The tyranny of email

Email: It sucks (time)

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

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

Why is it this way?

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

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

Controlling Email

Unlike time, you can control your email.

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

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

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

Email is tyrannical. It is time to revolt.

I can't find time to write

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

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

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

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

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

Then, move onto your next task.

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

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

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

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

Losing your confidence as a writer

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

Reasons: You, or someone else.

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

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

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

Fixing it

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

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

Small steps forward

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

Getting back to writing

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

First Principles

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

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

Take a hard look at reality

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

Writing every day that is not a vacation day

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

Dramatically lower your expectations

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

Take control

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

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

Reflect and remember

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

Now, make some decisions.

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

Remember.

Then decide to do things differently.

How to make time for reading as an academic

This is another blog post in response to a reader request, and you can tell that by the title they supplied - here at Academic Coach, we don’t believe you ‘make time’, ‘find time’, or ‘manage time’. Time is immutable. But in the spirit of the request, I think I get to the nub of it here.

Academic reading

One of the most difficult things to get right as an academic is seeing ‘reading’ as your job, and consequently, scheduling time for it. Reading is of course an integral part of your job without which you can neither teach nor research, nor do service. But how do you find a balance between all the reading you have to get done. In other words, when to ditch what, or how to prioritise?

Different types of reading

There are a lot of different types of reading to get through in any one academic day (I’m not counting emails here).

Teaching related reading:

• reading essays to grade, and reading teaching related material to prepare for class.

• reading student work for continuous feedback such as PhD and master’s dissertation students (not ditchable but time spent doing it is elastic and within your control)

Internal service reading:

• Committee paperwork, Boards of Study paperwork, departmental memos and instructions, policies, guidelines and a plethora of bureaucratic nonsense

• Reading to review colleagues’ work for feedback, mentoring, REF review reading (at your discretion and on your timetable)

External service reading:

• Reading to enable review of articles, book proposals, book manuscripts, grant applications

• Reading submissions for conference calls, workshops and in preparation for chairing panels (ditchable in the sense of don’t take it on)

Research Reading -Required

• Reading that you need to do in order to carry out research - books, papers, chapters, articles, primary and secondary literature, and a plethora of other source material

• Instructions for filling in journal submissions, article guidelines, grant submissions

Time constraints

Of all the things you do as an academic, reading is one of the most time consuming activities, yet how many of us schedule time in our diary to read? How many of you have that entry in your diary - not many, I’m betting. Reading for research requires what Cal Newport calls ‘Deep Work’: concentration and long periods of it. Yet, as we are pulled from pillar to post, the idea of scheduling a diary entry to ‘read’ seems laughable. The truth is though we MUST read to do most of our job, and we don’t have the luxury of being able to research without reading. So whilst some reading is indeed optional or can be put on the long finger, some cannot.

Finding the balance

So how do you find a balance? You can see from the list above what is discretionary and what is not, what involves other peoples’ deadlines and what does not. So first things first. Schedule your own reading for research. You should have scheduled time for teaching prep already. Internal service reading should be allocated into your admin slot if it is core to your role, put in a folder for ‘later’ or ditched altogether. This prompts feelings of guilt and all the things, but tough. You don’t have inexhaustible time.

What about reading colleagues work for feedback? Well, if you have a trusted circle (they read yours) you should have an explicit understanding that you will return that work in x days/week with comments, and schedule that task - this is reciprocal help and you both need it. If it is one way traffic - get a new circle. There is not the time to be the only one everyone comes to in the department and serious writers will understand this. If you are somebody’s mentor, this is part of your core role as a mentor, and this should be prioritised alongside your own research.

External service reading is purely discretional, so if you do take it on, do it swiftly. Do not agree to peer review and then hold some poor author hostage for 8 months because this was not a priority for you. If you cannot do it within one month (by this I mean identify a two hour slot in your diary to complete the task within the next 28 days) don’t take it on. No-one is making you. A good rule of thumb is to review 2 pieces for every article you submit within 1 year. When viewed through this lens, you are providing a service to colleagues which is in line to the service you expect to receive in return. It is not too onerous.

The point is to remember that reading is time-consuming and takes up a large part of your job, so you need to schedule time to do it.

Motivation and academic writing

Today I want to talk about motivation and why it is key to successful academic writing. Without motivation, writing happens in a sea of misery. If we are miserable about writing, we don’t want to do it and it is a vicious spiral all the way to oblivion. It is not impossible to write when motivation is either missing or low, but it is not a happy writing experience. We have all written when motivation is absent: in a PhD, doing an R&R, writing a grant proposal because our metrics require it rather than because we care about the research itself. Low motivation isn’t fatal to writing, but it is fatal to happy writing.

The motivation - procrastination mash up

Many people mistake a lack of motivation for procrastination, and don’t recognise the qualitative difference between the two. Procrastination is what happens when we avoid doing something. We may well be motivated to achieve this thing ultimately, but we don’t fancy doing it right now, or soon. That is procrastination. We accept ultimately we ought to be doing it, and we certainly want the end result of having done it, but we would rather clean the toilet bowl first. That is procrastination. At the heart of procrastination there lies many things - but a lack of motivation isn’t one of them.

A lack of motivation means you don’t want to do the thing, and you don’t really care anymore about the consequences (in the short term) of not doing it. It is an infinitely more negative space to occupy and it won’t go away when the house is sparkling clean.

Motivation is not accountability

Motivation is often mistaken for accountability in a lot of writing related advice: it might, for example, be treated as synonymous with writing groups or writing retreats. These types of solutions to unhappy writing are methods of writing, not motivation to write. Accountability through writing groups ensures you show up to write. Motivation comes before this - you are already motivated if you put these mechanisms in place.

Motivation - intrinsic and extrinsic

Why do you write? 'Because it’s my job'. True. But this is not enough to get us through the dark night of the soul when things are hard, because consequences of not writing are very far in the future (sometimes decades) and quite diffuse. This is in any case an extrinsic (negative) motivation (fear of one day being fired). These are negative motivations because you cannot control them. They do not hold sway for long.

You may write because you want to get past probation; get promoted or tenure; have a burning desire to be submitted to the REF (or fear the consequences of not being submitted); want to be the shining star of the impact case study; want respect of your friends, enemies, colleagues and complete strangers.

All of these are a mixture of 'hoop jumping' and of being considered successful by people whom we have no control over (ego). None of these are wrong: why we write is intensely personal and can depend on your career stage and personality / personal and financial circumstances.

Later on in your career, each of these (extrinsic, negative) motivations start to diminish. You have by then achieved a degree of respect as a scholar (your ego is somewhat satisfied); you are a professor or have reached the stage at which you are personally happy to stay so promotion no longer motivates; you have probably been through enough REFs to know none of that is in your control and cannot motivate you. If you don't show up to that conference and give that paper - well, shit happens, you have discovered this by now. If you are six months late on a book, or book chapter (and sometimes abandon a book altogether) there is very little consequence. So then what? Then what?

