Well, we have reached the middle of August. I know that the majority of you will be headed back into the classroom soon.
I hope you’re not having stress dreams about the beginning of the semester!
Until fairly recently I still had dreams that I showed up to the first day of class without a prepared syllabus or I couldn’t find my classroom.
Today I am going to offer some ideas for how to keep writing during the school year.
But before that, I want to talk a bit about DREAD.
A friend of mine who left the academy this past year shared with me how amazing it feels for them to not associate August with dread anymore.
I felt this way too last year, which was my first full summer after leaving my faculty position. My relief was so immense!
When all of my former colleagues were exhaustedly running from panel to panel at the annual American Sociological Association meetings, I was posting pictures of myself relaxing on Greek beaches.
But interestingly, this year I didn’t really notice the difference.
Part of it is that I’m just on a different work schedule.
Summer is now by far my busiest season as a coach. Everyone is writing like crazy.
People have more time and want to meet more often.
But my friend’s comment made me realize that I’ve gotten so used to NOT feeling dread in my work that I now take it for granted.
Sure, I often get really tired and overly busy, but literally no aspect of my business is something I dread doing.
Yet looking back to when I was a faculty member, dread was part of my daily existence between August and the end of the school year.
I was constantly worried about department and institutional politics.
I was always trying to make sure I had publications in the pipeline, and in fact, the year I resigned was the very first one where I had nothing in the pipeline.
I was always thinking about earning grants so that I could keep doing research and hopefully buy myself out of teaching.
I worried a lot about impending budget cuts, about teaching and meeting the tremendous needs of students, and about how to manage a never-ending onslaught of committee work and external requests.
All of this was on my mind while trying to take care of my health, a young kid, and attend to my personal relationships. Whew!
You probably know what I’m talking about. The list goes on and on.
You might be one of those folks for whom academia is truly a dream job that fulfills you more than it depletes you.
I definitely know folks like this, and if that is the case, I am thrilled for you. That is how it should be!
However, I would argue that for the majority of scholars, that’s not the case. So when end of summer rolls around, dread rears its ugly head.
And I know that AI has not made things any easier.
Now that I’ve thought about it more, I really see persistent dread as chronic low-level anxiety.
I think it contributes to many of the stress-based illnesses that afflict academics, women and other marginalized scholars, in particular.
And if you’re feeling it a lot of the time, it’s a bright red flag that things at work are not aligned with your own values and priorities as a human being.
So, I say all this to point out that dread does not need to be a regular feature of your work life.
When it’s not, you’re free to direct your energy towards the things that YOU find meaningful and important! And this includes your writing.
Now, this is not a bid to get you all to leave academia!
Higher ed needs to retain as many of its amazing, talented, hard-working, and committed teachers and researchers as possible.
But if you are feeling overwhelmed at the prospect of this upcoming school year, please check out my new Career Reset Coaching Program.
I designed it for folks who want to do work that’s rewarding, intellectually stimulating, and pushes you to grow and excel without draining you of every single bit of life force.
Over the course of a semester, I will help you do four things:
- Clarify your career vision
- Create space for what matters to you
- Overcome your internal obstacles to change
- And define what success means on your own terms.
Creating a career that doesn’t shortchange your life will not only reconnect you with purpose, but you’ll be able to work less too.
I’m also currently booking workshops for the fall that are geared towards balancing personal well-being with writing productivity.
These workshops are for everyone from grad students to tenured professors.
And of course, I’m always taking on new book coaching clients.
You can find all of my coaching offerings and book a free consultation with me through the Work with Leslie page of YourWordsUnleashed.com.
Three Questions to Help You Keep Writing
So, let’s talk about how to keep writing once the craziness of the semester starts up.
I’ll just start by saying that it is definitely not easy!
Many of you will be starting your courses in the next couple of weeks.
You’re probably prepping syllabi, which involves a million different tasks, from finding good readings to planning lectures, assignments, and exams, even when you’ve taught the course before.
Students might be emailing to bug you for these syllabi that you haven’t even finalized yet.
Committees are being assigned, and you may find yourself having to lead major committees or even whole institutes.
You might be on review or job search committees that are going to take up a good portion of your time and energy this fall.
You’re putting things like department meetings back into your schedule and seeing your available writing time shrink and shrink and shrink into smaller and smaller chunks.
August is the time when most people look back at their idealistic summer writing goals and beat themselves up for not reaching them.
The first thing I want to say is congratulations, you’re human!
Everybody does this. You saw your open schedule and thought you’d be able to write a whole book or write three articles.
When what you truly needed to do was rest, recuperate, socialize, have some fun, and read some good fiction.
By the way, this summer I read two romance novels about academic women in STEM by a professor who goes by the pen name of Ali Hazelwood.
Two was enough for me, but it was gratifying—and even a little weird—to read novels that get the peculiarities of academia right.
But back to you! You needed to give your brain and body a rest and if you didn’t, then you may be starting out the school year depleted.
So, I hope you took time off to refill your energy reserves.
The second thing is that you fell prey to the Planning Fallacy, which is the tendency to chronically underestimate how much time it takes to accomplish something.
