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Editor’s 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: I have a monograph, two conference talks, an edited volume, and a grant application that I need — fairly urgently — to be working on. And I also have two kids, a working spouse, limited childcare, and teaching responsibilities, so realistically I have only three hours a day to work. It’s urgent! But every time I even think about concentrating on one of these projects, I get stressed out about not working on the others, and then I end up not doing anything. How do I work on multiple pieces of scholarship simultaneously?
Signed,
Cloning Myself Not an Option
Dear Cloning,
Whenever I wish I could clone myself — for your same stated reason — I always end up deciding that any clone I employed to do all of my onerous tasks would eventually rebel, clone herself, then delegate to sub-clones, who would then rebel, too. The end result would just be 200 versions of me, still burnt out from 18 months of pandemic turmoil, sitting on the couch shoving blueberries into our faces watching Gossip Girl.
And so, I had to come up with a more workable plan. By which I mean: two plans.
You can approach the challenge of churning out concurrent pieces of scholarship or research via multiple points of entry. The only strategy I don’t recommend: doing each task to completion successively. That is best avoided for the simple reason that academic tasks almost always end up taking two to three times as long as our original, magical-thinking estimates. (You know it’s true.) So if every single work timeline for a project ends up dragged out longer than expected, that will mean that the five or so projects you’re supposed to have put to bed by year’s end will be done by the end of the year, all right, but that year will be 2025.
Here are two systems that work better. To determine which one best suits you, try each of them for a week, keeping track of what you got done and how you felt doing it.
Option No. 1: The Daily Juggle. This one can be daunting but the ability to switch between projects on a single day — even in the same work session — is a skill you can develop with practice and (just a little bit of) discipline. Here’s how I’d recommend you schedule your first week, devoting three hours a day to your writing and research:
(I don’t ever create a work plan that requires weekend hours, because many scholars don’t have child care available on weekends.)
With the Daily Juggle, you might feel, at first, like you don’t have enough time to work on any one thing. However, after a few weeks of operating this way — consistently — you’ll find that some of those tasks (smaller, easier ones like the grant application) start to drop off, and you’re able to allot more time to your monograph. And, of course, even 15 minutes of daily work adds up eventually.
However, if the mere thought of juggling multiple projects every day gives you hives, try this instead:
Option No. 2: Dedicated Days. In this approach, you spend each weekday doing a specific thing — mostly — but you don’t spend long enough away from any one thing to forget what you were doing with it before. A Dedicated Days schedule might look like this:
This example is a little extreme, since not everyone has five things they’re working on at once. If you’ve got two or three things you need to focus on now — say, a grant application and a monograph — work on the grant proposal Monday and Friday, and then allot Tuesday through Thursday to the monograph. Use the last 30 minutes of Monday to skim over your recent work on it and prepare yourself to dive back into it the next day.
Reality check: Neither of these methods is going to get that incredible glut of work finished as fast as you want it to be done. There simply are not enough human hours in the day to do everything you have to do. However, what these methods will accomplish — and I recommend switching between them every month or so, to keep your brain fresh — is a lot more successful than sitting around panicking, doing nothing, and feeling terrible about yourself.
Question: Someone whose productivity I admire told me that I need to shut off all distractions when I work: no social media, no news, no email. Just focus on the work. They even recommended I remove certain apps from my phone altogether. Is this a good idea?
Signed,
Definitely Not On Twitter Right Now
Dear Definitely,
I can understand the impulse to eliminate distractions and create a hyperbaric silence chamber for just yourself and your beautiful scholarship. However, that admirable impulse is the same one that causes people to want to, say, give up carbs entirely, or start getting up every day at 4:30 in the morning to commune with their beautiful thoughts amidst sunrise and birdsong, or spend $5,000 on a stationary bicycle hooked up to the internet.
We all want to exist as the better, healthier, fitter, more productive, and more perfect versions of ourselves. But if the one we see in the mirror is the other one — the real one, the one who stress-ate a few doughnuts yesterday and snoozed through an alarm and is using that $5,000 app-bicycle as a clothesline — then we’ll feel like such a failure that what’s even the use of trying at all? You see where I’m going here?
I recommend the opposite approach: Try to sneak in 15 to 45 minutes of work around the imperfect reality of your life as it already exists, every day. Then, as you achieve moments of success, however brief, in your work, build on them. Use the momentum you created to work for longer stretches — and you’ll stay off Twitter for longer, too, without even noticing that you’re doing it.
There are times, of course, when purging distractions can be useful. If you’re just not getting the words down, no matter what you try, then maybe it’s time to turn off your phone and give yourself an ultimatum: OK, tomorrow I need 250 words out before I can brush my teeth and drink coffee, much less check TikTok. After a few days of that, you’ll have some results, and then you can go back to your regular work routine.