ACCENTUATE THE POSITIVE

You need a raft of positive motivations to keep you afloat that are not based on threat or ego alone because when you don't want to show up to write, when you don’t want to show up to the sessions you have scheduled, something must keep you going. Something positive, or it becomes very difficult to keeping showing up for yourself without some outside moderator of your behaviour. And we don't have one.

Often people motivate themselves by working collaboratively with others (so you push each other through the tough times); or they find joy in actually getting out into the world of empirical discovery; or (common for me) they have something they just have to say because everyone else is wrong about X. They want to (and can) make a positive contribution to a field and change policy, the scholarship, contribute new methods of doing things that just excite them on an intellectual level. There are probably many more positive motivations you can identify for yourself.

But it is important that you know why you are writing. Try to identify something positive that you can control (hint: you cannot control other people's judgment, including REF, promotion, or journal editors or grant bodies accepting your paper or proposal). Stick these to your computer to remind you: why am I doing this?

The motivation - energy (Youth) level symbiosis

We tend to think of motivation as a static state or thing. I am motivated to do this, and I am not motivated to do that. And we also think that we remain in this binary state at a steady level, but this just isn’t true. Motivation levels wax and wane in response to the ebbs and flows of our career, and it ebbs and flows in response to any particular writing project we undertake, and let’s face it, in response to the ebbs and flow of life, and where we are in it.

Let’s take a book for example. At the beginning we are super motivated: we do a book proposal, we love the idea, and we get the contract. The initial stages of research are still exciting, but as we move further into the project, and things gets difficult, our motivation starts to ebb away. When we come to the middle, we are spent, yet there are miles to go. Motivation may desert use, or at least it feels that way, yet we are committed to completion. This is where we need to connect our motivation (or lack thereof) to our energy levels more generally.

A universal truth we can all agree on is that: bad sleep + bad diet + no exercise = low energy. At least if you are over 30 years old. And this age factor is relevant, and something it is hard to make your 30 year old self understand: you will not feel this effervescent sense of wellness and go-getterness forever. Yet in a cruel twist of fate your 30 year old self simply cannot comprehend of feeling any other way than you do now [ah but you will learn my fleet footed friend <laughs manically> you will learn]. I digress. My point is motivation to write is often easy to find when you are young(er) - you have many less life distractions, and if you are an academic, it is common to find people putting off life distractions (eg kids) until much later still (yes I am speaking in generalisations). Your energy levels are just HIGH. Motivation can be everywhere, intrinsic and extrinsic alike - it is a veritable buffet of motivational snacks.

Later though, things might get tough. Further into your career, having hit many of the extrinsic targets that motivated your writing originally, you begin to look more towards intrinsic motivations to keep you going…and you find the well has run dry.

Restocking the motivation well

Just like how we restock our energy levels through good sleep, diet and exercise, we need to do the same in relation to motivation. It is not in endless supply and when you have drawn down on it for a long time, it will run out without proper care-taking. Many times we don’t even notice this is happening, and we think we are just procrastinating.

I think this is especially hard now in isolation. We are missing the corridor conversations, intellectual exchanges, staff seminars and in person conferences that puts motivation back in the well. The chance exchange of comments or ideas that spark some creativity in our thinking is hard to recreate over Zoom.

The first step to restocking the well is noticing it is empty. It is not procrastination: it is something more fundamental, yet eminently fixable. For me, conversations with people in my research area become absolutely essential to restock that cupboard. Giving a paper, hearing comments (even if over Zoom). Perhaps a Zoom reading group to discuss new publications in your area. I find myself fixated on Twitter - not for doom scrolling - but for intellectual exchange of people in my research areas, like a woman in the writing desert searching for an oasis. Whatever activity restocks your creative well - and it might be baking - make sure you make time for that. Invest time in thinking about how you replenish motivation even in these direst of days and you will be rewarded ten-fold.

When motivation is low, we don’t always recognise we have hit rock bottom, and we just keep digging hoping to hit another spring but instead, we hit the molten core and burn out. This is not the time to start digging further in, it is time to restock. We need to do this ahead of hitting rock bottom and as often as we can.

How to edit your writing

I have these little mantras here at Academic Coach and this is one of them: write without fear, edit without mercy. Write quick, edit slow.

What is editing?

Let’s start with the basics. Editing is the process of re-sculpting your rough text into something that resembles an intellectual contribution. You can engage in large scale editing (macro, think structural issues) or small scale editing (micro, think sentence construction and paragraphs) and these serve distinct purposes in finalising your text.

Some writers don’t recognise editing as a distinct stage in the writing process because they are engaged in this process from the very first sentence (perfectionists). Others don’t recognise it because they have no discernible drafting process at all: writing, reading, researching, editing and polishing text is one unholy jumbled mess that is circular, unstructured and totally inefficient. Time ebbs away when we think of editing in these terms. ‘Writing’, or (properly speaking) producing a piece of finished research, becomes an interminable nightmare.

Why is editing painful?*

It is painful because if done at the correct time in your drafting process it forces you to confront reality, and that is despite your best heroic efforts the text still isn’t working. You might have come to this realisation yourself, or (more likely) you have come to this realisation because you have received feedback (criticism). Either way, this reality is inherently painful. Re-working the text is not re-working the idea necessarily and this is another reason that many lament editing. It starts to feel like this writing malarky is less Hemingway and his muse(s) and is more technical (mechanical) in nature. Less Leonardo da Vinci, and more spray painting the basement.** This can horrify the academic soul.

The joy of editing

I like editing. You are past the blank page. The hard (research) work is usually done and the joyous part of the writing process truly begins. It is here that you move from Frankenstein’s monster, to something that is quite well put together. It starts to flow. It starts to work as a piece of intellectual contribution. It stops lurching from one thought to another and starts to flow. Most importantly, it starts to make sense to someone other than you.

The guiding principle

This is the foundation of editing. It is no longer about you. It is no longer about your vision, your understanding, what you think is good and right and logical. It is about the reader. The reader! You have moved from it’s all about me to it isn’t about me at all. Regardless of what my internal narrator thinks is awesome and simple and clear, I now have to think about how someone else might encounter my work. What will make sense to them? How will they understand it?

This requires a bit of intellectual gymnastics. Hence the pain (for some).

Good editing is about structure, flow and signposts. It concerns your audience and how they will receive it. It is not about you. Your creation has left the building, flown the nest and is about to try and make its way in the world. Editing helps it to be useful to others and make a contribution to a dialogue that exists outside of your head. Embrace it: set it free.

*actual title suggested by a reader

** Paul J Silvia, How to write a lot, describes writing in these mundane terms.

How to set realistic goals for academic writing

It is the time of year when most of us get out the ‘big board’ and endeavour to do some planning about our writing goals for the year ahead. Last week, I talked about the importance of reflection in the writing process before we begin planning, so that we might learn a few things about our behaviour, what went right and what didn’t last year.

