unavoidable), but to tip the balance so your drivers outweigh them.

A quick exercise: draw two columns. Left side: your top three drainers. Right side: your top three drivers. Now ask: what’s one drainer I can reduce this week, and what’s one driver I can double down on?

Step Four: Make Small, Concrete Adjustments

Productivity isn’t about overhauling your entire system overnight. It’s about small, sustainable shifts. For example:

• If “email first thing” is a drainer → try writing before opening your inbox, even if just for 20 minutes.

• If “unclear next steps” is a drainer → finish each session by jotting down exactly where to pick up tomorrow.

• If “burnout” is a drainer → commit to one genuine rest activity (a walk, a nap, a book for pleasure) each day.

• If “accountability” is a driver → schedule a co-writing session with a colleague or join a structured programme.

Why This Matters for Your Career

Publications don’t emerge from bursts of inspiration. They come from sustainable writing habits that accumulate into finished projects.

By doing a drainer/driver audit, you stop blaming yourself for “not being disciplined enough” and start treating writing like what it is: a professional practice that depends on context, support, and energy management.

This isn’t about working harder—it’s about working smarter. The academics who thrive are not the ones who push through at all costs, but the ones who design systems that protect their energy and momentum.

A Quick Challenge for You

Take 10 minutes today to do your drainer/driver audit. Write down:

• Three things that are draining your writing right now.

• Three things that are driving your writing right now.

Then decide: one drainer to reduce, one driver to amplify.

You’ll be surprised how much lighter and more productive you feel with just that small shift.

Expanding capacity as a tool of writing

We often think the key to writing more is time. More hours. Longer weekends. Clearer calendars.

But the truth is, time isn't the only currency that matters when it comes to writing. If you're mid-career, juggling research, admin, mentoring, and teaching (not to mention life beyond the university), then you already know: the time never magically appears. And even when it does , it doesn’t always help.

Why? Because what actually determines whether writing gets done isn’t just time, it's capacity.

What Do I Mean by Capacity?

Capacity is your cognitive, emotional, and energetic availability to engage meaningfully with your writing. It’s what allows you to think clearly, focus deeply, and make intellectual decisions on the page. It’s what lets you approach your manuscript without dread. What gives you the presence to connect ideas, find your argument, and push the work forward. It’s the difference between sitting at your desk for three hours and producing nothing, and sitting down for 45 minutes and making real progress.

Your capacity is what fuels your writing engine. Without it, time is just an empty container.

Mid-Career and the Myth of Experience

One of the trickiest parts about mid-career writing is that you’re experienced enough to know what excellent writing looks like and often too stretched to consistently produce it. At this stage, most academics are carrying a heavy load: editorial boards, external reviews, committee leadership, PhD supervision, multiple research projects. These obligations accumulate just as personal responsibilities peak too: caregiving, financial pressures, health.

This results in a frustrating paradox: your expertise is at its peak, but your capacity is thinned to its lowest ebb.

And here’s the kicker: because you can still produce under pressure, you often do… until you burn out or drop below the quality you know you’re capable of. So you push harder, but not smarter. You get stuck in what I call the “over-functioning / under-producing” cycle; always working, never quite writing.

The Cost of Shrinking Capacity

Shrinking capacity doesn’t just slow down your writing: it erodes confidence. You begin to mistrust your ability to think clearly or follow through. You stop planning ambitious pieces or pull back from risky or innovative scholarship. You choose smaller, faster projects just to stay afloat and slowly start to compromise your scholarly identity.

This is not a writing issue. It’s a capacity issue. And it’s why productivity tips alone are never enough.

So the question isn’t just “How do I find time to write?” It’s also:
How do I expand my capacity so that when I do sit down to write, I’m available to do the work that matters?

Expanding Capacity: What It Really Looks Like

Let’s be clear: expanding capacity doesn’t mean doing more. It means becoming more resourced, that is, intellectually, emotionally, practically, so writing feels possible, energising, and sustainable.

Here are four essential components:

1. Strategic Clarity

Nothing drains capacity faster than fog. Many academics waste enormous mental energy wondering: Is this the right project?, What’s the argument?, Is this publishable?

Getting crystal clear on your project’s purpose, contribution, and fit eliminates decision fatigue and frees up cognitive space. This is why the very first phase of any writing plan should be strategic thinking — not blind drafting.

