The value of rest

The Academic Writing Course is big on scheduling. Many a module is on the joy of scheduling. I am big on scheduling. We don’t find time or make time to write. Time is not lost down the back of the sofa. We are not a time traveller, or God. The best we can do is schedule time (I hate the phrase manage time, as though it’s an unruly toddler -  you are not chasing time around the living room). 

Scheduling time is thus important to being a happier writer (and a happier academic). You may have noticed that your schedule is presently looking zoom bombed. 

 That is something we need to talk about.

 How do you fill your diary? Do you allow others to simply control it by filling it with endless meeting invitations? Or do you take control, map out your hours and what you will do with them, and then should meetings appear, either you are free or you decline as you are otherwise scheduled.  You do not schedule your work around other people’s meeting whims.

The single biggest hack for becoming a happier writer is taking control of your own diary. It is like magic!

 People who don’t write love meetings because it gives them a legitimate (in their mind) excuse for not writing. If you are a regular academic (not a head of department, dean etc) and you had previously a small x number of meetings per week, there is no reason you should be attending an exponential of that number now. Most ECRs and junior staff generally don’t have weekly administrative meetings (I’m not talking about teaching here), and if you do, you are probably doing  role that is so far above your pay grade you are being exploited.

 Just because other people can’t get their shit together to have one meeting, does not mean you have to become their zoom slave. Meetings without written published agendas are not meetings. They are opportunities to ambush you – don’ fall for it. If it’s critical, they will put it in writing, and you can read it at your leisure. If they have not committed it to writing, they are, variously: using your time to do what is their job; fake consulting you on decisions already taken; or giving you updates on things likely to change next week.

This is the sound of experience you are hearing, not cynicism. 

Time can’t be found, made or managed. But I do believe that time can be wasted and meetings are a classic example. 

Of course, I could suggest tuning in and dropping out as the oldies used to say, but I don’t believe this is a good idea. Be in a meeting, or don’t. If you are in it, contribute. If you have nothing to contribute, then you didn’t need to be there – this is a good early lesson to learn (some people never learn it). When you have tuned in, you have already decided not to write, and that’s a fact, no matter what you do when your camera is off. 

The Academic Coach Writing Course thus prioritises practicing scheduling writing. It is a lot harder for some people to do this than you might imagine. But in these Covid times, I think it’s important to actually practice scheduling rest too. I hear all you parents of small children bristling and laughing at this suggestion. However you are managing your children and work at this time, within that work slot, you must also schedule rest. Even if things remain undone. You are (I’m assuming) not a brain surgeon and no-one will die if your work doesn’t get done. Get some perspective. So what if you are late with your report, your marking, your book manuscript or whatever. So what. The world continues to turn.

Rest is critical to productivity and stable mental health. Those who work all through the night produce less than those who work regular calm hours. Without rest, we become emotionally and physically depleted. Without rest, we have no reserves. Without rest, there are, as doctors are fond of saying, no good outcomes.

So as well as scheduling time to write, you must now schedule time to rest. Rest between any on-line interactions. Move away from the screen, your chair. Have periods where you are in fact taking a break (you are legally entitled to these). This will inevtibly eat into your writing and research time. So be it. The whole point of the Academic Coach Writing Course is creating efficiency in your writing routines – spend less time doing it, getting more done.

Since some academics find doing nothing more agitating than working, rest periods can also be periods where you plan and think and reflect (but not in some hardcore journaling or homework type of activity). I would always encourage that.

Rest is the most important thing you can schedule. Do it today.

Next time: Research rescue: how, why and when

Navigating the (old) new HE context

Today’s blog seeks to draw your attention to the new (old) HE environment. I say new (old) for a reason. It has become apparent to me in the last couple of years that many academics – PhD’s, ECRs, established researchers, and tenured professors have a highly individuated experience of ‘academia’. Sure, we can all get behind some easy tropes: reviewer 2, tyrannical administrators; over-paid Vice Chancellors. But actually scratch the surface, and there is no one ‘academia’ we all seem to recognise. There are good reasons for this. Those at the beginning and at the end of their career have a lot in common in that they understand very little about what it is to be an academic for the vast majority in the trenches. They are both hopelessly disconnected from reality but for completely different reasons.

