Note: In the “Are You Working?” series, a Ph.D. and academic-writing coach answers questions from faculty members and graduate students about scholarly motivation and productivity. This month’s questions arrived via Twitter and Facebook. Read her previous columns here.
Question: Every semester I start with lofty goals for my research and writing — and every semester, my teaching obligations slowly eat those goals alive. How can I manage to get some writing done when there is all this prep, teaching, and grading taking up all of my time?
Signed,
Is Writing While Teaching Impossible?
Dear Impossible,
Technically, writing at exactly the same time you’re teaching — while not impossible — is inadvisable. Your students may wonder what you’re doing and then get bored and leave. But of course you mean that it’s difficult to maintain a writing practice during the academic term. Writing requires both inspiration and time, and tending to the various aspects of teaching can monopolize your inspiration and annihilate your time.
What a lot of academics do is simply give up their writing during the semester or quarter, and assume they will get everything done during holiday breaks. Not only is that farcical in its incorrectness — Ph.D.’s are ostensibly smart, and yet many seem incapable of understanding the spatiotemporal limits of trying to squeeze months of writing into weeks of vacation time — but it also continues to idealize a toxic and unhealthy “always-working” mentality that contributes to burnout.
So let’s try something different. I have three strategies for how to wrangle time for your writing and research during a busy week of teaching.
But first, you have to accept that teaching, at the undergraduate level at least, requires a different intellectual and physical frequency than grown-up scholarship. Especially as the term wears on and classroom obligations (and student stress and grading) mount, you simply will not be in optimum condition to undertake the sort of 10-hour marathon sessions that defined your research and writing time in, say, graduate school. So plan accordingly: What are the lower-bandwidth tasks in your research corpus that still need to get done but that can be accomplished without your having to conjure a perfect confluence of working conditions? For example:
- Everyone needs to do their footnotes and bibliography sometime, and scientists and social scientists always need to clean up their data or make their charts and graphs look cool.
- It takes more energy to start something new than to finesse a work in progress. So when that particular resource is in short supply, I would recommend working on a manuscript that is already more than 50 percent “done” (i.e., most of the research is finished and the data processed, and at least 25 percent of it written).
These sorts of projects lend themselves to 45-minute chunks of time, and said chunks are much easier to arrange during a busy week than any mythical five-hour visit from the (largely imaginary) muse. How much time you’ll be able to devote to your scholarly work will definitely depend on your teaching load and schedule, but I have three basic approaches that offer something for everyone.
- Approach 1: Draw sharp lines between your teaching days and research days. If you are fortunate enough to have all of your courses meet on the same two or three days of the week, devote those days fully to teaching (and to various administrative obligations). Free yourself from the expectation that, after five straight hours in the classroom, you will return to your office (on campus or at home) refreshed and ready to think very hard about your own stuff. (You will not. You will arrive ready to binge-watch The Great British Baking Show and then wonder why you’re suddenly craving pie.) Now here’s the difficult part: On the days you do not have contact hours with students, do not think about teaching at all. These days are your sacred research space, and your students simply do not exist. Nothing anyone wants from you cannot wait 24 hours. The flip side: On the days you do teach, you’ll have to cram in your preparation and grading as well. The good news here is that teaching work has the magic ability to expand and contract to fit exactly the time it is given. So give it two to three full days a week (and, alas, the occasional weekend during those last crazy weeks of the semester), and nothing more.
- Approach 2: Prioritize your own work for a designated stretch of every day. If you teach five days a week, the luxury of pretending your students (bless ‘em) don’t exist for an entire day or two is not possible. What is possible, however, is blocking them out for 25 to 60 minutes — say, first thing in the morning. Simply refuse to check email or even look at your lesson plan or course materials until you have accomplished one small, concrete task for your own research. This approach requires some drive to establish and stamina to maintain. It’s all too easy to put your most immediate teaching obligations first, but your writing deserves to take up space and be prioritized, too. Once you get used to devoting at least a short chunk of every day to writing, any day when you don’t — because you jumped into teaching obligations without checking in with yourself first — just doesn’t feel right.
- Approach 3: Desperate times, etc. If you teach five days a week and you simply do not have even 45 minutes to spare during those workdays, then comes a hard-core strategy that I do not recommend over the long term. Two to three nights a week, try to eke out about 25 to 45 minutes of a scholarship task sometime between 7 p.m. and 9 p.m. If you work any later than that it might disrupt your sleep; any earlier and you may have children screaming in your ear the whole time. The last thing I want to do here is encourage you to work a “third shift,” after a full day of teaching followed by family and home duties. But if you have no other choice, a very small amount of work at night — two to three times a week — will do an astounding amount to keep your research afloat during the term.
Finally, let’s be realistic here. The last two weeks of class and finals week are a total loss. Don’t set any deadlines during that time, and if you completely fall off your practice at this juncture, simply remember that forgiving yourself literally costs zero dollars, and do it.
Question: Like many early-career academics, I am having trouble saying no to obligations (edited volumes, conferences, etc.) that I have no time or desire to fulfill. What if that one thing I declined to do ends up snubbing the one person I need a favor from in 10 years? How can I stand up for myself while still not sabotaging my career?
Signed,
In Search of a Failsafe “No” Script
Dear Just Say No,
Here is a durable approach for protecting your time and your relationships with colleagues:
- Answer the invitation with effusive delight — about how there is truly nothing you would rather do than contribute a 7,500-word paper to an edited volume that will do nothing for your CV. Then tell the inviter that you will have to check your calendar before you can commit to anything. This gives the petitioner the necessary dopamine rush of knowing you think the project is cool.
- Do nothing for a week or two. This should not be hard because you will be inundated with other work obligations.
- Within 14 days of your initial reply, send a follow-up email with a bulletproof excuse (one that’s true) about some odious committee obligation or a tenure review or some other triggering thing that explains why you can’t participate and that will make your colleague recoil in empathy and feel sorry for you.
And, yes, make sure to state that you would love to work with this individual in the future (even if that part is not true). You truly never do know whose help and friendship might save your (academic) life one day, so it’s a good idea to keep all relationships as friendly as possible.
But that doesn’t mean committing to things that you have no interest or time for. There are some obligations that you simply should not take on, either for practical or mental-health reasons. Finding a way to draw the boundary with utmost diplomacy is, and remains, an important skill in academic life.
