There’s a quiet tragedy that plays out across universities every single day. Brilliant academics who’ve spent decades training their minds treat writing as if it were a hobby. Something to get to after the real work is done. Something for the weekends. For the mythical quiet time that never comes. They teach. They sit on committees. They supervise, mark, review, advise, and administrate. And they write only in the margins; on borrowed time, stolen mornings, or those magical sabbaticals that vanish before the work has even begun.
And slowly, imperceptibly, their careers begin to starve.
The Hard Truth
If you treat writing like a hobby, your academic career will quietly hollow out. Writing is the career. Some of you will not like hearing that. It’s not an add-on, not an afterthought, not a bonus for when everything else is done. It’s the visible, lasting expression of your intellectual life. Without a consistent writing practice, your thinking stagnates. Your ideas never mature. Your expertise never quite lands in the world. And in academia, visibility matters. The system may be flawed, but it’s also brutally clear: publications, grants, and intellectual contribution are the currency that sustains your professional life.
Why So Many Smart People Fall Into This Trap
Because the system trains you to. PhD students learn to respond : to supervisors, reviewers, teaching loads, departmental needs, externally imposed deadlines. The culture - on the surface at least - rewards responsiveness, not depth. So you get good at reacting, firefighting, and delivering on other people’s timelines and objectives. You serve their projects.
Writing, on the other hand, demands sovereignty. It’s self-generated. You have to choose to sit down. You have to decide what matters. You have to withstand the discomfort of being alone with your own ideas. That’s why so many academics keep writing as a “nice-to-have.” It’s easier to stay in motion and to fill your days with visible, reactive work than to confront the quiet, demanding work of producing ideas that matter.
The Professional vs. The Hobbyist
Here’s the difference:
When you shift from hobbyist to professional, everything changes. You stop asking, “When will I find the time?” You start asking, “What will I protect to make time?” That shift alone can resurrect a stalled career.
The Feedback Loop of Neglect
When writing slips, confidence erodes. When confidence erodes, writing slips further. You feel out of touch with your field. Your projects stall. You start avoiding colleagues who ask, “How’s the book coming?” And here’s the most dangerous part: you start compensating with busywork, more committees, more students, more administrative responsibilities, because they offer an easy sense of productivity.
But that kind of work doesn’t compound. Writing does.
Every finished article, every new idea on paper, every draft moved forward; that’s how intellectual authority is built.
Reclaim Writing as Your Core Practice
If you want your career to thrive, you have to bring writing back to the centre. That means:
Scheduling it first.
Build your week around writing, not writing around your week.Saying no to low-value work.
Not because you’re selfish — because you’re protecting your impact.Investing in your writing process.
Training, systems, accountability, and feedback are not indulgences. They’re infrastructure.Writing even when it’s uncomfortable.
You can’t think your way into writing. You write your way into thinking.
The Real Work
Your career doesn’t end when you stop writing, it just stops growing. The meetings will continue. The emails will multiply. Your calendar will stay full. But without writing, it all becomes motion without meaning. Writing is how you anchor your intellectual life in something enduring. It’s how you participate in the conversation that defines your field. It’s how you matter.
So this week, ask yourself:
“Am I treating my writing like the core of my career, or like a side hobby I hope to get to someday?”
Because the day you start protecting your writing like your career depends on it — is the day your career truly begins again.