A professor who never even needed a masters degree to get a job has had (and STILL has) a very different experience of academia than the professor who needed and got their PhD sometime between the 1990’s and 2000. Professors and established academics who got their PhDs and needed multiple publications to get a (probably permanent) job (say between 2000-2010) have had a very different academic experience again. Those who got their PhD, need multiple publications, suffered extreme precarity, and probably needed a monograph and a grant, and needed a huge amount of luck and connections have had a different experience again. Those still doing there PhD know all about precarity and publications, yet still seem to have a hopelessly romantic idea (and ideals) about what it is like to actually work at a University on a full time contract. Throw in the intersections of discipline, geography, race, gender, and disability and these communities will describe an academia that the first cohort can never and will never recognise (although they sit in hugely senior positions).

I’m not talking about different experiences of the job market here either, but different experiences once you have entered academia proper. These shifts in the job market merely reflect the broader shifts within universities, that have in turn moulded the expectations of staff too. These expectations play out differently amongst the different cohorts.

The Covid era academia may look staggeringly different to some colleagues, when in fact all Covid has done is rip away the mask. It’s a business, run by people who know little about business. It has the legal trappings of a charity, but is operated as a purely for-profit enterprise. Accordingly it seeks to exploit its workforce at every possible turn, who willingly, in the name of vocation and believing in the charitable status, passion or a number of other tropes, will work 24/7 in order to maximise its profit. 

This is the old (new) university. It’s one of the most competitive careers out there filled with over-achieving type As. For the last 20 years, it has been nothing but chaos, with restructurings, department closures, redundancies, financial mismanagement, invention of new annual league tables with ever changing goal posts, and continual reinvention of the administrative wheel as an army of administrators seek to justify their existence. Covid is just another turn of the chaos wheel.

The Covid era University expects unlimited access to your personal space via zoom; scheduling classes at any time of the day or night; preparation for teaching on-line (without training) but also for you to come into campus and teach in person in a pandemic whilst offering no meaningful personal protection. 

 Is this so different to the old academia? Not so much. 

 You’ve been expected to work 24/7 for a long time via email and instant responses to students, journal editors and administrators. You’ve been a slave to timetabling officer for time immemorial, and some people have regulary taught on the weekend for many years, not to mention the away days and the open days that eat into your personal time. Training? You can be given a course you know nothing about a week before term starts. Transforming your teaching pedagogy at the drop of hat to meet some NSS target is commonplace. One year, feedback is the priority. Next year, its ‘learning communities’. And the wheel rolls on. Change for the sake of change is the watchword. Is on-line teaching such a jump? Giving more, more and then some more again is hardly Covid specific. 

Granted, being forced to come into work to contract a deadly disease is an untenable step further, but it’s not so far off the well-travelled path. Colleagues have been striking over workload and work conditions for the last two years, with a suicide and mental health crisis in academia ever present. Care for your well-being has been distinctly lacking for some time. We are all a little tired of the downward dog solution.

Navigating with the compass of truth

So, how do you navigate this new (old) Covid University. First, it is up to you to face facts and begin to see Covid academia as an extension of the same academia as before. Once you accept that perhaps exploitative and unreasonable requests are being made of you, most likely in contravention of basic health and safety and your employment contract are not a one-off (this is a crisis) situation, but merely an extension of the previous exploitation, your mind-set ought to shift towards what is possible and reasonable for you to do, and what is not. These will almost certainly fall short of what is being requested from one week to the next. 

Facing this truth will prevent you falling into the trap of self-doubt, imposter syndrome and wondering why you are just not good enough. These thoughts are a spiral downwards to abandoning research and writing in the never ending quest to be the perfect on-line tutor.

The boundaries you can put in place now, having accepted these facts, will keep you sane later. Become your own committee of no. Think carefully about the battles you pick.  It is important you think through your survival tactics early and doggedly define your priorities and stick to them, otherwise the next 12 months are going to be very difficult indeed.

Remember this – just like we don’t all experience academia in the same way, we will not experience Covid academia in the same way. The winners will keep winning. The losers will continue to do all the heavy lifting right until they have worked themselves into the ground. You must see your situation as it is. Be your own advocate.

See the old (new) University as its always been. It’s not you, it’s them.

Next time: the value of rest

Academic writing in the time of Covid: first steps

This is the third in a series of blog about academic writing in the time of Covid 19. Whilst much traditional writing advice is still absolutely valid, it needs to be placed in an entirely new context that raises particular challenges. The tenth blog will transition from Covid to deal with academic life beyond Covid and how this time is likely to accelerate changes we have already seen in the last few years.