2. Realistic Project Design

A project that overwhelms your current capacity is poorly designed. Period. You need to match the scope and timeline of your work to the actual time and energy you can give it . Not your fantasy version of yourself in a parallel universe with no teaching, admin, or children. Designing right-sized writing goals is an act of self-respect. And it creates momentum rather than guilt.

3. Boundaried Work Practices

If writing is always squeezed into the margins of your day, your brain starts to associate it with stress, scarcity, and failure. That’s a capacity killer. Creating small but sacred writing containers — protected, time-bound, and realistic — trains your brain to trust that writing will happen. That it’s not another broken promise. Boundaries restore capacity by reducing guilt, preserving energy, and creating psychological safety around your writing time.

4. Support Structures

You weren’t meant to do this alone. Academics are some of the most structurally unsupported knowledge workers in the world. Writing isn’t just hard, it’s isolating. Especially at mid-career, when peer support drops off and everyone assumes you’ve ‘got it handled’. Investing in structured support, whether that’s coaching, peer accountability, or a strategic writing programme , restores capacity by taking the burden of “figuring it out” off your plate.

You don't need more discipline. You need more support.

Writing from Capacity — Not Collapse

If you're only writing when you're at your limit, you’re reinforcing a pattern that makes your best work harder and harder to access. Writing should not be a survival activity. It should be a scholarly one.

Expanding your capacity isn’t a luxury — it’s the foundation of your intellectual life. It's what allows you to return to your writing with energy, not dread. Clarity, not confusion. Purpose, not panic.

Workload management in Universities: time versus stress management & burnout

I’m not talking about the University Workload Allocation Matrix or whatever fantasy football equivalent your particular institution runs. We all know what we know: they are not accurate, they are not realistic because if they were the University would need to hire 50 more people in your department.

So let’s just get over that now, move past it, this is not a discussion about that.

Time and stress management

I’m talking about how YOU manage the workload YOU have been allocated, how much mental real estate you give to various parts of that allocation, and how you manage and sometimes bargain - because, yes, people do this - so that you optimise YOUR particular workload into something that won’t lead to burnout for YOU.

As you can see, my feelings are: this is different for people.

I talk alot about time management in my training because ‘not enough time’ is a preoccupation of many academics not getting to their writing. Whilst time management is important because efficiency matters, and unpicking stories around time is central to making sustainable writing progress, what if you already have all the time management systems in place?

You are a time management ninja.

You have good systems of capture, you have a way of allocating time to task, and you know why you are writing what you are doing and have multi-scale planning down to a fine art? What then?

What if the writing problems are located not in how much you have to do (yes, we know too much) or how you manage that, but WHAT you have to do. We all have more or less tolerance for certain things in our working environment, and if you are consistently rubbing up against the thing that stresses you out in particular, your stress levels are high and then your capacity to engage in deep work - and particularly writing – is vastly diminished. So, it’s important to identify, what is it for you?

In his podcast, Cal Newport gives 4 categories of the type of stress that you might find in the work environment.

·      Time stress- overload of tasks, not enough time to do it in

• Expectation stress- that you have to deliver a very high quality outcome (real or perceived)

• Uncertainty/Risk - possible bad things will happen (eg if you set boundaries, if something isn’t done) or you don’t know the next steps

• Conflict - toxic workplaces or individuals, or systems that encourage conflict

I am going to add one here which is related to uncertainty and risk, but not the same.

• Control – control over your tasks (not allocation) – but execution

Less things to do is not always the answer

The mistake I see both individual academics and institutions make over and over again is the concentration on ‘how many tasks’ a person is allocated as for example the root cause of burnout, failure to perform or failure to produce quality outputs. A classic response to a member of staff coming back from sick leave caused by burnout is in fact to take away the number of tasks. And of course if that was the root cause, GREAT. Problem solved. Rarely though is the problem this clear cut.  Sometimes fewer tasks being allocated cannot and will not cure the problem, and that is why return to work practices can fail.

We need to think more carefully about the things that gives particular individuals huge stress, to prevent burnout yes, but also to create greater capacity for everyone so they can get their writing done.

Let’s give a concrete example. A classic way to game the WAM system when I was a wee small academic was to teach across many small modules – to avoid the core subjects at all costs - but not be in charge of anything. Essentially you taught across a breadth of subjects, but you did little else except grade the papers of those students. You had no responsibility for course leadership, exams and other assessments, meetings and so on and your WAM figures looked very impressive. This type of approach leaves you with no control, but little risk, low expectations, low conflict and fewer tasks. You deploy as a teaching robot, but otherwise your mental real estate is preserved for other stuff.

