Saying No and Yes: opportunities and distractions

One question which junior scholars (and sometimes senior scholars) struggle with is recognising good opportunities when they arise as distinct from a black sink-hole of despair. It would seem like these two things should be pretty easy to disentangle. Not in academia.

Most things are presented as an ‘opportunity’. And indeed many things are opportunities. But how do you decide whether this is an opportunity you want to say yes to?

Not all opportunities are good. This bears repeating. Not all opportunities are good.

Deciding what is good for you

It is not just the classics you need to beware of. The classic head of school two-step: ‘why, only you can perform this [insert soul sucking admin/teaching task here] due to your particular skills and experience - the department absolutely needs your input here’.

I mean right away, alarm bells ought to ring. You are not a trained administrator, you didn’t get a PhD to administrate. Try to remember, this does not speak to your skill set. When flattery occurs, break left. Quick. This usually means no one else will do it (yes, yes, we all need to perform some admin, but not all the things, all the time: others also need a turn). Same for BLOT101 that no-one wants to teach. We all must do a turn. But it should not be your turn for the rest of your life.

When these ‘opportunities’ present, the first thing to do is say you will get back to them. Take time, maybe a week, to mull it over. What will this new opportunity take away from me? Because make no mistake, it will take something you already do away from you because you are already overworked and your time is full. You cannot keep adding to an already full list of tasks without some deficit occurring somewhere. You will either do other things badly or not at all, or you will work every weekend and evening and you mental and physical health will suffer. So the questions is, what am I prepared to sacrifice to do it? Will the opportunity add to my CV? Will it take away crucial development in other areas? Is it time limited? How long will this really take as opposed to the advertised time it is meant to take? Will you end up doing this one-time thing for the rest of your career within that department?

If anyone presses you for an immediate answer, the answer is NO. You need to consult your schedule, check on what obligations you are already committed to.

Ask yourself this. Have you done your turn? Are there others who have not? Is this something you have not done before and will add a distinct and different line to your CV? These are good questions to ask yourself. Distinct and different is important especially in administration or wider service. If you do the same task for 15 years, for example, like convening a particular conference, it is only one line on your CV for 15 years of work. Think about that.

Publishing ‘opportunities’

I recently heard a podcast instructing junior faculty to say yes to all publishing opportunities all the time without any thought. Take all publishing opportunities. With respect, this is terrible advice. Your time is limited. You can only do so much and if you don’t manage yourself in academia, you will burn out. Quality matters.

So my advice would be different. Don’t take all publishing opportunities: they are not all equal. Think carefully. Do I have space in my pipeline? If I want to do this, what can I delete from my already full pipeline. One in, one out.

Quality publications should be prioritised. If it is a choice between a peer reviewed journal article (new opportunity) or a chapter in an edited collection (already in the pipeline), the choice is clear. Negotiate extensions or pull out. Don’t just pile work or work on work because you are afraid of never getting another opportunity. Curate your publishing strategy to build your brand. An Encyclopaedia entry is not equal to a journal article. An expert report for an international institution may be more important than a journal article.

All publishing opportunities should be run through the same filter. What does this bring to me? Where am I positioning myself by doing this?

There is nothing more soul destroying than committing to write something you have zero interest in just because you were asked and it is one more publication. It will destroy your writing happiness, which will in turn, put you off research and writing altogether. All too soon this can lead to a downward spiral.

Academia is full of distractions (some nice, some not so nice) which are parcelled as ‘opportunities’. Take time to decide when ‘opportunities’ present, do I say Yes or No?

Realism and Time Tracking: a feasible pipeline

The most difficult part of building a viable pipeline is estimating how long something will take you to do. If you are just starting out in your career, this will be particularly difficult because you are doing many things for the first time, but fear not, experienced academics are just as likely to suffer from this too.

It is why the notion of deadlines are for some merely laughable aspirations. Even as they are signing on the dotted line of the book contract, they pretty much already know that deadline will not be made as they have NEVER made a deadline in their life.

I find this very depressing. And incredibly anxiety inducing.