 First steps: Your new reality

The mission of the Academic Coach is to create happier writers. The emphasis is on the happier. For some, this means more productivity, more efficiency or more elegant prose, but for others it is about having a more balanced relationship with the research /writing aspect of your career. Having time to write that is not late at night, at weekends, and in place of holidays. Whatever happy means for you, there is no doubt that your ability to do research in 2019/2020, and 2020/21 will have been (and will continue to be) severely compromised for a variety of reasons. A global pandemic and its associated trauma, including but not limited to sickness of you or your loved ones, home-schooling, lack of childcare, a complete shutdown of your research lab and/or research methodology are just some of the reasons that writing and research might grind to halt. Besides the fact that the world as we know it has completely changed, and a toothache can become a significant life altering event. 

Even if you were a super productive, happy writer in 2018, things might have drastically changed. 

Your new reality is something you need to face head on. I know it is tempting to sit and scream that it is all just so unfair. I feel this deeply. But, alas, reality is still there at the end of the tantrum. Facing this reality is the key first step to moving forward.

Your truth matters

One of the key components of the regular Academic Coach writing course is facing the truth about you, your life, and your writing (or procrastinating) habits. Facing this truth has never been easy, and when colleagues come to the part of the course which challenges them to record what they do all day, and record how long each aspect of writing and researching takes, they tend to shy away. Why? Because it is hard to face up to your perceived failings, and hard to look the cold hard facts in the face. Conversely, it is sometimes dispiriting to find out that the component parts of creating a finished piece of writing actually just take a really long time. In fact you are not lazy or procrastinating, it just takes ages.

Because knowing is hard. Denial is easy. 

That denial underpins many bad writing habits that we too easily ascribe to our ‘unique’ style of working (I can only write when…….). We spend a lot of time debunking this nonsense on the course, either practically or psychologically, in order to move into a space where we can accept our particular reality, and create writing routines that fit into that reality as opposed to actively work against it.

Everyone’s reality is different, yet we are all measured professionally by indicators that were designed for and therefore favour the old school norm of the single white male scholar – or the married with a stay at home wife scholar – both of whom are utterly devoted to the singular pursuit of publishing. This is exceptionally tough on those who are not in either of these categories. The pandemic has only underlined this situation with research demonstrating male authors increased submission of articles and female author submissions dropped off a cliff . This isn’t news. Yet…yet…somehow we fail to accept this single truth of academia and continue to hold ourselves to standards that have no relation to our own lived realities.

This is the shaky foundation of the unhappy writer.

Face facts

So, the first critical task in order to get back to your writing and research is to face your new reality. This reality might mean children at home all the damn time. Even if we are now technically in the summer holidays (in some places), your usual summer childcare arrangements will most likely be null and void. Granny is off-limits and so on. Even without children in the house, we face separation from family and friends and leisure, and perhaps we have another body permanently in our workspace (flat mates, partners) who would normally be at work. Our partner (or us) might be a key worker. We might not have a proper workspace at all – a rickety chair, a bad back and a kitchen table. 

This might go on for many, many more months. All our coping habits have been removed. 

These things pose significant challenges to writing. If you normally go to a lab and now you can’t, all your research might be compromised. Endless zoom meetings about absolute nonsense will fill your calendar. No doubt, you are being subject to the ‘will we, won’t we’ two-step of on-line or face to face teaching come September, and the associated disruption that brings. You are probably preparing on-line and in person teaching simultaneously while jumping through endless administrative hoops that try to run you over like a big giant evil trucker every single day. This may well go on and on until September, when student fees have been collected for tuition and accommodation, and the cold hard reality of crumbling, crusty buildings that allow zero social distancing will intervene and settle things. For a while at least.

This stuff is stressful. I mean really, mind-bendingly stressful. Preparing courses takes time and energy, and you are not being given any time and you are all out of energy. Writing everything from scratch for September in a vastly different format: nightmare. You are probably being told there will be job losses, pay cuts, more teaching, less (if any) research time. You are probably still working out how to say no to online meetings, or whether its impolite to have the camera off (I marvel at people who care about this: they are clearly nicer than me). If, on top of this Armageddon, you or your dependents have particular health, caring or disability needs, these are surely not being met either by the health and social care service, or your institution. Stressful doesn’t really cover it.