For some, this is optimally low stress and high capacity, because breadth of teaching is not the stressor. Stress for this person might look like one of the other things – high number of tasks, high expectations, high level of responsibility, perhaps conflict.

In other cases (me) I would rather have MORE work - more tasks, more responsibility, high expectations /or conflict, because lack of control is my number 1 stressor. I don’t mind allocating work (possible conflict), being the decision makers (high expectations and accountability) and I can tolerate risk well (if I get it wrong, it’s on me). Task overload is not then my stressor as I am a very organised person and have good time management skills, so ‘too many tasks’ is not what leads to burnout in me. But if I lack control over my work and my schedule, because Barbara is my course leader and she is a chaos monster, I am on my last nerve in 3 minutes flat. I can’t tolerate working with Barbara, and I will take on more tasks to avoid her. I will have more work, but less Barabra and less stress. If I were to burn out  and my back to work was you only have 1 class to teach, but you guessed it, it’s with Barbara, I am back on sick leave.

Review what stresses you out

Do an audit about what really pushes your buttons. Is it that you just cannot stand ONE MORE MINUTE working with Barbara? You would rather teach 3 more courses - take it. Bargain your way out of the stress triggers. Is it the uncertainty around the role you have been allocated (very common in academia where roles – and tasks😂 - are never defined)? Uncertainty feels like you are doomed to fail because you cannot know what you are meant to be doing, and high expectations around ill-defined tasks cause some people to allocate a lot of metal real estate to unsolvable problems.

Don’t conflate stressors: I’m not afraid of conflict with Barbara – I’ll do that all day long. My stress is Barbara is chaos and no amount of shouting will undo that. I need to avoid the chaos caused by Barbara – the uncertainty, the lack of organisation, the last minute requests, the student unhappiness caused by Barbara’s chaos that ends up in my inbox. I can’t deal with THAT, not Barbara. Of course sometimes a toxic co-worker should just be avoided because it ‘gets on us’ like radiation, and we don’t want that.

When these stressors are gone, you’ll be amazed how much capacity appears for writing when your mental real estate is spacious and untroubled. How much you realise it was not the number of things to do, but the other stuff that dragged you under.

If in fact it IS task overload – you need to get rid of some roles and keep others – remember not all roles bring the same level of task exposure, or the same type of stressors. Boundaries are your friend, negotiation is key and not everything requires 100% of your capacity. Choose wisely, and deploy your real estate judiciously.

Why Writing a Book Still Matters in Academia — And What’s Stopping You

There’s a strange silence around book writing in academia these days. A whisper that says maybe it’s not worth it. That journal articles and grants are better for your time. That no one really reads monographs anymore.

But the truth?

Writing a book still matters. Immensely. Especially if you’re in the humanities, social sciences, or any field where extended argument, original contribution, and field visibility are currency.

And yet, for many academics, the idea of writing a book—especially their first monograph—feels like standing at the base of a mountain with a broken map and no gear. They want to write it. They know they should write it. But somehow, they’re not.

If that’s you, I want to talk about why that’s happening—not just practically, but psychologically. Because in my work coaching academic writers, I see it again and again: the book doesn’t just expose your ideas. It exposes your fears.

Why Books Still Matter

Let’s clear something up: books still carry weight in the academic world.

• They’re often the benchmark for tenure and promotion in many disciplines.

• They’re where your ideas get space to fully breathe—beyond the tight word counts and constraints of journals.

• They establish intellectual leadership in your field.

• They can shift conversations, launch collaborations, and open doors to keynote invitations, editorial boards, and career-defining recognition.

No, they’re not fast. No, they’re not always immediately cited. But they are legacy-building.

If you’re working in a field where books are the standard, not finishing one can quietly stall your momentum, even if you’re productive in every other way.

So why are so many brilliant scholars not finishing their books?

The Fear Beneath the Delay

Let me say what most people won’t: not writing your book often has very little to do with time.

It has everything to do with fear.

• Fear that your idea isn’t “big enough” for a book.

• Fear that it was big, but you missed your moment.

• Fear that your voice doesn’t carry enough weight.

• Fear that once you put it all on the page, you’ll prove your deepest suspicion: that maybe you’re not as smart as they think.

This is the emotional undercurrent that turns into procrastination, spirals of rewriting, and endless “I’ll get to it after [insert excuse].”

