With the end of the academic year approaching, many faculty members are thinking about the few months that will follow and the promise of huge chunks of uninterrupted time to write and do research. In short, they’re dreaming of a summer of maximum productivity.
But the reality for many professors can be quite different. Grand ambitions of banging out a book manuscript, fine-tuning multiple journal articles, or ramping up research often morph into a mad scramble to accomplish something before the summer ends. With so much unstructured time — and a shaky, if any, plan to make the most of it — many faculty members set their expectations too high and end up looking back on the summer months with a mix of resignation and regret.
For professors the stakes are high when it comes to summer productivity. It’s during these months that tenure-track faculty, especially, need to keenly focus on doing the research and producing the scholarship that are the coins of the realm for tenure and promotion. And at a time when professors are under increasing scrutiny for what they accomplish, all faculty have an additional incentive to have something to show for their “time off.”
Faculty members may plan to get a lot of work done over the break but often fall short of their expectations.
While professors know that summer time is critical to their careers, they’re often unsure about how to avoid common pitfalls of the three-month period, time-management experts say. At the core of setting the stage for summer productivity is coming up a with plan that includes realistic goals and then sticking to it.
“You think you have all this time to get everything done,” says Kristine L. Lowe, associate vice provost for faculty affairs at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley. “But in the end you realize that summer is much shorter than you think it is.”
Many institutions know that early-career faculty members need help with summer plans. At Rio Grande Valley, where Ms. Lowe is also an associate professor in the department of biology, new professors get summer-planning tips as part of a yearlong new-faculty support program. Later this month, the University of Tulsa will hold a daylong faculty workshop focused on summer writing. And at Bradley University, the last session of a new-faculty mentorship series covered how to plan a productive summer “so you can return to campus in the fall ready for another year.”
Although talk of summer productivity often revolves around accomplishing tasks, experts agree that time off should also be a key part of the conversation. Opinions differ about when faculty members should take a break — at the top of the summer or near the end with completed projects behind them — but vacation time is a must. And it’s best to start thinking about that now, they say, along with summer plans as a whole.
“Take some time off. At least a week would be ideal,” says Susan Robison, a psychologist and former faculty member and department chair who does faculty-development consulting with a focus on time management and work-life balance. “It might be a family vacation, you might go away with good friends, focus on a hobby — anything that really restores you. No doing work. You have to give your brain a rest.”
Doing that takes some advance planning of its own. Tanya Golash-Boza, a professor of sociology at the University of California at Merced, knows that she’ll be attending two writing retreats in May, and in July she’ll be doing field work and writing. In August she plans to attend an annual conference for scholars in her field. But she also declared June her month to vacation for two weeks.
“I’ve already had to say no to things people asked me to do because I know I’m not working in June and I’m at retreats in May,” says Ms. Golash-Boza in early March. She provides productivity and time-management tips for academics on a blog called Get a Life, PhD.
Academics, like everyone else, underestimate how long it will take to complete a task — a rule of thumb widely known as Hofstadter’s Law, for Douglas Hofstadter, a cognitive scientist and author. That problem is often at the root of unproductive summers, which is why faculty members are urged to set goals that are compatible with the amount of time they have.
At Rio Grande Valley, new faculty learn to block out chunks of times that are already spoken for — such as vacations, conferences, weeks when children are in their care, and teaching time — and then choose two or three high-priority projects that can realistically be completed around those commitments.
Ms. Lowe remembers learning this lesson the hard way. For a decade she voluntarily taught a high-demand class during the summer at the behest of her department chair. It was a move that brought in extra money, but clashed with her writing efforts.
“Because I was in class in the morning, I just knew I would have half a day to write for the whole summer,” says Ms. Lowe.
“Once you get a rhythm for your work, then you can just stop worrying whether you should be doing something else.”
Or so she thought. A sample of Ms. Lowe’s ambition: She once set out to write five papers in a single summer.
“I ended up being very disappointed with myself,” says Ms. Lowe, who oversees the university’s faculty-support program.
Avoiding that kind of disappointment boils down to having the final goal in mind before the academic year even ends. Ms. Robison advises clients to think about what they need to achieve to feel great about the summer when it’s over. Then plan backward, detailing the specific steps for each task. That’s when people will usually begin to understand that “there’s no way they can get it all done,” and they can make adjustments, she says.