 All of this is an awful, incomprehensible nightmare. But once you have faced your new reality, instead of trying to operate as if nothing had changed, as if its ‘business as usual’, you will (after the shock) feel calmer in knowing that certain compromises will have to be made and some uncomfortable choices that perhaps fracture our ideals of what it is to be an academic will need to be accepted. This is part and parcel of the Academic Coach writing course in normal times because sometimes the things that hold us back the most are based on an internal narrative about how things ought to be, rather than how they really are.

Here there be dragons

We are now in a place of uncomfortable ‘not knowing’. We are at that point on ye olde world maps that proclaims ‘here there be dragons’. And for good reason. You don’t exactly know how things are going to pan out. Worse still, you know it’s likely going to be unpleasant and chock full of unrealistic expectations (from you, and your employer). This is taking up brain space. The worst part is you will have to be your own advocate, mentor, and champion. What I have learned from running Academic Coach is that most academics absolutely suck at being their own advocate, mentor, and champion. But you will have to. We are all drowning, not waving, and you will be fortunate indeed if your usual support groups have the ability to reach out and support you. No-one is on the life raft.

Nothing short of your physical and mental well-being is at stake here, and rest assured, your institution does not care one jot for either.

This I know is all a bit depressing. 

Over the next few weeks Academic Coach will provide a series of blogs and vlogs to help you navigate this new reality. There will be some hard talk about Universities in the time of Covid, and some strategies offered for caring for yourself and your writing practice in the midst of this new environment.We will cover topics ranging from rescuing stalled research to planning in the midst of the unknown. I hope you will find these useful scaffolds for building a happier writing practice.

Working from home for academics

Being forced to work from home isn’t like working from home by choice

Academics are by and large used to working from home. Even those in purely lab based disciplines will at times write or do other work from their home. But now things are different. Working from home is no longer a choice, but something forced upon us. Not only that, you are now teaching as well as writing and administrating from home.

Worse, you are now doing this with your children in attendance, or your partner, or with your pets, (or all of these), or in total isolation from anyone you know and would normally interact with.

All of these situations are unprecedented in your experience.

YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS UNDER CONTROL. You really really should not.

It never happened before. The idea that you can seemlessly transition into this chaos whilst maintaining sanity, let alone productivity, is ludicrous. Absolutely off the scale nonsense. Of course you can’t. No-one can. So let go of that bullshit right now. Breathe. Get through this moment. Then the next. Then the next.

Transitioning to coping

Here is a simple of list of things to keep in mind when transitioning into a being able to cope.

1. Dramatically lower your expectations (oh but the students will suffer, think of the students).

We are all going to suffer, regardless of what you do, and students will not be insulated from suffering as a special category of people. They are going to be stressed, and worried, but we are all stressed and worried. You are not a super hero. You are a person and you can only do what you can do. Grade kindly. Lower expectations of them and of you. This does not come easy for super competitive I-must-always-be-the-best personality types of academics. There is an apocalypse on - get a grip.

2. Stuff will go wrong.

Yes, children will interrupt lectures, tech will cut out, there will be delays. You won’t have all the answers. It will take time to work stuff out and get stuff together. Accept it. Do what you can. Move on. Accept imperfection.

3. Administrators will ask the impossible: ignore them

At the best of times, administrators have no idea of quality teaching. They don’t understand the classroom dynamic because they don’t really know what goes on in there. So the imperative to ‘just put it all on-line’ is yet another way in which they manifest that complete ignorance. You cannot do the impossible.

4. Trust your professional integrity

You know how to teach. You know how to examine and you know how to be kind and generous in recognising that students are not receiving the optimum teaching experience at this time. You know exactly what they need to know and what they can do without. Trust that professionalism. Don’t wait for someone who knows nothing about your course or material to tell you what to do.

5. You will work less

Yes. It is true. You will work less. But you will probably work much more intensely because between homeschooling, feeding and caring for a household there will be little time available for actual work. Accept it.

6. The kids will be alright in front of the telly for a few hours.

Release the guilt.

7. Prioritise yourself and your family.

Work is after all just work. Academics fetishize work above all other things. It is time for a reset. Look after yourself, your family. Eat well. Stay healthy and exercise. Meditate or do whatever you need to in order to get through this uncertain time. Devote a large part of your day to these activities.

