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: Can you recommend the best way to make the most of the holiday break in terms of work productivity?
Signed,
Hoping to Get as Much Done as Possible
Dear Setting Yourself Up for Disappointment,
Regular readers of this column will know what I’m about to tell you because I wrote about this perennial productivity issue back in 2018. My advice on this front remains the same: You shouldn’t be working during the holidays! At all! For myriad reasons! Now let’s all calm down while I enumerate those reasons. I’m not just going to give you permission to take an actual vacation for at least some of the winter intersession — I’m going to strongly suggest that you do so, for the sake of the quality of your work and life in 2022.
Reason No. 1: The results are not worth the effort. Do you really think that — after letting yet another semester get away from you and insisting you’ll get some research done over the break — you can write something of legitimate scholarly significance in two weeks? Would you like to read a master’s thesis or a dissertation chapter that your grad student wrote in two weeks? You would not, would you? Because it would be garbled and not particularly well-thought-out. Your scholarship is supposed to be the result of years of exacting and often painful labor. Completing a large chunk of it in a holiday-break binge will diminish the quality of your work.
Reason No. 2: It’s ultimately selfish. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a grown adult human. (If not, congratulations on your impressive accomplishments, child or animal prodigy.) And this means that the holidays come with a considerable amount of stress and responsibility, whether that be shopping and cooking, engaging Uncle QAnon in small talk, or preventing your children from doing something litigable.
When you disappear from a holiday function to do your big important scholarship, you unduly place the burden of holiday stress onto someone else in your household — a sibling, aging parent, partner, or spouse. In effect, your poor planning becomes someone else’s emergency, and this is deeply unfair. So don’t do it. You’re not curing Covid with your treatise on the subaltern in John Stuart Mill. Close your computer and go set the table and listen empathetically to your niece’s treatise on veganism. (If you need a break from the “festivities” — as we all do — then person up and say so.)
Reason No. 3: It’s very bad for you. You need to begin the next term — which will, again, take place inside a raging pandemic with all of its attendant nightmares — healthy and rested.
I’m not saying you need to turn your brain off between the day grades are due in December and the day your classes begin in January. What I am saying: Give yourself a “holiday cutoff date” of, say, December 21 or 22. As of that date, and until the New Year, you are not to do any work that does not pertain to decimating cookies or half-heartedly preventing children from setting your house on fire. (If you are teaching an intersession course online, do that half-heartedly too. The students certainly will be.)
To accomplish this feat with a clean conscience, give yourself very reasonable goals to accomplish in the days leading up to your cutoff date. For example:
- Only do final-touch work. Polish up an article or chapter that’s almost done.
- Audit your own projects. Read through your drafts, outlines, or notes, and write your 2022 instructions to yourself on what needs to be done — later.
Both of those task categories will leave you feeling relatively on top of it all before taking a well-deserved and necessary pause. In the first week of January, you may have to churn out a brief conference paper for your annual convention/Omicron-petri-dish, and I condone doing it quickly if you haven’t completed a draft in advance of the holidays.
Finishing that conference paper before a Festivus deadline would have been ideal, but you didn’t, so leave it while you spend some time with loved ones, or (mercifully!) alone. Writing a conference paper in two weeks versus one week doesn’t really make a huge difference — your audience of three will be treated to either a rushed paper or a super-rushed one, and the difference in end product will be indiscernible.
Question: I’m writing a paper about two different important bodies of work. How do I make sure the structure doesn’t end up lopsided?
Signed,
Unbalanced
Dear Unbalanced,
Ah yes, this is what I call the “Werewolf Bar Mitzvah” conundrum. In this iconic holiday ditty (fine, not this month’s holidays, but still) from 30 Rock, the titular character undergoes dual transformations — a boy becomes a man; a man becomes a wolf — but in the ill-advised third verse, after a lengthy treatise on party subs and briskets, realizes: And then I remembered/the premise of my song./I was at a nice reception/but the werewolf part was gone. This is not ideal because the song’s premise needs both of its attendant subjects to work.
I see two options for avoiding the Werewolf Bar Mitzvah conundrum in your writing. First, you could divide your paper up into a “werewolf” section, a “bar mitzvah” section, and then a final section that puts them together. Generally I advise against that, as it will require your readers to remember something difficult while they synthesize something else potentially even more difficult, and you risk losing them.
It’s a better idea to make sure there is enough werewolf and sufficient bar mitzvah scattered throughout your article. Every time you make a point about the one thing, tie in a teaser-point about the other that also functions as a transition. Since transitions are always a headache anyway, this kills many proverbial werewolves at once with a single silver bullet.
Happy Holidays, everyone. Now stop working.