This lack of realism in time management is also compounded by your institutional workload matrix. You may be given 2 hours to prep a brand new lecture, but we all know it is more like 2 days work (and longer if you know nothing at all about the subject). Longer still if you are inexperienced. Everything about the departmental workload matrix is based on deceit. Literally no single task is accurately reflected in these tariffs (because chronic understaffing, rising student numbers etc).

The point is you are used to being lied to. And you are used to lying to yourself. You have to. It is a coping mechanism to deal with overwork. I understand, I really do. But you cannot build a viable pipeline in this way. You too will carry on this deceit in your pipeline. You will overcommit, fail and get dispirited. Yes, I can write a book from scratch (including all the research) in 6 months. No problem (but it is a very big problem).

How to stop this behaviour

As I tell all my clients, honesty is key. Honesty with yourself (forget anyone else). Time tracking enables honesty as it provides you with an incontrovertible dataset that you cannot excuse or wish away. There are many apps out there, and you can search one that suits your needs.

I am not a fan of complex planning /tracking apps, because this feels like another distraction tactic from doing your actual work. Like Trello. I hate Trello.

I use myhours.com for this reason. This app is free. It is developed for freelancers who charge for work and so the focus is on time spent (billable hours) rather than lists of things to do like Trello. The premise is simple. Create projects. Create tasks attached to each project. Click record and stop every time you sit down to work on a particular project-and-task and it builds up a picture of how you spend your working week. It will provide you with charts and other fun stuff.

You should open up the programme first every morning before you have opened email or anything else.

Create a project for everything to begin with. Don’t bother with assigning tasks to non-research activities unless you are really dying to know how long it took you to upload your grades onto Blackboard (please for your own sanity, don’t find this out). Set up a project for teaching. Teaching Prep. Admin. Student hours. Emails. Meetings. Article X. Blog X. Conference presentation Y. Peer review. Grant body review. Grant applications. Dealing with finance. Booking travel. Writing references for students. Writing promotion references. Writing promotion applications. Study leave applications. Reading a thesis for examination. Grading. Whatever fills you working week record it. And then sit and marvel about how unbalanced your time is. Where do you need to adjust, and importantly, given this is how you actually spend your time, how much research can you propose in your timeline.

Dual benefits

This timetracking forces your to confront your behaviour. Perhaps you spend too much time in meetings or on teaching prep and do not respect your writing slots. If you are a dedicated researcher, and stick to your writing slots, you now begin to understand how long it takes to read and article and take notes. How long to compile a bibliography. How long to fill in footnotes in a nearly finished piece. How long to write the abstract (these are your individual tasks in each project). Pretty soon you are going to have a detailed picture of your research and writing process. From this, you can plan a viable pipeline, by allocating the hours you need in your diary to complete Article X around your other commitments. From these diary entries, a viable pipeline emerges.

Time tracking is something most academics avoid for a number of reasons. Ignorance is bliss. Do I want to know it will take 120 hours to write that article? Well, yes, yes you do, if you want to have a viable publishing pipeline.

Understanding your Pipeline: What goes in?

In the last post I talked about the importance of having a timeline. So you don’t get derailed. So you don’t say yes to things you ought not to do, out of some habit of needing to please or thinking every ‘opportunity’ is a good opportunity. It is not.

I also talked about the four crucial steps that you need to incorporate into your pipeline planner: What; Why; Steps; Deadline, with the emphasis on the why.

Today I want to talk about how you decide what to put in the planner and how to be realistic.

What should go in?

What goes in your planner will of course depend on your disciplinary expectations and career stage. What is expected in multi-authored disciplines far outweighs what is expected in sole authored (humanities disciplines). It also depends on what your expectations are. If you are looking for promotion, your pipeline should reflect the promotion criteria of your institution. If you are looking to build your academic brand in a certain direction, your pipeline should contain the research activities that reflect that brand.

Everyone will have certain things to do for their employer regardless of whether it maps onto your brand or what you care about or even promotion criteria. High quality peer reviewed journal articles will probably top the list. Thus your planner should contain a high proportion of these as your starting point. If you don’t know where to start, start with these.