So, now we are at the goal setting stage, how do we go about it?

what is a goal?

Let’s start with the basics. A goal is something you intend to work towards, an idea or thing you intend to achieve. You decide that this is the ‘thing’ you want to make happen, and then make a plan in order to make that idea a reality. So in academic writing terms, a goal is a specific grant, specific book chapter, specific journal article, specific book that you want to complete. Note, I say specific. A goal cannot be ‘write 4 articles’. It is too vague to action - a goal is ‘write article X for journal X’. That is a goal.

What is realistic?

Goals need to be realistic. There are two mindsets in play when goal setting. Aim high, and be happy with what you achieve. Aim low, and achieve everything.

Aim high, and whatever you achieve might be more than if you had kept your sights low. Aim for the stars and all that. This really works for many people: having ambitious goals that will stretch you is a way to motivate and lift your performance. These still have to be realistic for you at your career stage - but what does this mean?

I am not referencing time here. I am not referencing how much teaching you have vis a vis X member of staff to whom you regularly compare yourself. I’m referencing experience and track record and so on, and also your motivation. So, don’t set a goal to apply for a €10 million grant in an area you have no track record in, or no track record in winning grants for example. This is not realistic. Otherwise, dream big!

People who adopt the aim high mindset are OK with failure. If they don’t achieve everything on their list, they are not wounded beyond all measure, they are not wracked with imposter syndrome, and they are not going to focus on the one thing they didn’t do. Rather they will focus on all that they achieved.

The other type of mindset is one that aims lower, but achieves everything on the list. This means you won’t be faced with any kind of failure, and you can build confidence in your ability to set realistic goals and execute them. There is nothing wrong with this approach. If you are the kind of person who focuses on the one thing that didn’t come off, make your goals something you can absolutely without doubt achieve. Keep it small, and manageable, yet more than ‘let’s see what happens’ (this is not goal setting). What is achievable for you depends on your life, your discipline, single or multi-authored and so on.

Break it down into priorities and tasks

Once your goals are settled, you need to break them down into tasks, and prioritise completing those tasks on a week by week basis. I talk about this a lot, because it is the single thing that academics do not do as a matter of routine. They set goals, but no concrete action plan is in place to achieve them. You can read here about priorities and tasks.

Set deadlines

You must set a deadline for any of this to work. Set a goal, and at the same time, set a deadline. Avoiding setting a deadline is a little bit like admitting you have no real plan to achieve that goal - a goal without a deadline is a wish.

Backward map

Once you have your goal, your deadline, your tasks and priorities, you can backward map in your diary - from the deadline to today - what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. Assign diary slots to your tasks, and make sure you have prioritised correctly.

This is how we set realistic goals for the coming writing year! Good luck!

New Year, new writing resolutions?

It’s that time of year where we start to think about what we want to achieve in our writing in the coming year, and when we might like to plan our goals moving forward.

But wait. Before we move forward it is really important to take a moment to reflect on what happened in 2020. Academics really suck at reviewing the things they did - they want to move on and on and on to the next big thing. No celebration, no reflection, and very little joy is taken in actually achieving things.

Is that the sound of the apocalypse?

2020 was…quite a year. It probably felt like a car crash in slow motion on repeat, and I can understand why you just want to wipe that slate clean and move forward and pretend that all that <gestures all around> is, if not over, not something you care to dwell on. As someone who managed to get cancer in the middle of a global pandemic, boy, do I understand that urge only too well.

Nonetheless it is important to think about what else happened. What, even in the midst of a global pandemic and its associated breakdown of how we work and live, might you have achieved be it personal or professional? (Survival is a listable achievement here).

Moving your mindset

I’m hoping that when you look back at 2020, despite everything, you can pick out some things you achieved that you never thought you could. If someone had said to you, in 2019, I’m going to throw a global pandemic in next year - this will mean you are too afraid to leave your house and you will simultaneously home school and do your work - but you will still manage to do x or y you would have laughed in their face. Absurd!

But somehow, someway, you managed.

Moving from deficiency to sufficiency

When you begin to think about the year ahead, I want you to do so from the perspective of having everything you need. From being everything you need to be. From the perspective of there being enough time, enough space, enough understanding and empathy to set realistic goals and then to achieve them. I know that is a big ask, I really do. But just try it for a second.

Along the way, you have probably achieved some amazing things in the last 12 months in the face of unimaginable disruption. I’m sure your writing plans took something of a hit, and maybe you didn’t hit the dizzying heights of your own predictions back in the before time, in January 2020. Radical adjustment of life is to be expected.

Taking time to appreciate the things you did get done is important. But also moving your mindset, from one that laments all you lack, to one that celebrates all you have, is an incredibly powerful motivating force. It celebrates your resilience, and your achievements, and tethers that appreciation to your lived experience.

On a practical note, it can help you set more realistic goals for the coming year where all that will still be going on in some fashion or another for much of the year. You will have managed to get things done you could never have imagined - so take a moment, before launching into the new year’s planning, to celebrate what went right.

You are still here for one, more or less intact. That is a thing worth celebrating all on its own.

What is an Academic Coach for?

There is something of a curiosity around people who leave a full-time, tenured, super secure position at a leading research focused institution at the peak of their career. Especially people who are still publishing, still writing, still actively engaged in research and for all intents and purposes are behaving as though they are an academic within an institution and, more importantly, still have a mighty fine relationship with their previous employer. That is me - I am a curiosity - perhaps not to close friends and colleagues who know me well, but I imagine those colleagues who are less close looking in wondering…what happened there! Leaving academia, or an academic institution, is considered shameful by other academics - an abdication of a core identity - and insane by those who are striving against the odds to obtain such a position.

Many people leave academia for all kinds of reasons. I am not typical. I have no hard feelings, I really loved my job, my colleagues and my academic life. Yet, I always knew there were other things in this life I could do, and wanted to do - alongside doing research - that I was not granted time for within a University structure. And that is what I do now.

What kind of an Academic Coach am I?

There are of course many coaching styles and approaches out there: executive coaches, life coaches, and so on. I am speaking about what I do. First, yes, I have undertaken training to be a coach: executive coaching, management coaching and so on. I have done various courses. I have also undertaken specialist training to support clients with dyslexia, and I will continue to train in all sorts of different ways I am sure. As a previous appraiser of mine was wont to comment ‘you sure do like going on a lot of courses, don’t you?’. Yes, I do! I like to learn things.

I have trained in coaching, but I am not the kind of coach who is going to ask you to colour in your wheel of life - that is just not my bag. I understand the principles and models of coaching - T-GROW, STEPPA, ACHIEVE, OSCAR and all that jazz, and I employ them as is appropriate. My courses and coaching is based on the latest research as well as my experience as an academic. But I am above all things pragmatic. So many years in academia has wedded me to research-based training and mentoring, but also ‘outcomes’.