8. Research will wait.

Some of you may take refuge in writing and there is no judgment from me on that. For some people, this is a type of escapism by utter absorption in a task, and certainly, we would all like to escape right now. If that is you, have at it. Get a schedule together. Find a quiet space in your house and begin. Block out a maximum of two hours in your day and write to your heart’s content. Get a task list together and slowly work your way through it. At the end, write down tomorrow’s tasks, and repeat.

For many, this won’t be feasible, either due to little (or indeed grown) people in your tent, or the fact that right now you could not give a rat’s ass about research. That is also a completely acceptable reaction. In time it might change, but for now, just breathe.

9. Dynamics of communication will change

Communication will be difficult at this time. By this, I mean that people are worried, they are scared, they might be snippy or downright unreasonable, and at the best of times, email is not a great way to communicate. It lacks nuance and tone is often misconstrued.

Exercise a bit of patience with colleagues and students who are flailing about and are under who-knows-what pressure.

10. Practice kindness

Be kind to yourself and others. Academics are notoriously hard taskmasters with each other, with students, with themselves. Instead, choose to be be kind. It is a much nicer way to live.

Working from home hacks

Some of us work from home anyway outside of a pandemic and have actually experienced little disruption to our daily schedule outside of not being able to get everything they want from the shop. I feel like I have been in training for this my whole life, as I am a natural born hermit and normally work from home.

I have my ways, naturally, but have never given much thought (until now) to how I organise myself.

I have read with some amusement the many ‘work from home hacks’ articles which exhort you to ‘get dressed’ and ‘get up as though you are going to the office’ and all that jazz. Let me tell you, this is not how I work from home.

I have never done any of those things and am a very productive person. You do you. Wear what you want, do what works for you and your family. You will find your own equilibrium through this chaotic and unprecedented time.

My courses are in essence about managing your time well, and in regular life, I would certainly recommend setting a realistic schedule, whilst being absolutely honest about your real life circumstances. Your real life circumstances now include a global pandemic, and an entire disruption to the way we live and work and communicate. Try not to pretend anything is other than it is.

I would recommend setting very small goals, breaking down tasks into very small parts, ticking them off a list, and doing one tiny thing at a time. I would usually recommend a plan, because I am a planner. But right now, I have erased my whiteboard of plans because everything turned upside down and now I can’t leave the house. What I planned before, I now cannot do (or at least I cannot do it as I planned it). Accept it.

Crucially, don’t set yourself up to fail by putting in place unrealistic expectations. We need to really readjust what we can expect of ourselves in this period of unprecedented uncertainty. It is not business as usual.

Writing routines in a global pandemic

We are living in strange times indeed. At this point, you have probably been given 24 hours notice (at best) to take everything you do and put it ‘online’ (as though this were no problem). The last thing you are thinking about is your research and writing. And that is fine. And that is normal.

In the interim, you are going to alternate between terror scrolling through Twitter, and staring at your leg. That is also fine. Whilst marinading in social media terror, you will come across a number of different Twitter asshats who will swing between ‘Shakespeare wrote King Lear when quarantined’ and all that productivity bullshit, and people bragging about how much writing they will get through because they have no child care ( and possibly no humanity either).

You will also come across those who tell you to down tools and do nothing. These same people overworked and will still overwork through this pandemic - they were the ones who raised the bar in the first place, and burned the ladder underneath them.

I’m here to tell you: ignore all this bullshit. It is hard, I know. These are extreme times, and if you are able to keep any writing going I salute you, but most won’t and that is OK too. All those hard fought for writing routines are under incredible pressure right now. Just stop worrying about research and writing at least for a few weeks in the midst of a global meltdown. Eventually you will (probably) adjust to the new ‘normal’ of online lecturing whilst a toddler is swinging on your leg. Or not. Eventually you may find your feet. Your eventually might be three weeks, three months or however long. That is OK.

All your writing progress is not lost. Depending on your personality, you might actually find a bit of solace in writing, since it is a solitary activity, requires utter concentration, and a blocking out of the world. This kind of fits the bill right now. For an hour or two, it might sooth your soul. That is OK. But equally, it might not.

Needless to say your publication pipeline will need some severe adjustment. When you wrote that, a global meltdown was not on the cards.

