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.

Conferencing: to conference or not to conference?

Conferencing: the dark ages

Conversations about the pros and cons of attending conferences are beginning to change. In ye olden days (10 years ago) it was simply a must. You must go and be seen and network In Real Life. Then, the questions were about choosing the right conference in order to get the most out of it. In early scholarly life, this would have been decided by reference to the following:

• Were the right people (major thinkers in your field) going to be there?

• Was this going to be a real opportunity to get good feedback on your work?

• Could you afford it? Would your meagre conference budget be blown on one outing that year and if so, was it going to be worth it?

These were the BIG questions. No-one really thought about whether conferences would be accessible, in terms of not being ableist in their design, location or structure. No-one thought (or cared) about the differential impacts conferencing had on women with children (ie those primary carers who could not go), let alone the imperative to provide on-site childcare facilities to mitigate these impacts. No-one thought about the ‘othering’ and outright discrimination that can occur at these events for POC.

Less still (though all women knew it) was it openly discussed whether these venues would be safe spaces for women. Would they be able to navigate them without the customary, nay expected, bout of sexual harassment that openly populated women’s experience of conferencing.

The big decisions were between the major conferences in your field with thousands of papers, which in reality meant giving a paper to 4 of your work colleagues in a hotel room on the other side of the world (or to literally no-one), or whether to go to a smaller subject specific workshop where there was an actual opportunity to meet scholars closely connected to your field and get feedback were the hot topics of debate.

Shamelessly, the other major consideration was whether it was a lovely location. The more tropical the better. The more distant and exotic the better. It was one of the perks of the job.

Conferencing, climate change and accessibility

This attitude to conferencing seems woefully out of date with the times. Whether to conference or not at all is high on the agenda of many academics for ethical reasons. Whether to restrict your air travel (easier or harder depending on where you are located), prioritise train travel, offset your carbon emissions, or simply only attend local conferences are today’s conferencing questions.

Despite all the changes in technology that make remote participation a possibility, the people who organise conferences seem unwilling or unable to change with the times. We still hear the familiar narrative that in person drinks (hello, yet more exclusionary behaviour) are just so essential to building a network, but the truth is many of us are addicted to what we still see as the perk of the job. And unless conference organisers grasp the nettle, the pressure on junior scholars to go to these events will not abate. They feel they have to go. They must build their career through conferencing.

Of course, it is not just conference organisers that are to blame. The international conference is the spawn of many parents. Universities still have archaic ‘indicators of esteem’ in their promotion criteria which are most easily fulfilled by showing you have been invited or presented your work at an international conference. Similarly, the establishment of a global or world leading reputation in a field is seen as being concomitant with travelling to far flung places. Grant bodies require evidence of extensive dissemination of your work and whilst this can be achieved in many ways, the obligatory international conference circuit is still important. You can get enormous amounts of funding to build networks which in and of itself require travel to fulfil the grant conditions. Building cross disciplinary teams with international partner Universities also reflect the priorities of big grant funders.

No-one disputes global collaboration is part of moving knowledge forward. But does this require we all travel to multiple far flung places every year to huge conferences? I’m not sure it does.

Whether and how you choose to conference, or to limit your conference travel, is a decision for each scholar to make, but we should all be pressuring conference organisers and Universities to rethink centuries old mentality. The format of conferences must change for so many reasons: accessibility, discrimination, equality, sexual harassment and climate change are just some of them.

Curating your on-line presence

In order to build an effective academic brand, and be able to constantly curate that brand, you have to actively manage your on-line presence. What happens when you google your name? If you have an unusual name, you are in luck, since it will require less work for you to maintain your academic brand on-line. If you are blessed with a name like mine (Smith), well, those are the breaks.

It is tough to be a Smith on-line.

What are your options?

There are many different approaches to managing your on-line presence. Some people maintain that you should have one profile, on one social media site (besides your institutional affiliation) and that is all you need. Do one thing well.

I’m not a fan of this approach simply because of the way algorithms on Google stack pages. The more (consistent) social media presence you have, the easier it is to build a brand. You don’t have to do everything but the more you do, the more your profile will be at the top of the list on Google.

First make sure you have a on-line list of your publications. Whether you choose Academia.edu, Google Scholar or ResearchGate to list your publications, make sure it is kept up to date. I have ResearchGate and Google Scholar because these are very searchable platforms and free, and they take a lot of the work of updating away from you. I am not active on these platforms and I don’t use them for research per se. I update them once a year, so they are not particularly onerous. I don’t share publications over these platforms due to potential copyright issues, and I don’t post draft work due to the possibility of it being stolen (it happens).

