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.

Planning a publishing pipeline

New year, new resolutions. Whatever happened last term, whatever you did or did not manage to do is in the past.  January may be full of grading, but is usually free of teaching for the first few weeks and this gives you the opportunity to put aside some time to think about the upcoming academic year and plan (or readjust) your writing pipeline. If you have never done a writing pipeline before, then you can start now!

 Why you should have a pipeline

• Sanity – you know what you are doing.

• Purpose – you know why you are doing it.

• Permission to say no without guilt – you know you cannot say yes to yet another thing, because you have a full calendar already.

• Prevents overwork – you know that if you accept anything else, something must be deleted on a 1 in 1 out basis or you are saying yes to working evenings and weekends because we cannot invent time.

The pipeline puts all this IN YOUR FACE rather than a sort of background hum you know is there but can tune out at will. It will save you from yourself.

3 guiding principles of a pipeline

• Be Realistic. Depending on where you are in your career, design a pipeline that fits your capabilities. Be ambitious, but be realistic. You might not be ready for a €10m grant (i.e. you don’t have the publication record to support such a grant application so wont be assessed as having an appropriate track record). Build your CV commensurate with your grade and skills, whilst planning any upskilling you need to move to the next level.

• Be Strategic. Decide on your goals (specific to what YOU want) and only accept or begin work aligned to these goals. If an offer to do something comes in but does not align with your goals, politely explain you cannot commit to x project at the moment.

• Be Responsible. Know yourself. Know how you manage your time, and crucially how long things take YOU to complete. Do not repeatedly commit to writing and then miss the deadlines because people will think you are a flake that cannot be trusted. This is not good for future collaboration, references and academia is a small world. Besides this just builds endless stress and begins to alienate you from your writing practice. Time tracking, and learning how long things take, is a key skill that most academics don’t bother with.

Organising a pipeline

There are many ways to organise a pipeline and many ways to utilise that pipeline. A publication pipeline can be used for career progression for example. You specifically plan your pipeline according to the promotion criteria in your University. In most research focused  institutions, this would mean prioritising peer reviewed journal articles (and in some disciplines, prioritising monographs) above all else. Invited chapters in an edited collection, for example, would be filler in the pipeline, but never your goal. Editing a book might be higher on the list for a number of reasons, not least your citation index. Identifying which journals you need to target for prestige / fit reasons is also important in this type of pipeline.

Many Universities now prioritise impact and engagement with the public and/or industry or government stakeholders. This is probably in your departmental and University mission statement and the promotion criteria, but impact and engagement alone will rarely be privileged without simultaneous publication. For the UK environment, the REF is always hovering in the background ensuring that 4* peer reviewed journal articles remain the gold standard.

You might not care about being promoted. In that case feel free to use your pipeline for the purposes of planning how you would like to spend your time (but don’t bitch about not getting promoted, please). Even without an eye on promotion, you still need to carefully curate your pipeline so that it builds your profile in a way that is meaningful to you. Do you want to be the expert on X? Then don’t plan a scattergun approach to research topics and papers because you were asked to do A, B, C  this year. Think about what your choices say about who you are as a researcher.

Planning Process

Planning is key to happiness in writing and I encourage people to set aside an hour or more each Monday to plan the working week and once every few weeks check in on their longer term plan.

I like to plan in 3 month segments since this fits the academic year and I am programmed after all these years to think this way. As it happens, alongside teaching and other duties, this is about how long it takes me to do draft a peer reviewed article to initial submission. This does not mean I only plan for 3 months. Pipelines should be between 1-3 years (and 5 years for a job application). When I first started doing this, I used to be super optimistic and pretend I could accomplish all the things, and many of them between September-December. Clearly wrong. I never accounted for illness, holidays, general malaise I felt in February and March and was truly optimistic about how much conferencing and travel would seamlessly fit into my life and schedule (hint: it didn’t and I was totally exhausted by it). 

I have a planning template here that is free to download. This template is merely indicative and not what you should be aiming to complete in each academic year which is dependent on your specific circumstances. The principles in designing your own pipeline planner are pretty straightforward. Include the following categories:

• What?

• Why?

• Steps required (milestones)

• Timeframe/Deadline

Most planner examples miss out WHY. Why is the most important question. Why are you doing this project? What will you achieve/ gain /by doing it? What does this signify to you? How does this advance your career or build your profile in a way that is meaningful to you? You must be able to answer this in a way that is NOT ‘because someone asked me’. Don’t do that project. 

 You can plan this out on a whiteboard, or a word document, or spreadsheet.

You can of course then break down projects individually either by using a Gantt Chart or simply using Post It notes in way that breaks the project down into specific milestones. More on this type of detailed planning in a later post. 

The most important point of the pipeline is that you sit down and consciously plan your writing year, acknowledging the specific timeframe attached to each project. Once you have this outline you can backward map into your diary how many writing slots you need to complete the project. This starts to fill every day with specific slots and tasks in those slots so that you never need to wonder what you should be doing today in terms of writing. 

Want more help with planning your pipeline and then actually executing it? Check out my 12 month coaching programme that will help you to establish your pipeline and then actually execute it.