I’ve managed to hold off on writing this post until the spring semester is all but over, in part because I didn’t want to fall victim to the faculty version of senioritis that Jason recently wrote about. But now that summer’s nearly here, planning for the summer and beyond is absolutely fair game.
One of the things that ProfHacker has been best at is sharing strategies for making the most out of the little bits of time to be found in a crowded schedule. Natalie, for instance, brilliantly discussed how to prioritize and delegate small tasks for periods when you won’t have much time and Billie’s recent Writers’ Boot Camp post focused on using tools like 750words.com to facilitate and reward working in manageable chunks.
These are key strategies for getting work done when there’s too little time, as is nearly always the case during a regular semester. When there’s plenty of time -- say, a full year’s leave, which I’m lucky enough to be about to embark upon -- most of us would have a clear sense of what to do, of how to plan for and make progress on a large-scale project.
But what of the in-between state -- when there’s plenty of time, but only for a short while? This is true of summers, of course, but also of the one-semester leaves that are increasingly the norm for those of us privileged enough to have sabbaticals. How can you make the most of the time you’ve got while you’ve got it, without succumbing to the anxiety that the swift passage of that time can produce?
Reorient Your Thinking
My last leave was during the blissful Spring 2006 term. I knew my leave would be followed by a summer, and so would be a bit longer than one semester, but I was still anxious about it. As I began planning for the leave during the preceding spring, all I could see was that I was right at the very end of a major project, and uncertain about the direction of the next one. I was worried about how much I could really accomplish in a semester, afraid that I’d finally get my bearings in the new project just at the point when I had to go back to teaching. And I was really worried about how quickly that sabbatical was going to go by: a teaching semester is nearly over as soon as it starts, and that would surely be even more true with a semester of leave.
Right at the end of the preceding academic year, however, just before I left for the summer, I had a conversation with my dean, during which I mentioned how much I regretted not having been able to find the support required to take a full year of leave, and my worries about how much I’d be able to accomplish in one semester. My dean shook his head and told me that I was thinking about it all wrong. “It’s not four months of leave,” he said. “It’s fifteen months of leave interrupted by fifteen weeks of teaching.”
Now, I’m at a small liberal arts college, so this wasn’t the dismissal of the importance of teaching that it may sound like. Instead, it was a call for me to reorient my perception. If I had imagined my leave as four months in which I could work, I might plan for a manageably completed four-month project. But with a year-plus ahead (even a year that contained one fifteen-week interruption), I might take on an entirely different project, one that would matter more to me in the long run.
So, instead of thinking of Summer 2005 as a summer, to be followed by a regular fall semester and finally a spring sabbatical, I instead embarked upon my sabbatical at the start of the summer, then came back and taught my fall classes, and then picked up my sabbatical again in December.
Plan Ahead
Doing this, however, required a pretty significant recalibration of my relationship to the flow of the academic year. Instead of believing that the year was broken into Time For My Work (predominantly summers and leaves) and Time For My Students (every other bit of time), I needed to see the ways that writing and teaching could be woven together. It helped me to think of them as the A-plot and B-plot of a television series (yes, I’m in media studies): one always takes priority at a given moment, but the other doesn’t cease to exist in the meantime; one may stretch out across an entire season while the other may be exhausted in an episode.
If for the year of my one-semester leave, my research became the A-plot -- the one most central to the overall trajectory of my work, the one that would provide the year’s narrative arc -- and yet would need to be temporarily displaced by the B-plot of the fall’s teaching, I needed to think about ways to keep the A-plot alive, so as not to lose the thread.
What I needed to do was shift my sense of what it meant to get work done, understanding that progress can be made during a teaching semester, even if only in small increments. So during the summer, as my leave-year-minus-fifteen-weeks began, I made a plan for the following spring, but I also thought about the kinds of lighter-intensity work that I knew I could accomplish while I was teaching, in order to keep the project from going into full hibernation. As in Natalie’s strategies for self-delegation, I created small tasks that even my teaching self could manage, and committed to keeping the A-plot active.
Be Prepared for Surprises
This strategy made the summer and fall more productive in a long-term sense than they’d likely have been otherwise; I allowed myself to linger in my research in a way that I might not have done in a normal summer, and so made significant headway on the research for my spring project well in advance of the spring itself.
As it turns out, however, the spring itself took an unexpected turn. Right after New Year’s, I wrote a blog post responding to something that had happened at the MLA meeting the week before. That blog post got me invited to write a guest post for The Valve, a group blog in literary studies, and that guest post got me invited to meet with the Institute for the Future of the Book, who were working on an aspect of what I’d written about, and that meeting led to a series of further meetings that finally led, many months later, to the founding of MediaCommons, one of the projects I’ve been working on since.
Had I thought of my summer as simply a summer, thought of the fall as a regular semester of teaching, and thought of the spring as the entirety of my sabbatical, I’d have been much less likely to allow myself the freedom to wander a bit off-task. I’d have jealously hoarded my time, forcing myself to stay focused on the article I intended to research and write, and I’d probably have left it at that. Instead, thinking about the larger flow of the year gave me the flexibility to incorporate the unexpected into my plans.
This flexibility came particularly in handy during my very first sabbatical, a year-long junior leave during which I completely rewrote my first book, despite the year beginning with 9/11 and ending with me in the hospital being treated for a blood clot. But I digress.
Rest, and Have Fun
Such flexibility doesn’t come easily, particularly if you’re hearing the clock ticking or the calendar pages flying in the background. Determined to make the most of short periods away from teaching, we often overload ourselves with work only to find we’re too exhausted or stressed out to focus.
The best piece of advice that I got prior to my junior leave was from a senior colleague, who was just at the end of a year’s leave; “remember,” he told me, “that Sabbath and sabbatical have the same root for a reason.” As scholars, we often sprint headlong from one task to the next, without ever taking the time we need simply to be still.
So when I found myself, for several weeks after 9/11, utterly unable to concentrate on my book, I forgave myself that, and took several weeks completely off. I read novels that I had no intention of either teaching or writing about; I watched movies and television shows just for fun; I went to the gym, and caught up on my rest, and saw some friends and family. And then, when I was ready, I went back to work, and accomplished far more over the next couple of months than I’d have been able to had I forced myself to struggle through.
Having learned that lesson well the first time, I made sure during my most recent leave-year-minus-fifteen-weeks to set aside some time early on to rest. It’s probably not accidental that the blog post that spawned MediaCommons came during such a rest period; because I felt myself to be on vacation, I was free to do whatever I wanted -- as long as it was fun.
And that sole requirement -- that it be fun -- perhaps did the most to transform what could have been a high-pressure semester of Time For My Work into the beginning of a series of long-term projects that I really wanted to accomplish, as it helped me remember why I wanted to do the work in the first place.
These small shifts in my thinking wound up having a terrific impact not only on what I was able to get done during my last sabbatical, but also on what I’ve done in the four years since. What strategies do you have for making the most out of the too-short periods of time when you can focus exclusively on research and writing?
[Creative Commons licensed photo by Flickr user gnackgnackgnack]