There are certainly better ways to engage with peers through these platforms than I do. But this doesn’t matter. These pages help tie my profile together and rank highly on Google. I also have a LinkedIn profile to reach an entirely different (mainly industry) audience, but still with the consistent information about who I am and my publications list.

Institutional profiles

You probably have an institutional webpage that lists your publications. In the UK, it is compulsory for REF purposes to have such a thing. Do not let this be your only online presence. These are usually clunky, ugly and badly maintained, and they unnecessarily tie your profile to your employer. Your brand is not where you work remember. In my experience, it takes several weeks and many forms filled in triplicate to alter anything on these pages. It is just not worth the effort.

Should you have your own webpage?

I think you should. These can be cheap (or free depending on the platform) and are within your sole control in terms of style, how you present yourself and the different ways you can engage with your peers, be it through podcasting, blogs or video abstracts (blogs on how to do this later). Your personal webpage (with your name as the domain) offers a whole host of possibilities to curate your online presence and your academic brand in a way that you see fit.

Video content and podcasting are also listed first by Google in searches, so one way to increase your visibility online is to make some content using this media. This would be impossible to post on your institutional webpage, but easy when you have your own.

The idea of running your own webpage may sound a little intimidating and also alot of work. But maintaining a webpage for research projects is increasingly common (and sometimes a requirement of funders) so it is never too early (or late) to try and learn how to do this. Typically, academics use Wordpress (ugly), or sometimes Wix (nicer) to build pages, but there are many other platforms out there.*

This sounds like work

Well it is a bit, but it is not too bad. Building a webpage can take a couple of days or a week if you are learning for the first time. I use a social media management platform to manage Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. The joy or your own webpage is that all of this is totally integrated. I can post to LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Vimeo and so on all from my webpage. So once it is set up, it is a good way to take control of how you present yourself, rather than relying on the dusty, fusty institutional dungeon to show your wares.

However you choose to do it, it is wise to show an awareness that the first thing people do when they hear about you, or meet you (or potentially think about hiring you) is to Google your name. Make sure what they see reflects your brand.

*My websites are all hosted on Squarespace which is stylish, but not for beginners.

Self promotion versus engagement in brand building

Today I want to talk a little bit about the idea of your academic brand vis a vis the concepts of engagement and self promotion.

Building your academic brand is a minefield because it requires you to carefully traverse the terrain of being an insufferable ****** on social media who everybody hates, and someone who genuinely shares things to engage and inform a relevant audience about your research or ideas.

Twitter I think is probably the most difficult platform to manage in this regard. First you should be on Twitter. But how you use Twitter should be consonant with building your professional brand. If you want to re-tweet cat videos, probably get a personal account for this.

Twitter can be a valuable information source for your own research and it can be a good place to share your research, especially if your followers are people in your field (or connected) who might actually read and engage with what you are tweeting.* However, it can seriously damage your mental health too, so it pays to think before you Tweet, and also, think before opening Twitter.

I tend to use a social media management platform (I use Hootsuite, but others are available) to manage Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc). I am not just randomly hanging about there, because it is not a good place to be hanging out.

I am mindful of my social media health and you should be too.

Engagement

When you use social media to engage, you are sharing valuable information that other scholars might find useful. This can be a direct self promotion - here is a link to an article I have published on X. You can @ particular scholars who might find it helpful. This is of course telling everyone you published (hoorah) but it also serves a community purpose. It shares useful information. This is a good use of Twitter. This is engagement. You have built a following (or follow specific people) who are relevant to your research and field and you have given them a heads up on something they might find useful. You are building a community and a brand. If you are a senior scholar (but not the head of school) you should absolutely promote the work of junior scholars you think is interesting and useful via referencing it and its content. Use your platform to pay it forward. Be a generous and kind mentor.

You can even Tweet about being at a conference if you have something to say about it, the panels and the papers. Share what you have heard, or presented. Thinly veiled ‘it was great to be here’ references are pretty pointless. It is like writing ‘I WAZ HERE’ inside the toilet stall. With your name attached.