And here's the kicker: these fears often show up not as full-blown breakdowns, but as perfectionism, avoidance, and over-committing to other work that feels more “urgent.”

It’s not laziness. It’s self-protection disguised as productivity.

No One Teaches You How to Write a Book

Another hard truth? The academy rarely teaches you how to actually write a book.

You might have written articles. You might have done a PhD. But translating a big idea into a compelling, structured, finished monograph? That’s a different skillset entirely.

The structure, pacing, reader journey, even how to craft a persuasive proposal—these aren’t intuitive. And without guidance, many scholars just keep moving chapters around, unsure of whether they’re building toward anything coherent.

They start, stop, rewrite. The idea starts to feel stale. Self-doubt creeps in. Confidence dips. And soon, the book becomes something they dread, not something they’re proud to build.

The Longer You Wait, The Harder It Feels

Here’s something I see all the time: the longer a book project drags on, the heavier it becomes.

Guilt starts to compound. “I should be further along.”
Shame creeps in. “Maybe I’m not cut out for this.”
Comparison adds fuel. “Everyone else is publishing. Why can’t I?”

And once those emotions attach to the book, even opening the document can feel loaded.

That’s why I always say: the first step isn’t finishing the book. It’s rebuilding your relationship to it. From dread to clarity. From avoidance to momentum.

And that’s absolutely possible.

You Don’t Need More Time—You Need a System

If you’ve been stuck in the same chapter for 6 months, or rewriting the introduction for the fifth time, you don’t need another writing retreat or inspirational podcast.

You need a repeatable, supportive structure to get the book done—with accountability, feedback, and clarity at every stage.

You need a plan that respects your teaching load, your emotional bandwidth, and the size of your idea.

This is exactly why I created Mastering the Monograph—a 12-month writing program built for scholars like you. It doesn’t just teach you how to write a book. It gives you the framework, coaching, and community to actually finish it—with confidence.

Because you don’t need to hustle harder. You need to write smarter.

Final Word: Your Voice Deserves the Page

Your book is the fullest expression of your intellectual vision. It’s where your voice doesn’t just contribute to your field—it shapes it.

And the world needs that voice. Not someday. Not “when things calm down.” But now.

So if fear’s been sitting in the driver’s seat, consider this your permission to take back the wheel.

Your ideas matter. Your work is worthy. Your book can be written—and I can help you write it.

Why You’re Not Getting Anywhere with Your Monograph: It’s Not Discipline, It’s the Idea

If you’ve ever found yourself saying, “I just need to sit down and write the book,” you’re not alone, and you’re also not going to get very far. Most academics assume that the hard part of writing a monograph is the writing itself. They wait until they “have time,” open a fresh document, and try to draft their way into clarity.

But here’s the truth: your biggest obstacle isn’t writing discipline : it’s a weak or undeveloped idea.

And that’s not your fault. Most academic systems don’t teach us how to develop ideas. We’re taught how to research, how to analyse, how to cite, how to structure arguments. But no one teaches us how to build a compelling book-level idea — something coherent enough to sustain 80,000 words and compelling enough to make a genuine contribution.

The Fatal Mistake: Writing Before You’re Truly Ready

The biggest block I see in monograph writing — particularly for mid-career academics — is starting the book too early.

Writers sit down with a vague theme or topic and start producing content around chapters, sections, word counts in the hope that the shape of the book will eventually “reveal itself.”

But writing is not excavation. You can’t dig your way to a finished book.

What usually happens instead?

• Endless redrafting of early chapters

• Constant restructuring because “it doesn’t quite fit”

• Uncertainty about the overall argument

• Inability to explain what the book is really about

• Idea drift so you no longer even like the original starting point

What you’re experiencing isn’t a failure of writing habits or motivation. It’s a failure of ideation.

What Does Real “Readiness” Look Like?

Readiness doesn’t mean you’ve read everything or have every chapter outlined. It means you’ve done the intellectual heavy lifting to define:

• A clear, central argument (not just a theme)

• A coherent contribution to your field

• A book-worthy structure that sustains that argument

• A set of through-lines that hold the book together across chapters

• A target audience and a vision for how the book will land with them

Without this, you don’t have a monograph project — you have a topic with some ideas orbiting it.

Why Mid-Career Writers Fall Into This Trap

Mid-career academics are experienced. You’ve taught, published articles, supervised students. You’ve written enough to trust your ability to “just start writing.”