There are a lot of people holding free online social writing events (check out ScholarShape and the Professor is in offering free stuff, and CampNaNoWriMo). There are some asshats trying to monetise this disaster of course too. I won’t shame them here. When people tell you who they are, believe them.

All my courses will be pushed back a wee bit until we have found some equilibrium in this new world. I will continue with the free stuff as much as I can. If you would benefit from a free Write with Me Friday, I am happy to put these on in the future when we have had time to adjust. Please post any interest on the Facebook page.

For now, stay safe. Forget the rest.

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.

Getting published in academia: pitfalls and perseverance

The publishing process in academia - getting your article from your first ideation to printed - can be a tricky and sometimes tortuous path. If you search ‘how to get published’ there is a lot of great advice out there - including my How to Write and Publish a Journal Article Course - about choosing the right journal (making sure you have fit) and ensuring you have a lot of robust feedback before sending out the manuscript. This is excellent advice. But it doesn’t describe the publishing journey nor does it demystify what a brutalising experience it can be.

Advice tends to imagine the writing experience as some kind of linear event: idea-and-journal-selection-in tandem; research; writing (to that journal style); submission; revisions; acceptance. This is not my experience.

So I thought I would describe my last publishing ‘journey’ to highlight some pitfalls and the need for perseverance in writing and publishing, including some common traits that make publishing more difficult.

1. Ideas that are cross disciplinary don’t fit

My last published journal article was about the rule of law and how the EU was handling the conduct of Hungary and Poland in this context. I saw a call for papers in a destination that sounded appealing (Trento, Italy). It was a political science, not law, workshop and required a novel cross disciplinary approach. Full papers were expected upfront as the promise was a special edition of a particular high profile journal. The presentation went well. It had taken 3 months to write the paper and was finished by September 2014.

It took around 12 months to understand that the special edition bid had failed and now I had to find a publishing outlet for this on my own. I had used a framework from another discipline (organisational theory). It was unlikely to get past editors in legal journals due to the framework. It was unlikely to be accepted in political science journal because there was too much law. The very thing that made my work novel, made it essentially unpublishable in any journal I could think of. I had not started off with a journal in mind, I started off responding to a call for papers with a special edition attached . I don’t think this is that uncommon for researchers, yet all publishing advice starts with journal fit.

2. Scope of idea too large

If I could write a book on this topic, I could probably convince both audiences this was a great idea, but in 10,000 words or less, it was a road to hell. The idea was too big. I needed a lot of time to explain what was happening in the real world (a lot) and the intellectual framework also needed a lot of word count. It didn’t work. It could not work in a journal format. But I persisted anyway.

3. Feedback can be brutal (9 months on)

All the feedback from my peers confirmed my worst fears. It was clunky and there was not enough detail to convince on the framework (naturally some were kinder in how they said this than others). I rewrote this. Bulked out my referencing. 18 months. More feedback. More research. Essentially the same feedback again.

4. Don’t let the noise of others demoralise you

By now many articles had appeared on this topic. I felt like it had all been done although in reality much of these contributions were nothing like mine. Particular scholars were literally building a career on the topic and drowning the airways and every possible outlet with their endless stream of contributions. This in itself was incredibly demoralising. I put it in the drawer and brooded (what a waste of time!).

5. Do you really have something to contribute? Submit.

Everything I had predicted in my article came true. So, out of the drawer it came. I sent it off to the top generalist journal. I had little hope in publication but wanted different feedback. Within 2 weeks I got desk rejected but with some excellent advice which focused on the scope - it was too big for a journal and the framework didn’t work (and it didn't fit that journal which I already knew). The journal editor was really encouraging and very polite. I did yet more work on this.

6. Resubmit

3 years. I resubmitted to a different journal I thought it belonged in. It is a very good journal and is very hard to get published in. After 8 months under review, I got 2 split reviews: ‘This is the best thing ever’ and ‘This doesn’t work for me’. So a third reviewer was sought only to say no. I got the ‘after much thought no’ email. By this time this was the hottest topic around, and was exciting a lot of political and deeply felt academic opinion. Reviewers had very strong opinions and reactions. This had become a very controversial piece that could never please everyone. It had not felt like that when I began because when I began no-one was interested in it.