Once the path to summer productivity is clear, a structured work schedule should follow. That’s because professors need a new routine to settle into to keep their professional pursuits on track once the familiar cadence of the academic year has disappeared.
“You need to set up some sort of work rhythm that works for you,” Ms. Robison says. “And then stick to it week in and week out.” Some academics decide to do certain tasks daily, like writing, in the mornings when they’re most alert. Others assign certain types of work to specific days. For instance, Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are for teaching prep, with Tuesdays and Thursdays reserved for research and writing.
“Once you get a rhythm for your work, then you can just stop worrying whether you should be doing something else,” says Ms. Robison, author of The Peak Performing Professor: A Practical Guide to Productivity and Happiness. “If it’s not the day to do what you’re worrying about, it’s not the day.”
Academic writing is the kind of task that triggers such worry, and many a professor has made plans to hole up somewhere until a writing project is done. But that typically doesn’t work for most people. A daily writing goal is more achievable and builds a habit that pays off beyond the summer.
Shervin Fatehi, an assistant professor of chemistry at Rio Grande Valley, has picked up that habit recently. Since the beginning of the year, Mr. Fatehi has used a free block of time he has each day, from 11 a.m. to noon, to write. The goal is to stick to that and then think of summer as just more of the same, but for longer chunks of time.
Mr. Fatehi is eager to improve on last summer. One month was “erased in terms of productivity,” he says, because he attended three weeklong conferences and then took an additional two weeks to do some personal travel.
“After that, I had nine weeks to try and get some things done,” says Mr. Fatehi of his first summer at his institution.
The advice he got at Rio Grande Valley was to set milestone dates for projects, figure out what would be measurable weekly progress for those projects, and then work diligently toward them.
“In the interest of full disclosure, I didn’t do that,” Mr. Fatehi says. An article he planned to write “unfortunately fell by the wayside” — squeezed out by all the travel he was doing, says Mr. Fatehi, whose research areas include theoretical and quantum chemistry. He also oversaw the progress of one of his undergraduate students who volunteered to spend the summer working on a computational geometry project.
On tap for Mr. Fatehi this summer: Personal travel, at least one academic conference, and he wants to finish writing and fine-tuning a couple of manuscripts by the end of June. After that he plans to work on a proposal to compete for an early-career award from the National Science Foundation, energized by his recent attendance at an NSF workshop on how to prepare such proposals.
As for structure during his work day, Mr. Fatehi owns up to being a night owl. He plans to make sure his summer schedule accommodates that.
“I’ll probably come in late morning at the earliest — noon is more realistic,” Mr. Fatehi says. “I basically try to enjoy living in my natural mode and not having to fight my biorhythms on a daily basis.”
Faculty members who are honest about their habits can find ways to use them to their advantage. Jared R. Hardesty, an assistant professor of history at Western Washington University, knows he does his best work at his office on campus. So he goes into the office every weekday during the summer.
“I can’t write from home,” says Mr. Hardesty, who is in the third academic year at Western Washington. “I tried it, and I get too distracted.”
Last summer he usually wrote in his office from about 8:30 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. during the week. Then he’d take a break — lunch and maybe a walk — and then do some reading for a couple more hours until the early afternoon.
This summer Mr. Hardesty again plans to write — mainly focusing on a small book that’s related to his first one on the lives of slaves in 18th-century Boston. He also has a conference to attend in Europe and will be a visiting faculty member for two weeks at a seminar hosted by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Vacation time — or at least a time where he’s doing “a really minimal amount of work” — will be in August or September just before the quarter begins, he says.
“I try not to think too much about all that I have to get done,” says Mr. Hardesty, who writes at least a few hours a week during the academic year. “It can overwhelm you if you let it.”
With so much on the summer agenda for faculty members, sometimes self-motivation alone won’t cut it. It helps to find ways to celebrate achieving the goals they’ve set.
“When you accomplish a task you should reward yourself,” says Ms. Lowe, of Rio Grande Valley. “Even something simple like treating yourself to a really nice lunch or dinner — that can be enough to keep you motivated.”