But a book is not a long article. It’s an entirely different intellectual and emotional process. You can’t brute-force your way through it with discipline alone.

And because you are experienced, it’s even more painful when the book stalls. You blame your time, your discipline, your energy when what’s missing is the invisible architecture of a well-developed idea.

The Hidden Cost of Skipping Ideation

When you skip or rush ideation, it shows up later — in painful ways:

• Chapters that need to be thrown out or entirely rewritten

• Confusion over how chapters relate to one another

• A book that doesn’t know what it’s arguing, or who it’s for

• A reviewer asking: what is this book actually trying to say?

These are not problems of expression. They are problems of conception. And the cost is years of wasted time, effort, and emotional energy.

What You Need Instead

You don’t need to start writing right away.

You need:

• Time and space to test your idea at the book level

• A structured process to refine your argument before writing

• A way to understand how your chapters build and relate to one another

• Feedback from people who can challenge and strengthen your thinking

This is not “wasted time.” This is the work that makes your monograph possible.

Writing a Book Isn’t Just About Writing. It’s About Building Something That’s Built to Last.

Think of your monograph like an architectural structure. You wouldn’t start pouring concrete before you’ve drawn up plans. Why should your book be any different?

When your idea is structurally sound, the writing flows. Chapters make sense. Arguments deepen. And you’re no longer constantly revising because you’re no longer guessing.

The idea is the book.

📬 Want to Learn How to Build a Monograph from a Strong Foundation?

My Monograph Programme is designed specifically to help academics stop spinning their wheels and finally develop a compelling, publishable idea that anchors their book. We don’t just write. We build your book the right way, from the ground up.

👉 Join my mailing list [in the footer ⬇️ ] for more on developing your monograph idea — and to be first to hear when the programme opens next or head over to my FREE guide to pressure testing your monograph ideation.

When Writing Success Becomes a Source of Shame

There’s a particular problem I hear from mid-career academics. It doesn’t show up in grant metrics or performance reviews, but it gnaws away quietly. It sounds like this:

“I used to love writing. Now I avoid it.”

“I’ve got ideas, but I can’t seem to start/finish anything.”

“I feel like a fraud—and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing by now.”

If you’re a mid-career academic feeling this way, you’re not alone. In fact, you’re in excellent company. Because somewhere between promotion, tenure, and mounting responsibilities, something unexpected happens:

Writing stops feeling like an expression of your scholarship, and starts to feel like a liability. The thing that built your career, becomes a burden you feel you can’t reproduce.

When the Writing You Aren’t Doing Becomes Heavy

At this stage, most academics have internalised that publishing is essential for their career. But many no longer feel in control of when—or if—it happens.

I work with clients who supervise PhDs, sit on editorial boards, and hold leadership roles, yet are haunted by a single Word document they can’t bring themselves to open. What starts as the latest draft quietly becomes a point of shame. The longer it sits, the heavier it gets.

Over time, this avoidance becomes identity-shaping. They stop calling themselves “a writer.” They defer leadership opportunities or focus on becoming the best module leader they can be. They lose confidence. Their once-vibrant scholarly identity shrinks. And the world rarely sees any of this, because on the surface, they look successful. They still have a decent list of long publications.

The Myth of “I Should Know Better by Now”

One of the most damaging beliefs I see among mid-career scholars is this: “I should be able to manage this by now.” It’s not just about writing: it’s about self-trust.

The belief that writing should come easily by mid-career adds a layer of shame when it doesn’t. You hesitate to ask for help because it feels like an admission of failure. You keep quiet because you think you're the only one struggling. But the truth is, academia doesn’t prepare you for the volume and complexity of writing that mid-career demands. Nor does it teach you how to balance writing with the leadership, admin, mentoring, and emotional labour you’ve now taken on.

You’re not failing. You’re overloaded. And no one ever taught you what to do with that.

Writing Isn’t Just a Skill—It’s an Identity

This is why it hurts so much. For many academics, writing was once a joy. A calling. A core part of who they were. When it becomes difficult, they don’t just worry about career progression, they mourn a lost part of themselves.

This identity-level erosion is rarely talked about. But I hear it every day. And what I want you to know is: it’s real. And it’s reversible. You don’t need to write 1,000 words a day to come back to your scholarly identity. But you do need to rebuild your writing relationship from the ground up—with strategy, with systems, and with support.

The most dangerous lie you can tell yourself is that this is just how it has to be.