What I do works.

I want to help you publish that book, get that promotion, win that best presenter title, get your paper published, change your attitude to, and relationship with, writing. Help you to rediscover your writing mojo. As the tag line says, I want to help you become a happier writer.* That is the kind of coach I am.

What kinds of things do I do as a Coach?

Besides training in coaching, I have a lot of experience in academia which generic executive / life coaches do not have. That is not to say these type of coaches cannot help you in other ways - each type of coach does something rather unique and different. I see many people without experience of ever having worked a full time permanent role in an academic institution setting up as academic coaches, which I find peculiar to say the least. There is a lot of tacit knowledge gained through long years of experience that outsiders will never possess and research does not necessarily convey. The unwritten rules, and how best to navigate them, is not taught on generic coaching courses.

My work covers a gamut of things: it is focused on writing, becoming a consistent, productive and happy writer. It enables you to master academic writing techniques so there is more time for life. Various programmes tackle different and specific challenges, and the Membership provides holistic training with that elusive yet critical aspect of academic writing - accountability. Besides these programmes, I offer 1-1 coaching for some clients - to help with a specific paper, with writing a monograph, with promotion forms, job applications, and R&Rs. I provide career mentoring through the Elevate Programme. I help with drafting grant applications. I work with people who, for whatever reason, find writing a challenge for practical or emotional reasons. I help them to work out a way of writing that works for them. I provide accountability, I help with planning and organisation. I provide mentoring for more junior academics who through me, have access to all the tacit knowledge it took me 17 years to accumulate, so they don’t need to stumble around in the dark making bad decisions. I am a shortcut, a leg up. I am a safe space where you can admit the unsayable. There is little I have not heard.

Coaching can be a short term intervention, or a long term partnership. I can provide a space to reflect, resources to use, course materials to walk you through all manor of skills or pragmatic editing of text. We co-design our sessions so you can get exactly what you need.

Why am I an Academic Coach?

I love mentoring. I love helping people in ways that I was never helped. I like to make other peoples’ experience of academia easier than mine. I don’t think junior colleagues / PhD students should suffer just because I did. I like to see other people have success, and if I can play some small role in helping them to achieve that, I am both honoured and delighted to have done so. This suits who I am as a person.

Coaching speaks to my core values, and what better reason is there to do the job that I do now? For along time after leaving academia, I still researched, and published, and advised government bodies. But coaching is my full time focus now. It gives me something that none of that does - a sense of joy in watching other people reach their potential and go beyond anything they thought themselves capable of.

*These are just some examples of things I have helped clients achieve through my coaching. You will find me credited in papers and books and all kinds of things.

Managing expectations of yourself as a writer

This blog comes as a request from readers, and again, not one I would have thought to do on my own. I want to say this is not addressed to one particular individual, because this does come up a lot in various ways, from various different requests. However, the phrasing of this particular question caught my eye.

As a writing coach (and an academic who writes a lot) this thought would never have crossed my mind. The request was actually phrased as: ‘managing expectations of yourself as a writer in the context of other obligations in your academic job’.

My immediate response to this is that I can read this question in two ways.

Unrealistic ambitions?

The first way to interpret this is: my expectations of what I can achieve in my writing are all out of whack with reality. I am expecting myself to get a €10m grant, write a book and publish 7 solo articles in one year. And if that is the case, I am overjoyed at your ambition, and I can happily refer you to my previous blogs about writing in your reality, managing a publication pipeline and why planning is essential. Some time management and a bump with reality should sort that out in no time. Happy days! As those awful posters on the wall of my workplace used to say: you asked, we answered!

The second way to understand this question though is, to me, infinitely more depressing.

Teaching is all I care about

How do I manage my expectations of myself as a writer when I have so many (more important/other) things to do?

There is something underlying this statement that is unsaid. And that is that writing isn’t a priority, it just isn’t as important as teaching. Writing is just one thing on a long list of things I have to do in any given week/term/year and I’m not certain I can fit it in, and so, how can I lower my expectations of myself i.e. stop feeling the guilt of not writing or being disappointed in myself that I can’t get it done? If you genuinely feel that teaching is all you care about, the solution is to have a job that only has a teaching element to it. If this is not how you really feel, let me, as the song says, flip reverse it.

You are a writer

What if I asked you this? How can you manage your expectations of yourself as a teacher in the context of your writing obligations in your academic job? Oooooooh.

Have a think. Let that just roll around in your head for a while. Let it percolate. Let it breathe. You are a writer. You research. You read, for a living. That is what you do. You also teach. You fill out lots of forms. You manage budgets and book rooms. But you are a writer: this is actually what you get paid to do.

How does that sound? Do you feel called out and confronted? That is what I am going for.

I spend 10 weeks (it is that long for this sole reason) training people out of the mindset that they are teachers who write on the side, rather than academics whose job it is to write and teach. That they are paid for both, and must do both in their working week. Yes, it is possible. Yes there are lots of tips, tricks and hacks, but also solid research that supports my course materials. It is possible, and people do it. I did it. I trained colleagues to do it. I now coach other people so they can do it.

It is not easy. It requires discipline and just a teeny, tiny bit of brain re-engineering via repeated engagement with my online videos and materials.

This is such a wild idea for some people it takes repeated run throughs of my course for it to really bed in. People actually start to miss my video missives (rants? brainwashing? serious talking to?). It is the reason that once you are enrolled, you are in for life - you just keep on (for free) because it takes a while to get used to the idea.

You manage your expectations of yourself by knowing who you are and what your priorities are, and you plan your schedule accordingly. Not what you think they ought to be, or what tends to happen. Is this easy: no! It is easy to be overtaken by events, not commit, not stick to your word. It is hard to stay focused. Your expectations must be realistic, for you, in your life and coaching can help you figure those things out. But after that, it is a mindset.

Happily that is all in your control.

How to deal with feedback

*or what to do with a broken soul. This one’s for you!

This is a common problem for academics. Feedback in all its forms, from colleagues, from friends and family, from anonymous reviewers and editors, and of course, Reviewer 2, can be brutal. Academics can be fragile when it comes to receiving critique of their writing. Of course, we merrily criticise students’ work all the time and when they are broken, we are like: ‘get on with it’!

It is always so much worse when it happens to us. Of course.

We need feedback

Whilst this might seem a tad obvious, it is worth breaking this down a little. Feedback is provided when work is voluntarily handed over to be judged. When you press submit, you are inviting a critique of your work; this is what pushes your ideas and your communication of those ideas forward. We can’t do this alone and in a vacuum: we must have the input of others. Academia is a profession where you never do anything at all without it being criticised, be it teaching, research or administration. It is why a lot of people find solace in meetings - it is about the one place where criticism of your performance takes a break (mostly).

