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.