It isn’t.

You’re not broken. You’re buried.

And the right kind of writing support can help you dig your way back out.

If your confidence in writing has slipped, and you’re ready to reclaim your identity as a scholar who writes with purpose, 📨 Subscribe to my mailing list and receive real talk, research-backed support, and expert advice to help you write again—on your terms.

👉 Join the list below [in the footer ⬇️ ] and reconnect with the writer you know you are.

The mid-career malaise: The Hidden Cost of Binge-and-Bust Writing

Mid-career academics are masters of adaptation. They’ve learned to survive the post-PhD years, navigate job precarity (sometimes), and grow into positions of greater responsibility. But when it comes to academic writing, many still rely on methods that no longer serve them—none more so than the binge-and-bust cycle. It’s the writing strategy that got many scholars through their PhD: long, intense sprints of writing driven by deadlines, panic, or temporary relief from teaching. But what begins as a functional short-term solution often becomes a long-term liability.

The Myth of “I Work Better Under Pressure”

Mid-career academics often tell me they work best in bursts—that structure stifles them, or that inspiration only comes under pressure. But here’s the truth: what they’re actually good at is responding to crisis. And that’s not the same as producing excellent scholarship consistently.

In practice, binge writing often means long stretches of guilt, avoidance, or non-production followed by frantic writing binges—usually at the cost of weekends, holidays, or sleep. And while it may yield occasional wins, it rarely results in a sustainable writing life or career momentum. It is very hard to step out of this way of thinking because it has been a comfort blanket for so long.

What the Binge Cycle Costs You

On the surface, binge-and-bust writing can seem productive. After all, papers do eventually get submitted. But dig deeper and the real costs start to emerge:

• Lost time: Between each burst, there are often weeks (or months) of little progress. Rebuilding momentum is mentally taxing.

• Lower quality: Writing in rushed sprints leads to uneven work that needs significant reworking, if it makes it to submission at all.

• Emotional burnout: The stress of constantly “catching up” drains cognitive energy and corrodes self-trust.

• Career stagnation: Without a sustainable pipeline, mid-career scholars risk slowing their publication output at precisely the point where consistency is most crucial for promotion, leadership roles, or funding.

Worse, the longer this pattern persists, the more entrenched it becomes and the harder it feels to break.

Why Mid-Career Is the Danger Zone

Binge writing may have worked in early career when pressure was external: thesis deadlines, postdoc applications, or annual reviews. But mid-career presents a paradox: the stakes are higher, but the structure often vanishes. Autonomy grows. So does workload. Leadership, supervision, editorial duties, endless admin. Writing becomes the thing you squeeze into the cracks. With no one checking in, it’s easy to let weeks pass without touching the work that matters most.

What I see again and again is this: mid-career academics who once identified as strong, even prolific, writers begin to question if they can do it at all anymore.

They haven’t lost skill, the truth is they never had a sustainable system of writing. They haven’t lost interest: they’ve lost access to the kind of structure and support that enables consistent progress.

The Real Risk: Quietly Falling Behind

When your writing is unpredictable, so is your output. And in academia, output is currency. If your work isn’t moving, you don’t get invited to join collaborations. You don’t win grants. You’re passed over for promotion. Your voice becomes quieter, not because your ideas aren’t valuable, but because they never make it to print.

This is the slow erosion I see with binge writers in mid-career: not a dramatic collapse, but a slow slide into invisibility.

The First Step Is Naming It

Here’s the hard truth: you cannot build a long-term research career on short-term panic.

The good news? This is a fixable problem.

But the first step isn’t buying a new planner or downloading another pomodoro app. It’s realising that your writing isn’t just a time problem, it’s a systems problem. And that begins with confronting the habits and beliefs that keep you locked in the binge cycle.

This isn’t a call to write every day. It’s a call to build trust in your writing process again—a process that works with your life, not against it.

You’re not bad at writing. You’ve just outgrown the writing life that once got you through.

Ready to break free from the binge-and-bust cycle and build a writing practice you can actually trust?

📨 Join my mailing list to get expert insights, practical tools, and behind-the-scenes strategy for writing consistently— without burning out.

👉 Sign up below ⬇️ in the footer to start building the writing life your career deserves.