This never ending onslaught of criticism can grind you down, for sure. Hence, why academics are so prickly about their writing.

Recognising the difference between feedback and other stuff

Genuine feedback seeks to engage with your ideas. It seeks to see things from your point of view, and endeavours to push you to do better by suggesting where you might improve the text or the ideas so they can shine. When you see this kind of feedback, grab it, embrace it, even when you feel your hackles rise. This is just your ego talking, and it is not helpful.

Feedback might not, though, be dressed as gushing praise, and might initially make you feel a bit dense and demoralised. In my experience even the most egregious attacks on our intelligence, dressed up as feedback, contains within it in a kernel of truth. A nugget. A snippet of something that might be useful if only we could see it through our tears. Even the ‘newspaper editorial’ guy had some useful stuff to say before he slipped sidelong into his own personality vacuum.

Anyway, as we all know, there are many axes to grind in academia and occasionally someone decides to grind their axe on you. On your very writer’s soul. It is not remotely fair. I know this.

What about when you get rejected?

There is no two ways about it: this sucks. Not even being given a chance to remedy the situation is quite annoying. Worse if it gets rejected after major revisions (this should not happen as often as it does, and it is often down to totally new reviewers). Look, sometimes we just are not in the right knitting circles for that journal. Sometimes they just didn’t get it; it is a solid paper for the right audience. We must pick ourselves up and resubmit somewhere else the very next day. Don’t sit on it, don’t agonise, just change the style and re-submit. Publishing is a numbers game these days, and the key is to not give up. So what if it takes 10 submissions, just keep batting that thing back till it sticks.

Learn something

We all like to learn. It is why we became academics. Feedback is an opportunity to learn and we should grab it. Of course, it might sting for a few days, and by all means have a sulk. Call them names. Put it in the drawer for a day (or two, not more). But then take it back out with clear eyes, and find that kernel of helpful advice within it. It won’t all be helpful. Maybe not even most of it. But some of it will be helpful. Make a list in a table of the comments, rephrased in your words, and then slowly and surely work your way down the list in order to improve your piece.

You may not think it improves your piece, and this is just somebody’s hobby horse that you have to ride to get it published. So be it. Don’t get precious; this is how the journal article game is played. Reviewers want to be acknowledged and heard, so absolutely address every (meaningful comment) using a table. Any defamatory language will naturally not have made it into your table. Don’t sweat it. Once it is not in your table, it is like it never existed in the first place. Then tabula rasa. Move on.

How to plan your writing week: goals, priorities, and tasks

Academic Coach is a planning fanatic, because planning works. It just does. It works. It moves you from A-Z because you know where (and what) A is, and you know where (and what) Z is. 

I have more blogs on planning than on any other topic because (a) it works and (b) I still feel there is a lot of resistance to serious planning. Most academics tend to, let’s be honest, lurch and stumble through the teaching term, hanging on with their bare fingernails for the end, only to be faced an avalanche of grading the minute teaching stops.

Academics are notoriously pushed for time due to many reasons which we need not rehearse here. The purpose of this blog is to try and help you to understand the fundamentals of planning. I’ve talked about planning a publication pipeline, what goes in it, how you understand how long things take you, and planning in the midst of Covid, but I have not broken down planning into the specifics steps and concepts that you need to get to grips with.

 Scheduling your week

One of the first things I get coaching clients to do is to have a proper online schedule. Yes, you can also have a paper diary, but an online one is essential. The reason for this is the detail an online diary allows you to visualise. You can colour code, you can write detailed notes. I ask clients to programme in all of their non-negotiable commitments (work and life) each week. Then we talk about what non-negotiable means. Sometimes this is straightforward and sometimes a momentous battle of wills commences. Eventually, when the dust settles, I ask them to weed out things that are not really non-negotiable, but are more in the genre of ‘someone else expects this’, or ‘I’ve always done this (so I always will)’, or ‘FOMO’, or ‘I might upset people’. Once the schedule is set, we go about filling the diary with writing, reading, and note taking slots that are feasible and realistic for that particular person. Everyone is different, because everyone’s life is different. We fill it with breaks and rest periods. We make it as realistic as we can. Often I end up reining in clients who enthusiastically pencil in 8 hours straight research: not realistic if we want to stay healthy.

This is pretty straightforward stuff (getting people to stick to it, not so much, hence the coaching). But then we start to talk about how we are going to fill those slots and a blank expression arrives. Now we have to talk about goals and priorities and tasks, and the difference between the three.

Goals

Goals are aspirations, or big picture end results (outcomes if you will) that you want to achieve. Goals are your long term objectives. You want to submit a promotion application, submit a grant proposal, submit my book for a prize, submit 4 journal articles this year and so on. These are goals. Your goals are best planned on a long term basis – quarterly and yearly (sub goals and main goal). These need to be realistic for you, because if they are too aspirational (i’d like to win the lottery) you will repeatedly fail and this is not good for your writing confidence. Too easy and there is little point in setting a goal. Notice I didn't write ‘win a grant’. That is not in your gift or control, so don’t set up goals you alone cannot achieve.

When you are breaking down your writing projects, you can do so by setting mini-goals if you will - quarterly, monthly, weekly. These should be discrete elements that take you to the big goal at the end of the year.

Priorities

Priorities, on the other hand, start to narrow down which goals have more importance (a ranking function if you will), and what concrete steps you need to take (and which concrete steps should be prioritised) in order to move towards the bigger picture goal. It is most effective if you plan these in weekly segments – anything longer than that, and you soon find your weeks are spent doing things that are in fact not furthering your progress towards your goal. You weekly priorities should amount, when added together, to the steps you must take to hit your weekly mini-goal.

Tasks

Tasks are the discrete things you need to do daily in order to meet your priorities each week. These should be broken down into as much detail and as small a task as possible because they should be able to fit around your other non-negotiable commitments.

Whilst this appears quite straightforward, academics are usually great with goals, but not so much with prioritisation or making task lists. The reason for this: fear and reality. This provokes a very hard look at life as it really is, rather than what we would like it to be and some people are more willing to do this than others.

As we lurch towards to the end of [gestures vaguely to the *outside*] all this year has brought us, it might be time to think about how we are going to move forward towards our goals come the new calendar year. To meet our horizons, we have to see the path the get there.

Writing accountability through social writing

I wanted to write a post to mark the Academic Writing Month of November (yes, it is a thing). I don’t know who decided this was a good month for writing. November is not a particularly auspicious month in the academic calendar. Perhaps it comes at a time where that first sting of term has (supposedly) died down, and we might turn our attention to all the writing projects we have been neglecting.

In any case, it is now that #Acwri comes alive, and things like NaNoWriMo (for novelists, but academics can use it too) get underway.