7. Talk to the journal editor

I emailed the journal editor and said that I would, with permission, try to respond to the reviewers’ comments and resubmit as a fresh submission because I thought it was incredibly important and this was the right home for this piece. They agreed.

8. Bite the bullet

I took a machete to my article. I removed all trace of the framework and wrote it as purely a legal piece. It broke my soul to do so. I removed the novelty. I wrote in paragraphs about nonsense as a defence to the next set of reviewers so that I did not get accused of being ignorant of one set of literature or another. I toned down some of my opinions, or at least my language in expressing it. Six months later, I submitted it again.

9. Time lapse

I received an email saying I had two reviews, and the editor was minded to publish so could I do my best to respond to some of the criticism in the reviews.

10. More revisions

The reviews were much harsher than the first (reject) reviews. One of the problems was a lot of time had elapsed since I had put it in for review (7-8 months) and a lot had happened in the real world. Naturally the reviewers queried whether I knew what I was talking about since I had not mentioned x, y, z (all happened after submission). The reviews were done by (I suspect) a rather senior scholar whose contribution was kind yet critical and had some amazing ideas, and one was done by what appeared to be a more junior scholar (it went on for pages and was a bit unprofessional at times). Once I got over my initial recoil, both had something worth listening to, especially in terms of clarifying my ideas in certain places and of course updating with recent events.

11. The final publication

I finished the revisions and copy edited it and it is published December 2019. It is no doubt a better written piece of work in terms of the clarity of my expression, and no doubt a poorer piece of work because I was unable to do something novel and interesting with some inter-disciplinary research. The more ambitious the research, the less easily it will be published. I had to write a lot of paragraphs in defence of what someone might misunderstand or accuse me of not knowing. All of that took up word count that I could not then use for actual analysis or core argument.

This is hard to accept when you spend so much time on something. But it is part of the peer review system.

Lessons learned

Perhaps there is no ‘typical’ publishing journey. This was not typical for me. Although you can try to ensure you pick a journal first, and don’t let too much time elapse, listen to feedback, and get lots of different feedback, you will still most likely get rejected and have to try several times. It is important that junior scholars know this. I did not know this because no-one talked about it. This process can easily devolve into fear, doubt and loathing.

15 years before I had written a piece and sent it to a senior mentor. He ringed some sentences and wrote in red pen ‘these are hostages to fortune. They are true. But don’t write them’. What he was getting at was these statements (which were neither here nor there in the final analysis) are like loose threads on a jumper, waiting to be pulled by an unkind or pedantic reviewer and can be made into something much bigger than they are, leading to rejection. I had forgotten that lesson. My framework was a hostage to fortune. Once that was removed, all that as left was a difference of opinion on tone and the usual lament of not dealing with x or y in enough detail (word limit). There had never been anything wrong with the research, the core idea or the conclusions drawn from it.

Getting published is hard. It requires a lot of perseverance, an enormous capacity to absorb rejection and not take it personally, and being able to act on the feedback you are given.

Creating a writing practice

Consciously deciding you are going to create a new relationship with your writing takes guts.

An enormous amount of guts.

You need a healthy dose of self-awareness, and a desire to do things differently.

Your writing practice will be your own. What works for others cannot be seamlessly transplanted onto you. You need to create something that works for you. There is no one-size fits all, but there are some common messages given in research on academic writing.

Protect and dedicate specific time. Don’t engage with things/people who derail you. Write with others. Understand how to use feedback. Understand your inner demons.

Academic writing is something that can get pushed to the margins of your day job if you let it. It is also a part of the academic job that exposes us to intense criticism, and intellectual challenge. Naturally, sometimes we want to shy away from that. But this behaviour creates a cycle of dread and unhappiness, guilt and loathing.

It should be (and is) a privilege to write for a living. It should be something that we enjoy, look forward to, even escape into from other demands of the job.

To create a writing practice that works for you, you need to spend some time consciously thinking about your own mindset, habits and challenges. There is no quick fix. It is a holistic challenge. For some, this will mean changing their thought processes about the task of writing, yet for others, it means challenging their own behaviours around writing and how they respond to the demands of others.

Creating a healthy academic writing practice is easier when you do it with others. Setting up departmental writing groups, or using social writing online, or engaging with writing retreats (or even a Writing Coaching Course!) will provide a forum that offers the structures you need to bring the joy back into your writing practice.

It can be joyful. Let’s all try to be happier writers.