The Habit That Builds (or Breaks) Your Academic Career

Getting a writing habit isn’t just helpful — it’s foundational. Without it, your academic career can stall, or even collapse. Because without consistent output, you lose momentum. And without momentum, everything slows: your ideas, your publications, your confidence. Instead of sustainable progress, you fall into boom-and-bust writing cycles: a few good weeks followed by months of avoidance. It feels like chaos. And over time, it becomes exhausting. Unsustainable. That’s where burnout sets in.

Burnout is everywhere in academia. We point the finger at workload, toxic systems, and the culture of overwork. And all of that is real. Workloads are wild. You’re not imagining that. But here’s the hard truth: burnout doesn’t just come from having too much work. It comes from working in a way that drains you.

It comes from the story you tell yourself when you can’t keep up — the story that says you’re failing, that you’re the problem. That story is what empties the tank. And that story can change.

Your academic career doesn’t need to feel like a slow-motion collapse. There’s a better narrative — and better techniques.

A strong writing habit, paired with smart drafting systems, is the most powerful intervention I’ve seen in overworked academics’ lives. It’s not about adding more hours to your week. It’s about building a repeatable, sustainable process that fits the reality of your life.

I’ve coached hundreds of academics — from postdocs to full professors and Deans of Research, with and without learning differences, neurodivergence, caregiving demands, or heavy admin or teaching loads. And the pattern is always the same: once they have the right technique, writing becomes manageable. Even energising. The old way doesn’t work anymore. Writing notes in the margins, rereading piles of articles, highlighting until your pens run dry; those PhD-era habits are no match for today’s higher ed reality. You need methods built for speed, clarity, and confidence.

And yes, it’s hard to admit that your current system isn’t working or even that there might be another way. You’re a smart person, surely, you would have figured this out by now…and if you havn’t what is wrong with you? That can feel threatening. But it’s also liberating — because it means you’re not stuck. You’re not doomed. You just need to shift your approach.

You don’t need more time. You need better tools. Better habits. Better thinking. Ideation training.

It’s simple, but not easy. And in a moment like this — with promotions frozen, funding cuts, and colleagues leaving — it’s tempting to give up entirely. You might wonder: What’s the point?

Only you can answer that. But if you want to stay in this profession — and thrive — you need to start building the future you actually want. That starts with reclaiming your writing. Rebuilding your momentum. And remembering that you are not powerless here.

It’s not about time. It’s about technique.
And it all begins with the habit.

The academic blindspot: the ego gets in the way

There’s a particular kind of discomfort that lives inside many academics — one we rarely talk about, let alone admit. It sounds like this:

“I should know how to do this by now.”

“Other people seem to manage.”

“What if they find out I’m struggling?”

These quiet questions don’t come up in research seminars or writing groups. But they often swirl beneath the surface, especially when it comes to writing. At the heart of this discomfort is something we al know has a profound place in academia: ego.

Not necessarily always ‘ego’ in the arrogant, bombastic sense, but ego in its more subtle, more dangerous form: as a defence mechanism against perceived professional weakness. And this kind of ego creates a blindspot, and one that can seriously hinder your career.

The Rumsfeld Problem: What We Don’t Know We Don’t Know

It’s the unknown unknowns that causes the trouble. Especially for academics who assume that, by the time they’ve earned a PhD, they should know how to write. The more senior they become, the more dangerous this is.

They should be productive. That asking for help or admitting struggle is a kind of failure we cannot admit to in a highly competitive environment. Professional athletes are loathe to admit they have any kind of injury niggle before races, because they don’t want to give the psychological edge to their competition. Academics can fall into this similar mindset. But here’s the rub: writing is a craft. A technical, genre-bound, and structurally complex craft. And it’s one most of us were never actually taught, and are certainly not comfortable performing inside a time pressed environment where we have substituted technique with time.

The gap in our skillset is an unknown unknown: as such we don’t recognise it as a fixable problem. We internalise it as a personal flaw.

And then the ego kicks in.

The Academic Ego: What It Protects (and Prevents)

The academic ego protects us from the embarrassment of not knowing. It tells us things like:

• “Everyone else is fine. You just need to focus more.”

• “This isn’t a skills issue — you’re just lazy or disorganised.”

• “If you ask for help, you’ll lose credibility.”

This mindset is understandable. Academia is structured around performance — and performance demands polish. We are rewarded for what looks effortless, not what required rebuilding our entire process behind the scenes.

But the cost of this ego-protection is high. It keeps us stuck. It erodes our confidence. And it prevents us from getting the targeted help that would allow us to flourish.