It is a good excuse for me to talk about my favourite writing subject - social writing - and give a shout out to my writing buddies (hello to Susannah and Marieke) without whom I am certain much less writing would have taken place in the last couple of years.

Why do people fear social writing?

First though, I must convince you on the efficacy of social writing. Alot of people work in (largely) sole author disciplines so by and large do not write with other people. Writing has been formulated as a solitary and private space where the small sparks of joy are enjoyed and the deluge of fear, doubt, shame, avoidance and procrastination are endured. Many academics (of a certain age) dismiss the possible benefits of social writing out of hand - they never learned to do it as a PhD, therefore, it can’t be real.

I know that doesn’t sound very much like a scholarly or evidenced based reaction. Nonetheless, I do encounter this kind of reaction in response to my coaching suggestion that social writing might just be the key to getting unstuck. It might be the first step in medicating the malady that ails them.

The reason for this out-of-hand rejection is simple; people want to keep their fear, shame and procrastinating habits private, because the overwhelming feeling they have in relation to writing is shame. I get it, I really do. But the only way out the other side is through. What you are doing isn’t working, so why not try something new.

Research shows it works

Regardless of scholarly discipline (science to humanities), research shows that academic productivity increases as a result of social writing. Social writing can be enacted in person (difficult now of course) and on-line. It can be done in physical or on-line writing retreats, writing workshops or informal (or formal) writing groups set up within departments, amongst colleagues, or can transcend departments, Universities and disciplines. My own social writing groups are across different countries, Universities and disciplines. The key is to try lots of different methods until you find the mix that works for you. I had a few brushes with social writing that really didn’t work for me but eventually I got there.

Why does it work

Social writing enables accountability, visibility and shared learning. It enables solidarity in the same struggle which no-one except another academic can really empathise with. It centres your writing in your academic life, and gives you the opportunity to talk about your on-going projects in a pragmatic fashion (today I am doing X to move my article forward). It provides an opportunity to make an appointment with your writing that involves other people: this means that you will show up. The shame of being a flake is weightier than the shame of not writing.

The key to all this is to find writing buddies that WILL show up and who, like you, prioritise their writing. These might not be your closest friends and allies, and in some ways, it is better if they are from outside your department because you will not be tempted to rant about the latest office debacle in a precious writing slot.

So, if you have never tried social writing before, do give it a whirl. It is the gift that keeps on giving.

Stopped writing? How to start again

Wow. It has been a tough few months. Many of us will have been hanging in there, particularly parents, waiting for the mythical day when children go back to school. That thought has probably sustained you, right up until they did actually go back to school, and then came back days later with a cough. And around and around you go.

Worse - on top of the into school, out of school Hokey Cokey - you were faced with the mother of all onslaughts: preparing on-line teaching. I’m sure some of you work for institutions that had this all organised well in advance of term starting (I mean, surely somebody did), but for the rest this term is starting to feel like a programme of torture. Between dealing with the technology, wondering whether you will literally survive in person teaching and supporting the isolated and bewildered student body and fearing for your own mental health, there is rarely a moment to sit back and breathe.

But just for now: breathe. Slowly. Take a moment.

What happens when you stop?

I want to talk about what happens when the hopes and dreams and coping mechanisms of the last few months start to falter, because that is sure to happen. Right now you might be in the white heat of it all, and are merely crawling through each day. I’m sure you had great hopes for your shiny new on-line all singing and all dancing teaching module, yet instead, you sit in your room staring at 400 blank black boxes wondering if anyone is out there. You created this thing of beauty in a frenzy pushing all other obligations aside, including writing.

There might be a sense around you that you have successfully pivoted - and somehow it is, in a sense, all over. You are done here. You have got used to it. You have become a teaching robot. The new normal. But it is anything but normal and don’t be moralised, brutalised or gaslit into thinking anything else.

At some point, whatever coping mechanisms you have developed to keep on pushing through will likely come to a crashing halt. And then what?

Rethink your goals and priorities

It is time for a serious rethink about your priorities and where exactly you spend your energies. It is time to re-think the publication plan, but not so much that you have nothing on it. The thing about writing is that it is both a joy and a time suck, a respite and an unbelievable pressure, the thing that gets put off and the thing where deadlines start to loom hard. Some of you may have re-set your expectations in the summer, only to have missed the mark (repeatedly) and piled on additional pressure now it is term time.

It is time to get real. But it is also time not to fall into the trap of saying ‘I have no time to write’. This isn’t true. It just isn’t. Writing can take 15 minutes. Everyone can find 15 minutes, but some of us just don’t want to. Cool. Own it. Just own it, and feel that rush of denial just slip out of your body. This is the first crucial step forward.

Writing is a habit, but not the fun kind. It has the inverse effect of most habits. When you break the writing habit, it is unbelievably difficult to start up again. When you have the writing habit, it is like being on a gentle down hill slope - you kick your little pebble along the ground without thinking about it too much. Break the habit, and you are Sisyphus pushing that boulder up the steepest of mountains. Then you think this is what writing is like, and you don’t much care for it. This gets hard wired into your brain - you begin dreading writing - and around we go. Denial. Fear. Avoidance. But that is not the truth of writing. Writing is only like this when you break the habit.

Identify your motivations

When things get tough on the writing front, the most important thing to re-centre is your motivation. Why do you write? What is it about your research that gets you up in the morning? I talk a lot on the course about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, the differences between the two, and that what really matters is that you can locate some motivation whatever its form. Be it instrumental (I need x publications to get promoted / a job) or more cerebral (I just have to tell the world about x), it doesn’t matter. Even if it’s ‘I need to keep this job’ that works too. Motivation comes first.

Start the habit

Starting writing again after a long halt is a bit like aversion therapy. Small, repeated exposures build up a tolerance. Don’t start in a rush or start big: ‘today I will start my paper’ is a sure way to fail. Start small: ‘today I will find my notes, read them, for 30 minutes’. Then ‘tomorrow I will open up a document and bullet point/ write headings for 15 minutes'. Slow and steady. Break your writing tasks down into 15 minute jobs. If necessary, do one 15 minute job a day until you start to lessen that fear reaction. Eventually you will build up the momentum you need to get to a 25 minute Pomodoro. A couple of these a day and you are back on the down hill slope, writing merrily without drama.

I made that sound easy, and it isn’t. It requires a concerted effort to change your mindset - that is where the real work is. After that, it is all down hill from there.

The Entrepreneur Academic

Today’s academia is much like being in the circus, except in this circus you are the ring master, fire eater, juggler, clown, acrobat, tight-rope walker and every other single act inside the tent. There is no support act. You are the main, and only event.

Here is a crude representation of the evolution of the academic job. In a galaxy far, far away, it looked like this:

I know this is a little simplistic but it was a reasonably simple job.

Alas, it has now morphed into this:

There are no more hours in the week than before. This is upsetting, I know. This is what academia looks like now. Yet, you are perplexed why it is so hard to find time for writing. Wonder no more. This is why.