Grandiose self promotion

If all you do on Twitter is promote your CV (I was here, here, here and here, and also here; I did this, look how important I am, LOOK AT ME) you are one of those people I have to mute. I’m pretty certain others are muting you too. Similarly if all you do all day long (it appears) is Tweet things (such as calling out stuff) also know I have you muted too. So when you do Tweet something useful (if you ever do) I will absolutely not be reading your work, because you were muted.

This head mashing, screaming into the void tells me a couple of things about you. I might not want to work near you, and I might think twice about hiring you, if you appear totally self absorbed in relation to your social media posting. You might not be giving out signals that appear very collegiate or community building orientated. So it is worth considering how you use social media to engage peers.

Be aware of the signals your Twitter feed is sending out about you and the kind of colleague (and scholar) you might be. Navigating the line between building your brand and sending out the kinds of tweets that annoys everyone because they are grandiose acts of self promotion (or worse, the humblebrag) is something you should pay serious attention to. This is not the same as building your brand.

*If you are looking for tips in managing algorithms on Twitter and getting more followers, please see @careerconversations who has really excellent technical advice.

Building an academic brand

Immediately some academics will recoil at the title of this blog. Brands are for Nike, Starbucks, Coca Cola. Not for academics. But I’m afraid this is a rather old fashioned view. Like it or loathe it, the need to curate your brand is real.

You can either consciously curate your brand, or leave it to the vagaries of the internet to curate it for you. I would rather be in charge of mine.

What is your brand?

Your brand is what you stand for as an academic. It is more than your skill set (I know R!). It is more than whether you are a quants or qual person. In fact, it is not really any of these things at all. Your brand is not really your skill set per se. Lots and lots of people have these skills. Your brand is (a) what you are THE expert in (b) what your USP is and (c) what professional image you have created for yourself outside of your institution.

Your brand is not where you work

Academics change workplaces a lot for a wide variety of reasons. Thus your brand is not where you work. Your brand goes with you. Your brand is not what your close friends or even your immediate colleagues think of you. Your brand is not the ‘bio’ that gets trotted out at conference introductions by the Chair who has never met you and has not read a single thing you have ever published. It is not the awful three sentences at the beginning of edited collections that trot out your name, title and affiliation.

Your brand is the shop front. The logo.

Creating your brand

Brand creation happens in your professional interactions with others outside your department. These interactions can be with other academics, stakeholders, policy makers or industry. These interactions can be on In Real Life, or on Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, SSRN or any number of other social media platforms.

You have the power to create your brand, or let it be created for you. Managing your interactions, especially on social media, is critical to how you will be perceived by others who may one day recruit you for a job, research, expert advice or other work related opportunity.

What are you THE expert in?

Being an academic requires a lot of flexibility. Even in so-called research intensive, research-led teaching Universities, the reality is oftentimes we do not teach what we are experts in. We might teach on the edges of our wider expertise (if we are lucky). We might simply be required to teach an enormous compulsory subject that all undergrads must take because someone has to. So we can say we know quite a lot about a range of topics. We have flexibility. This is not the same as not having a brand.

Indeed, this is one reason why your brand is not located inside your employing institution. Whatever research excellence you were hired for is long forgotten in the handing out of teaching, which is a process of sticking fingers in a leaking Dam. Constant exposure to this ‘flexibility’ can make you doubt you have any expertise at all. But you do. This is your brand. If there was an imaginary rolodex* in someone’s hand, where would your name be located? What would someone say about you in answer to: ‘Who do I need for this? Oh, yes [blah blah] is the person for x’. Consciously build this brand by promoting this particular expertise through publications, impact and engagement work. And on-line (but more on this next blog).

What is YOUR USP?

What is your unique contribution to field X. Let’s say you are an expert on Brexit. This is a pretty big topic, even within one single discipline. There are by now literally thousands of academics claiming expertise in this area, even within one discipline. Even within one sub-sub-discipline within one country. Thousands. What makes YOU special? What perspective, contribution, and skill set do YOU bring to this topic that makes you more desirable than A, B, or C? And how have you summed this up as your brand identity?

What is your professional image?

What are you known for outside your institution in terms of attitude, or positioning. Do you occupy a specific disciplinary school to which you are an ardent disciple? Do you call out others on Twitter who do not agree with your position? Are you passive aggressive (or just plain aggressive) to those who are outside your knitting circle (obviously the answer to this ought to be NO). Are you a community builder or destroyer? These questions are important particularly when you are at any stage in your career that does not occupy the territory of being 3-years-from-retirement-after-a-40-year-career pigeon hole. And even then, it ought to be important if you are a decent person.