Writing Is Not Supposed to Be Easy — But It Is Learnable

Here’s the truth I wish more scholars could hear early in their careers:

Struggling to write consistently is not a reflection of your intelligence, talent, or commitment. It’s a sign that something in your process needs to change . But to get there, you have to move past the ego. You have to be willing to say:

“There’s something here I don’t yet know how to do or I could do it better.”

That small admission opens the door to exponential growth. Because when you approach writing as a craft — one that can be broken down, studied, and rebuilt — you shift from seeing yourself as the problem to seeing your system as the problem. And systems can be fixed.

The Real Professionalism: Admitting and Addressing the Gaps

Ironically, the most professionally mature thing an academic can do is admit what they don’t know and take deliberate steps to close that gap.

That’s not weakness. That’s mastery in the making.

What makes a journal article transformative?

Last week I talked about how to create a 4* REF journal article and what the component parts were. This week I want to unpack in a little more detail the idea of originality, which is usually the thing thats scuppers many ECR and mid-career academics from claiming the 4* status.

First it sounds undoable the way it is framed in the REF: to remind you, the REF fashions 4* works as:

"4* = Quality that is world-leading in terms of originality, significance, and rigour."

We read “world-leading in originality” and immediately think:

Well that’s not me. I’m not Einstein. I’m not rewriting the field.

And you know what? You're right, you’re probably not. But here’s the thing: you don’t have to be. The REF language sounds like it's calling for revolutionary, once-in-a-generation research. But if we’re being practical - and we must be - we know that kind of paradigm-shifting work doesn't emerge on tidy 4-year cycles. Not unless someone’s hiding their time machine.

So what does REF actually mean by originality? Let’s break it down.

1. Originality Isn’t Invention — It’s Contribution

You don’t have to invent a new method or theory out of thin air. You do have to do something useful and new with what’s already there.

That could mean:

• Applying a theory in a novel context

• Synthesising existing debates in a way that unlocks fresh insight

• Proposing a new conceptual model that helps others see the issue more clearly

The key word here is contribution. You’re helping the field evolve. That’s original.

2. Originality Is About Position

You don’t need to be on a pedestal looking down at your field. You need to be in it, showing that you understand the current conversation — and that your work shifts it meaningfully.

Ask yourself:

• What debates is my article entering?

• What does it move forward?

• What can no one say again once they’ve read it?

If you can answer that last one confidently — you’re likely in 4* territory.

3. Originality Has to Be identifiable

Here’s where many scholars unintentionally undercut themselves: they do original work, but they bury the lede. REF panels are not detectives. They won’t hunt for your originality buried on page 17. Neither will the article reviewer. So:

• Don’t be coy about your contribution.

• Don’t save the “so what?” for the final paragraph (DISASTER).

• Say early, clearly, and confidently: Here’s the original move this paper makes.

It doesn’t have to be arrogant. But it does have to be visible.

4. Originality Looks Different in Different Disciplines

In some fields, originality means a new dataset or analytical technique, but not just the presentation of it. The ‘so what’ still counts. In others, it’s a fresh conceptual lens, or a reframing of long-standing problems so we can solve them differently. The point is: REF does not expect one uniform definition of originality. But it does expect that your work pushes the conversation forward.

So instead of asking “Is this ground-breaking?” Ask: “Who is this useful to, and how does it move their thinking?”

You Are Already Doing Original Work, You’re Just Not Framing It That Way

I see this all the time in my programme, Master Journal Article Writing. Brilliant researchers doing powerful work — but not naming their contribution, not positioning it, not claiming the originality already embedded in their thinking. Being afraid to claim their contribution, own the intellectual space they have created. They will go so far: build a new model, build a new theoretical insight and then - forgive the analogy - present it like my Cat brings a dead mouse to me - as an unsolicited gift, a bit mangled, and not something I can use.

Don’t just present the new thing but tell me what this enables us to do, solve, think differently about and why.

You don’t need better ideas — you need to learn how to write your ideas better.

That means clarity. Structure. Knowing how to frame your work for REF-recognised journals. And yes, that can be learned. I help individuals and universities push staff contributions to the top level, by helping scholars know what it looks like inside their own particular publication. If you’re ready to go from quiet, hidden originality to REF-ready contribution, that’s exactly what we do inside Master Journal Article Writing.

You bring the research. I’ll teach you how to shape it, write it, and publish it at the level your career deserves.

→ Applications are open now.
Let’s make your next article a 4*.