And of these burgeoning responsibilities, what exactly have you been trained for? By now, most people have been trained to teach classes (though not-online). You have been trained in some aspects of research via your PhD. Everything else you have taught yourself. Every single thing.

You are already an entrepreneurial academic, albeit, not through any choice of yours.

This is not a vocation

I want to end this series of 9 blogs with a particularly challenging concept: academia is not a vocation.

You are not on the front lines (probably) battling Covid. No-one is clapping for you. Even the handful of academic scientists working on a vaccine like science for science I bet. Finding stuff out. Everything after is a bonus. 

Why is it important to recognise this? It is about creating balance in your life, and enabling you to set boundaries about what is and is not reasonable working hours. It is about being able to carve out time to do the various aspects of your job without sacrificing the rest of your life (health, family and friends) on the altar of academia.

Some academics bridle at being told it is not a vocation. It REALLY winds their clock and I’ve seen a lot of angry social media exchanges on this topic. I rarely use generational / class tropes, but forgive me, I am going to. The belief that academia is a vocation is particularly prevalent amongst a certain millennial-and-later generations, and I have to say it, folks from the middle classes more generally. Millennials and the after millennials (and the middle classes) have been brought up in a world where they believe work should be:

• (a) rewarding (on a personal level)

• (b) they should receive personal recognition of their greatness and be taken care of, nurtured and cherished by their employer

• (c) that work should be their passion.

There are outliers of course, and I personally know a few Gen Xer’s who need a reality check. Whilst these are lovely sentiments, they are just that. Sentiments.

I call bullshit here. This became a thing only to convince people to work for free and be enslaved by neoliberalism. Also it’s a thing that makes you feel important and special because I know we can all think of jobs that do not fulfil a, b and c and yet are critical to the functioning of society. The people that do those jobs are not inferior to you. 

Work is to there to pay you for your labour. It puts food on your table and a roof over your head. The minute it is unable to do this, you are engaged in charity. It is not work. When people use the phrase ‘vocation’ they mean working for free. You work for free, for nothing. There is a certain kind of self-indulgent bullshit in this narrative I cannot imagine my father, who worked down a mine, ever partaking in. 

This is not academia. Academia is for profit. Yes, you may enjoy some parts of your job, and that is wonderful. It’s still a job, and there is a lot of bullshit nobody enjoys in that job. You would not think working for Goldman Sachs was a vocation (trust me, I did, it wasn’t), and if anyone suggested it to you, you would laugh. They are for profit too. You probably don’t think working in Tesco’s is a vocation either, yet I think if recent times have taught us anything, it is a far more important job than yours. 

Academia is not special. It is a job. Nothing more, nothing less. When you frame academia through this lens, things look a little different. You may start to ask questions like ‘why am I working on Saturday to do the 30th open day this year when my contract states Mon-Fri 9-5?’. Why am I working evening and weekends and never taking my contractually entitled annual holiday? Why do I revel in busyness exchanges? Why do I not call in sick when I am in fact sick? Why am I checking my emails at all hours? Why do I allow myself to be routinely exploited, and then feel terrible about not meeting the norms of my exploitation?

It is not a vocation. It is a job for which you are paid. 

This is important to remember as in 2020/2021 all kinds of requests are going to be made of you that engage some kind of latent charity (vocation) instinct. They are not reasonable, humane, or your job.

Why I am saying this and making your feel bad? Because 2020/21 is going to be tough, and if you want to preserve your sanity and your writing and research career you need to start saying no to things otherwise you will have a mental or physical health crisis in the name of a vocation that does not exist. 

It is nice to like your job. But it is much better to have a life beyond it.

(If you are not being paid, please find a job that actually pays you. It is the very least your humanity demands for your labour – being an academic is not that great you should sacrifice your life trying to achieve it. It is a literal human right to be paid for your labour).

Changing gears in your writing practice

The purpose of the Academic Coach Writing Course is to build up writers who feel stuck, and writers who are not stuck but need better habits through a series of modules that gradually increases your writing time to solid blocks that are regularly scheduled. 

The psychology blocking many academic writers from being more productive and efficient is based on the one of the toughest writing myths to crack: ‘I can only write when I have big blocks of time’. Because big blocks of uninterrupted time rarely materialise, writers who believe this don’t write, or if they do write, it is gruelling through the night binge writing. And when sabbatical or other ‘big block’ opportunities do arise, they still don’t write as they are so out of practice writing has become a THING of fear and loathing. They cannot work without being 3 months over a deadline.

 Cracking this particular nut is hard work.

The course progresses from writing for a mere 30 minutes to longer periods (perhaps 2-3 hours). This is about bringing you into the writing habit, making it like the brushing your teeth habit. No fuss. No drama. We call this rhythmic writing, from Cal Newport’s book ‘Deep Work’. Writing is just a thing that, at a particular time of day, appears in your diary and you do. The aim, by the end of the course, is to move you from not writing, to writing regularly, to writing in fairly large regularly scheduled blocks. Once you become proficient at this, the course aims to move on from this type of rhythmic writing (regular scheduled slots) to so called journalistic writing – anytime, anywhere.

We look at other types of writing practices of course, what Newport calls bimodal scheduling (big blocks of writing and big blocks of non writing time) and monastic scheduling (the archetypal cabin the woods, or writing retreat). These two particular writing philosophies are generally not that practical, but it’s possible in the time of Covid 19, at least some element of monastic scheduling might be either necessary of attractive depending on your particular life circumstances.

The changed practices of HE in 2020/21 are going to pose a particular challenge to those writers who are welded to the ‘I can only write in large blocks’ myth. Even small blocks of time might be hard to come by. Practicing the art of journalistic writing will be crucial for moving projects forward. Dipping in and out of writing, 15 minutes here or there, will move your writing projects forward enormously, but this type of writing requires a massive mind shift and a writing practice that facilitates it.

If you’ve never done this before, it can sound rather fantastical, but with support this kind of writing can become second nature. Join us on Academic Coach to find a supportive writing environment where we can change up our writing practice together.

Happier writing needs a flexible mind.

Planning in the new reality

Academic Coach is a big advocate of planning: it is a prerequisite of becoming a happier writer. Many academics don’t like to plan, and in the case of reluctant or sporadic writers, there is some underlying writing anxiety that provokes a disdain for planning. Without a plan, you don’t write, and if you don’t like writing, well that all works out just fine. 

Here are ten reactions I see when planning is raised as a must to be a happier writer. In no particular order:

1. I don’t plan – I’m not a planner (the absolutist rejection of planning as a concept)

2. I don’t plan my academic writing because … (this accepts planning might be beneficial per se, but has one thousand excuses about why they don’t do it, along the lines of ‘I can only write when…eg all the planets are aligned).

