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: It’s summer recess, and I can finally get some writing work done because I am not grading and answering student emails and attending meetings all week long. But, now that I have the time, I’m having a lot of trouble motivating myself to actually work on my research. Any advice to get me going?
Signed,
I Wish “Summers Off” Were a Real Thing
Dear Real Thing,
Indeed, it seems few faculty members ever take an entire summer off. If you’re fortunate enough to have a full-time position on the tenure track, you most likely work on a nine-month contract. Which means, technically, you are paid to get all of your research, teaching, and service done from September to May. Lucky you, you can spread out your salary (and your workload) over 12 months, and opt for lower paychecks during the academic year in exchange for the honor of being able to cover basic living expenses during June, July, and August.
It can be demoralizing, after toiling to keep up with the immediate demands of teaching and service, to reach the end of the academic year only to face a mountain of work that got repeatedly pushed to the side: writing, reading, data analysis, and the like. Using your summer break to catch up ends up feeling like free labor. And that’s hardly motivational.
So, RT, you’re actually not being paid to work during the summer — and yet, if you’re like most academics, you’ve got loads of things to do before the next term begins. Especially if you are untenured, you may feel under particular pressure to be productive in the next few months. I could do some rabble-rousing here about the fairness of faculty workloads and the increasingly time-consuming demands of teaching (done well) but that wouldn’t help you get your writing done this summer. And I do have some tips on that front.
Take a real break. Dedicate at least two weeks of the summer to a full-on vacation with family and/or friends. Or if, like me, you desperately need to decompress away from everyone, go alone. I cannot overemphasize how important this is to your mental and physical health — more important than any research, teaching, or conference project on your docket.
If you have offspring, especially if you are the primary parent, I recommend taking a third week off when the kids are in one of their extortionately priced summer camps or visiting the grandparents. And I mean take those camp hours all the way off. Do as little housework as possible. Go outside and take long walks every day listening to murder podcasts. Get a haircut. Catch up on Ted Lasso. Use that child-free week to do whatever you consider to be truly restorative.
Plan a (reasonable) work schedule. Unless you’re facing some critical looming deadline — for a book contract or a tenure file — your goal should be to create a not-at-all overzealous summer work schedule for yourself. Count up the weeks available until the start of fall classes, and then immediately subtract a week in August for scrambling around doing your syllabi and course prep.
From this new and more realistic end-of-summer date, figure out the number of days you are willing to work each week. For the most ambitious among you, that might be five days a week; for everyone else, I’d aim for three to four. If you want to work eight-hour days, go for it. But for the summer to be truly restorative, you should aim for three to four hours’ of daily work on some days, and on other days, an hour or two may be enough. (If you feel guilty about that, please remind yourself that you are not being paid this summer. Act accordingly.)
Here are some productive ways to get started:
Use the summer to organize your sources for a project. If you are at the secondary-source reading stage, you no doubt have a growing file of stuff that needs proper sorting. Create a table or a spreadsheet with three columns to record information about each source (your citation software may have a similar feature):
- Use the first column to list the correct bibliographic citation.
- In the second, write a short summary of the author’s primary point.
- And in the third (if warranted), note two to three pertinent quotes from that source.
Once you’ve populated the chart for a particular text, set that source aside. Maybe skim the rest of it if you’re feeling generous. You’re not taking an oral examination on your secondary sources; you will not be held accountable for their every nuance. Their authors will generally just be happy to get the citation. Move on. Reminding yourself of this will help prevent you from getting bogged down in one or two sources and then losing momentum to go through the rest.
Knock out a first draft. I find summer is a good time for the “sculpture method” of drafting. Here’s how it works if you’re starting a new draft of a paper:
- On your first day, set a timer for 30 minutes and lay down some freewriting that is the prosodic equivalent of a lump of clay.
- The next day, take a second look at that lump of clay and tweak it so that it begins to resemble a shape — the beginnings of an intro or a later paragraph in the piece. Then continue writing where you left off. Freewrite and produce some new prose that will look like a lump of clay.
- On Day 3, take a third look at your earliest prose and shape it again. This time it will really start looking like a coherent paragraph. Take a second look at the lump of clay you created yesterday, and shape it slightly. And then, you guessed it, start freewriting from where you left off on Day 2, and lay down another lump of clay.
The idea here is twofold: First, touch each section of writing three times as you slowly work to draft a paper, or a section of a larger manuscript. Each day, tweak your most polished work first and then use that momentum to create a few hundred more words of mess. Which you will then polish in the days ahead … until, by summer’s end, you have the makings of a strong first draft.
Second, and more important, at no point in this process are you expecting yourself to lay down perfect, clean prose. The sculpture approach makes it easier to start writing, and then frees you to write with less fear and more speed.
Get some productive reading done. If you feel like you’re out of date on the latest research in your subfield, or you’ve got a new upper-level course to teach, or you’re beginning (or updating) the literature review of an existing work, the summer can be a great time to read as long as you do it strategically. Unproductive reading is a massive time sink.
Before you read something, set yourself a goal: What is the “takeaway” you’d like from this source? Is it several good quotes you can use? A full and nuanced understanding of the text’s primary argument? A scathing rebuttal? Then, as you read, make sure to take active notes about this takeaway only, skimming over all other parts because they are irrelevant to your purposes.
Once you have achieved your takeaway, scan the rest of the work and never think about it again — unless you are legitimately enjoying it, in which case you do not need to be told how to read. Carry on.
Question: A colleague just asked me to be in charge of an edited volume that could end up being the gold standard in our field (think an Oxbridge companion or similar). It’s going to be so much work! How do I balance this with my monograph and teaching responsibilities?
Signed,
Ed.
Dear Ed.,
Have you said yes yet? If you have, then Godspeed. You must — I repeat, must — constrain all activity and bandwidth regarding this project to two afternoons a week, maximum, forever. It will get done eventually, I promise. But let everyone you’re working with understand that Thursdays and Fridays are your Oxbridge Companion to a Thing I Once Loved days, and any correspondence outside of those days will be answered later in the week. Three years from now you will have learned your lesson (I hope).
Which brings me to: If you haven’t said “yes” yet, say no. Say. No. Especially if you’re on the tenure track: Your name is “No” here.
Edited volumes are infamous for not pulling their weight on a CV. If you are at a research university, an edited volume will not really help you achieve tenure — which is your entire objective right now. An edited volume, even a prestigious one, will eat up your time and suck away your will to live. (Even if you work at a teaching-oriented institution where the research requirements of your job are lower, you will need to make sure that your department views an edited volume like this one as “enough” for tenure, or if it prefers original research.)
My answer is different if you already have tenure and are looking for a reason to procrastinate all other work for an indefinite period of time. If so, this project is exactly right for you.
As for how to balance your work duties with all of the effort required to produce an edited volume, I’m afraid the answer is: You don’t. Picture it: You’re working with 15 of your field’s brightest stars who are already busy. They may all be late with their contributions, and the quality of what they send you may be marginal. What do you do? Avoid this thankless project.
