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.