3. I don’t plan as it never works out (the defeatist position)

4. I don’t like planning (I only do things that make me feel good position) 

5. I can’t plan because I don’t know how to do this effectively (the perfectionist position: this I can help with)

6. When I plan and it doesn’t work out, self-loathing occurs (the perfectionist position)

7. Things never go as I planned (the fatalist position)

8. Planning makes me feel bad (the fear of failure position)

9. I don’t like to estimate how long things take me (the fear of reality position).

10. Other people ruin my plans, so I don’t make them (the lack of personal agency position). 

To hijack Silvia’s phrase, these are specious barriers to writing. None of it is real, it is a story you choose to tell yourself. Excuses 1-4 are simply excuses not to change your behaviour. But these excuses are a substitute for a more visceral fear of writing that has developed over time, and accordingly you have reverted to the Ostrich position. 5-9 are rooted in perfectionism, the twin of the fear of failure. The last one is my absolute favourite because it’s so very common and so easily cured by taking control of your own diary.

If you recognise your reaction to planning in this list, fear not, Academic Coach has the cure where over 10 weeks we engage in some gentle brain reengineering about planning, imposter syndrome, perfectionism, procrastination, and all the other reasons you don’t like to plan.

Planning has always been important to being a happier writer, but in the next year or two, planning is indispensable to your happiness, precisely because ‘here there be dragons’. When the unknown presents many terrors, planning is the remedy. You will have to take control of your diary or you will do absolutely nothing of merit writing wise. Enough with the Churchill nodding dog routine. It is not possible to do all that is being asked of you, so choose the things you will commit to and accept there are things you cannot do.

Micro planning

Once your teaching has been allocated to you, you can plan all your writing and research activity in slots in your on-line diary. At the beginning of term, there will be official meetings you have to attend – exam boards, boards of study and so on that are planned a year in advance. Put these in. When unplanned meetings appear out of the ether, missing a fixed agenda, you can ask yourself: do you have space in your plan, or don’t you? If that slot was allocated to writing, you do not move writing to attend that meeting. You would not move teaching. Don’t do it.

Macro planning

This is the part academics struggle the most with. Or should we say realistic macro planning. Planning the year, or two, when it comes to your research is seriously important. You set (realistic) targets for yourself, that in turn requires the micro planning above to achieve. Let’s say it takes 100 hours to complete an article to submission, and you are planning your diary from Sep-Sep. If you have not started, it is pointless putting in ‘article completion by October’. It is not going to happen, because you can’t find 100 hours in your diary between Sep-Oct to complete it. This is why planning upsets people. The cold hard reality is, this stuff takes time. But with realistic deadlines (perhaps you can find 100 hours over 3 months), stuff does get done. This also means sticking to your allocated slots, which helps when saying no to meetings. It is a lovely virtuous circle of writing harmony.

A viable plan for the year will differ depending on your teaching load, career stage, and discipline, single or multi authored, theoretical or empirical research, so I am not here to say X is a realistic target for you. This is something you learn after trial and error (note, error, not failure).

I have some planning resources you can find here if you absolutely don’t know where to start, but the basics you need to consider is what, why, how and when. It’s that simple.

 Happier writing begins with serious planning.

Research rescue: how, why and when

Today I want to talk about stalled research and how (and if we should) rescue it. Stalled research is perhaps the trickiest type of research: this is the research that you were engaged with before Covid, but have not looked at since. If you have project deliverables for a funder, you do not have the luxury of abandoning this project. In that case, fortitude is needed and extensions need to be negotiated. But at least you have somebody to be accountable to and with. You are also probably working in a team that will also keep you accountable.

If you are not tied into a funder, it can feel easy to just bin it, and move on. Dispense with the guilt. Stalled research lacks the shiny new excitement of the freshly started project. Like relationships, research is just better at the start. You don’t know how hard it’s going to be, and it’s all a wonderful discovery. It’s the follow through that is tricky. It is absolutely possible that you have started new research during Covid, but left that stalled project in a box marked ‘failed’. 

 The question is, will you leave it there?

If you have a stalled research project, it is possible that you have convinced yourself you have legitimate reasons for not bothering with this research anymore, eg your research method became unfeasible because the lab was shut, samples died (do samples die? I don’t know anything about Stem), or you were unable to observe participants, or carry out in person interviews etc. Someone else has written the thing you were going to do (unlikely). Maybe this is true, and you are not able to adapt your specific research method, or maybe, could it be, that you could not face making the necessary adjustments to the project to move it forward? 

Picking up old research is hard. Often we have just ‘gone off’ it. Eight months ago it was cutting edge and timely, now it feels a bit ‘bleurgh’.

Should you continue?

Writing and researching slots are going to be incredibly precious in the next 12 months, so whilst in my usual writing advice I would say never abandon research (wasted time!), I think this is a genuine time to make a pragmatic call. Answer these simple questions to help frame your decision making, and take away the guilt, feelings of failure and all the *emotions* of it. Get practical.

1. How far along is it? Are you closer to the end than the beginning? [If Yes, this is a tick in the continue box]

2. How critical is this to your own personal goals (this might be tied into promotion, REF, working with certain people, publishing in certain journals)?

3. How difficult is X problem to overcome (new ethics committee to change research design, or just tweaks around the edges)?

4. Do you have partial data you could reframe into a different article / piece?

5. Can you work with someone who can bring a different theory/angle and ditch the empirical parts (also bonus – half the work)?

Sometimes it will not be so much abandonment than rescuing a project by changing its shape or angle, by bringing others on board or only having a partial dataset that answers one question (or poses further questions for research).

Do you want to continue?

It is only practical to engage in research rescue if you are motivated to do so. And I mean really, really motivated. In normal times, you ought to have a full research pipeline where you can move projects up and down the list, and pick up and leave off depending on deadlines, waxing and waning motivation and so on. 

These are not normal times.

The next 12 months will be HARD on research and writing time. Motivation, which is always key to being a happier writer, really comes to the fore. Do you really want to do this research in the next 12 months? If there is any doubt, abandon it now and begin something you actually feel motivation to work on. In the coming academic year you will have severely waning motivation to do anything beyond just making teaching work, so you need all the help you can get in moving any research forward.

Why should I care?

Although this all feels a bit *who cares, we are in a pandemic* it is important to remember it won’t always be this way. Or, worse, it will. Regardless, you are still going to have to produce research to keep your job, and I can guarantee you this, University promotions and hiring committees will not give a fig about the pandemic as an excuse for a publication gap because other people will have continued production because this is a super competitive career. You know it, I know it.

 The classic writing advice to finish the thing that is closest to completion (regardless of how much you like it) still stands. If the pre Covid research is nearly done, bite the bullet and finish. But if you are anywhere else further back than nearly there, it is seriously time to ask those five questions and decide this: if I have only got time for one piece of research in the following 12 months, is this going to be it?

Next time: This is not a vocation