All of your writing should go into your publishing pipeline. Articles, research monographs, grant applications, edited collections (as editor), chapters in books, journalistic pieces, blogs and any other research-related writing should included. Not all of these attract the same prestige, but all serve different functions. A warning here. If you are thinking about publishing a textbook for undergraduate students, please speak to senior professors about the desirability of this for your career goals. If you are in a teaching focused institution, this may well be the thing you need to do. In research intensive institutions, probably only senior professors who are not trying to build their career via publishing should be engaged in writing text books. Text books are a never ending publishing grind that squeeze out any opportunity for you to engage in research. Don’t kid yourself it is anything other than this.

A multiplicity of things in your pipeline means when one project is stuck on pause (waiting for feedback or data collection) you can turn to another and move that forward a little bit. You are never stuck wondering what to do with your research time.

The five year plan

When applying for jobs, an indicative research plan is usually one of the things hiring committees will request as part of the application. If you already have a publishing pipeline, you have this 5 year plan (more or less) ready to go. Although I would recommend a 1-3 year pipeline plan, it will be easy to scale this up to 5 years once you have a realistic grasp of how long things take to complete.

Progression is key

Your pipeline should consist of a mix of big and small projects that describe your potential, aspirations and development as a scholar. You can’t always work on, or claim to be working on, huge grant proposals. One grant proposal is more convincing that 5 grant proposals. More convincing still if you have built up to making a big grant application at the end of a suitable period of publications in the area.

A mix of a grant size might be desirable. A small grant which in a few years could be the basis of a large grant shows that you know you need to build up reputational capital in order to be successful. So a network grant that might lead to a pilot that could be rolled out to a much larger interdisciplinary project shows both a grasp of reality, how to build a potential team of collaborators, and a sense of academic vision.

The same is true of publications. You can’t put 5 single authored top tiered original journal articles as one year’s pipeline. It is unlikely (depending on your discipline) that you have the time each and every year to work up 5 original ideas and data sets, research and writing. But a mix of linked journal articles, some alone, some co-authored around the same dataset might be feasible. Salami slicing findings for a number of mid-ranking journals might also be feasible, but be careful in doing the too often. Quality matters. Speak to mentors and others in your field.

Journalistic pieces and blogs could also be included, alongside conference papers. Producing a 100,000 word research monograph from scratch takes more than a year so your pipeline should reflect that. It should detail how many weeks/months you are engaged in research for what chapters, and how many weeks or months you need to write that research up. Spread out your projects so that they build a picture of your career as you want it to develop, and of you as a scholar. What is your brand? What will you be known for? Have definite aims and objectives for your career and brand attached to each project.

How do you know how long something takes?

One of the key lessons I try to impart at Academic Coach is that you must start to understand how long something takes YOU to do. Everyone else is irrelevant. And the way to do this is to time yourself. You can use lots of different apps for this, but the sooner you start doing this, the sooner you will know how long research takes you (in hours). How long data collection design takes you. How long it takes to get the data and then how long it takes to analyse the data. How long it takes to read, write and edit a paper. How long it takes to do revisions.

You might think: ‘it depends on what I am doing’. Of course. Research will take different amounts of time depending how familiar you are with the topic to start with. But the writing part takes about the same amount of time in my experience. You just need to find out what that is for you. And when you do, you can break down those sessions and plot your pipeline accurately. How many writing sessions per week for how long is 100 hours of research (or whatever your number is). From there you can plan a 1-3-or 5 year pipeline in a way that ensures you are writing in your working week, not your evenings and weekends which is key to being a happier academic writer.

Taking on too many things is a cause of stress and academic burnout. Usually, no-one but yourself put you in that situation because you did not plan and you said yes to anything and everything that crossed your desk. Opportunities for working for free (publishing) are never ending. Make sure you get paid for your writing by making a pipeline that you tackle in your working week alongside your other teaching and service responsibilities.

If you want helping designing and then implementing your Publication Pipeline, join us on the Activate your Publication Pipeline Programme. 12 months coaching Programme with live coaching and lots of online course materials to guide you step by step through designing a pipeline that maximises your outputs.

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.