A brand is bigger than the one-trick-pony

Getting known for THE THING is clearly central to building a brand. But beware of becoming a one-trick-pony or talking head. This does not hurt your brand directly, but it hurts your academic reputation in a number of other ways, which in turn compromises your brand. Promotion, for example, requires you to show development of your skills and knowledge, a branching off into other (connected yet different) areas that complement your expertise. Development indicates growth and change, yet this does not warrant a scattergun approach of doing whatever is asked, whatever crosses your desk, whatever the next zeitgeist is. This starts to make you look like jack of all trades, and master of none. Flimsy. And flimsy is not a good brand.

Next week I will continue the academic brand theme by talking about self promotion and engagement.

*a rolodex is a round thingy containing business cards. Think Mad Men. It is how people in the olden days used to locate someone they needed outside their organisation.

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?

Productivity apps and project management for academics

Part of the Academic Coach’s mission is to create happier writers. For some, this means writing more, but for others it means having a completely different, more balanced, relationship with writing. You do you.

Regardless of your motivation for taking a writing support course, there is no doubt that part of my writing coaching is about increasing your efficiency in the writing process, which in turn, will probably increase your productivity (or give you extra time for Netflix: no judgment).

So today I want to talk about something that comes up a lot. The utility of productivity apps.

Apps: useful or procrastination?

There are certain things I prescribe on my course. An app that tracks your time to provide you with data on how you spend your time, not in your head, but in actual reality. It requires minimal set up (10 minutes) and literally open and click to start and click to stop. This is efficient. There is a point to it. You are learning about your habits so you can change them. It produces a data set.

I also recommend using the Pomodoro method when you are stuck or can’t face writing. No app required, just your watch / phone, alarm and off you go. Of course there are a number of apps that behave like an alarm (like Focus), or you can just use your browser and type in tomato timer too.

But in my experience keeping it simple is best.

There are apps that delete your words if you don’t type fast enough (weird) or plant Trees as you type etc etc. These types of apps start to feel like procrastination tactics. Stay clear of these if you want to actually do your writing.

Project Management apps

Similarly there are lots of apps that claim to be project management apps, but most are optimised for business management or building sites / architects etc. They may have some utility if you are managing a huge grant with multiple partners, work packages and rolling deadlines on deliverables. In the name of research, I have tried most of these apps and whilst for 10 minutes they seem like they might help, in reality, such apps end up being very sophisticated methods of feeling like I am writing but not actually having to do any hard intellectual work. There is an app graveyard on my phone from failed experiments in productivity.

Whilst I am sure you might need some kind of interface for managing teams of people working on projects (eg Slack, Trello etc), in single authored disciplines, such things are, in my experience, an enormous waste of time. I have tried all the leading apps, and in the end, found I spent more time on the app than I spent writing which is definitively not the point of productivity management.

I’m very busy organising my Trello Board, so that’s work no? NO. IT ISN’T.

There simply is not a good enough app on the market for sole authored academics to manage their research time on. I want to love Trello. But I just can’t. I can’t see the point of endless lists and boards and yet one more thing to think about and manage (and I am an ardent list maker). One more thing to forget to login to, and then it soon becomes redundant.

Honesty: is this a diversion from actual work?

Whilst seeking technological help to improve your work flow is natural, it is useful to sit back and do an honesty check. Why are you really trawling the App Store for more productivity apps? Why didn’t you spend that time writing which, ahem, is far more productive?

Planning your work is important, but you don’t need an app for that.

I plan my work for the year in January (perversely outside of the academic year). New year, new plans. I review my pipeline and adjust accordingly. I pull out of commitments I cannot do, or renegotiate deadlines for things I want to commit to.

I have a white board as a physical reminder of work in or out and deadlines.

I have an on-line calendar which I plan my individual work sessions, and I review that each Monday morning for one hour to see what’s cooking this week.

I have a physical list of things to do each day and goals to achieve each week which I cross off as I achieve them. It is simple and clean and there is no room for procrastination in this technique. I spend more time actually writing than planning my writing which increases my efficiency, and in turn my productivity, and gives me more time for Netflix.

So give yourself a break from trying to make this or that app work for you. Just keep it simple, functional and you will spend more time writing than thinking of ways to improve your time management.

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.