We all do this because we can’t foresee all the tiny details something will require, so that what we thought was one thing actually turns into 5 smaller things.
And, we don’t factor in other regular life situations that take time from writing, like illness or needing to get over jet lag or even just exercising more regularly.
Kerry Ann Rockquemore, who founded the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, has great advice to avoid falling into the Planning Fallacy: take the first estimate of the time you think something will take to accomplish and multiply it by 2.5 X to arrive at a more reasonable expectation.
At the very least, I think you should double the amount of time. Because then you won’t feel like you’re falling behind due to underestimation when really something is taking a normal amount of time to do.
And on the off chance you accomplish it more quickly, you get time back. It’s bonus! And everyone likes bonuses.
So once again, no one reaches the writing goals that they set out for themselves in May or June.
In my experience, the only people who do are under extreme pressure. Usually these folks have a hard, unmoveable deadline that comes with major negative repercussions if they miss it.
Sometimes it’s because their tenure case is coming up soon.
In another case, one of my clients did a big push and was able to finish their manuscript. This entailed writing 2 entirely new chapters and revising the rest of it.
They worked super-duper fast because they had hired a very pricey developmental editing company and HAD to send them the whole thing by the end of summer.
If we were fairer with ourselves, we could try to accept that whatever you had hoped to accomplish by August you might actually be able to accomplish by December… and that would be awesome!
Or maybe you have been in a good flow and able to write a lot this summer and are worried about how you’re going to get any done in the fall.
No matter what, with the school year beginning you are going to have to shift your approach.
So what I’m going to offer you are not really strategies per se.
Instead, I want to give you three open-ended coaching questions that will help you come up with your own strategies for writing when you have less time and a million other things on your plate that feel more urgent.
Recently, I’ve offered these questions to two different clients who’ve been having a hard time prioritizing writing.
In one case, it’s because service work is all-consuming and keeps getting in the way.
In another, it’s because daily life and department politics are currently very challenging and it’s hard to stay focused.
For both of these folks, writing their books feels like an insurmountable task.
And when the book feels like a massive mountain to climb, people tend to wait for times when they feel like they have more energy and mental space.
But during the school year, that time might never come!
So then it’s easy to get into a cycle of avoiding writing, feeling bad about it, and throwing yourself full force into other responsibilities to compensate.
All of this reinforces negative feelings about writing, and then the cycle repeats.
It makes sense that the longer you avoid doing it, the more impossible it feels.
So the goal of the following questions is to lower your resistance to getting started with writing.
Ask yourself these questions at the beginning of each writing session so that you can get into a space of possibility and curiosity about your own work rather than feeling overwhelmed by it.
You can then use these openings to chip away at pieces your book even when you’re under major time and energy constraints.
#1: The first question I want to offer you is: what’s the easiest thing I can do right now when it comes to my writing?
As you know, every project, from a grant proposal to a journal article to a book chapter has so many different pieces.
Some of these tasks are easier to do than others. So start by doing the very easiest thing.
However, this requires you to have a good sense of the things you need to do.
Therefore, for some of you, the easiest thing would be to open one document that relates to your project.
Maybe it’s part of chapter you started a year ago or a memo you wrote about your data analysis.
And once you open one and read it over, this makes it easier to open others to take stock of what you’ve done and what you have left to do.
I’ll give you one of my own examples.
When I was starting work on my second book project, I had a heavy teaching load.
So I decided at the outset of the semester that the easiest thing I could do was to code interviews I had already recorded and transcribed.
It allowed me to think about the project themes without overtaxing my brain.
I also really liked doing it and each one made me feel like I was maintaining momentum with the project.
I had a free hour on campus each day before classes started that I used to code.
And by the end of the semester, I had coded all 50+ interviews and was ready to move into the next stage of writing.
#2: The second question, which overlaps with the first, is: what can I do that would be the most efficient?
Obviously, once the semester starts you don’t have the same openness in your schedule or in your mind.
So you need to prioritize things you can do more quickly.
But even more than that, it’s about being mindful of the fact that you’re working with less overall energy.
I often talk about the advantages of double or triple purposing your work.
This means that whatever you do, you find a way for it to help you write your book.
If you give a talk or a conference presentation, you design it around something from your book that you need to work through.
If you’re invited to give a guest lecture, you use it to workshop ideas from the book with an audience.
If you’re teaching a small seminar class, you assign pieces of your book for the students to read so it forces you to write something.
If you’re writing an article, you plan it so you can eventually revise it into a book chapter.
This is why I often tell clients to take a published article or fully written conference paper and revise that into a chapter as their very first step in the book writing process.
Because you’ve already done a lot of thinking and writing for the piece, it’s much easier to transform it into something else than stare at a blank screen.
And this helps you build a sense of momentum, which is one of the most key factors you need to accomplish a big project like a book.
Finally, the third question is: what would be the most fun thing I could do?
Now I’m holding the word “fun” lightly here because writing is often not fun.
At the same time, writing is sometimes VERY fun, or at least, it feels enjoyable because it’s personally meaningful.
But if you treat it like it’s something you can only do with a completely mind and clear schedule or you associate it with dread, self-doubt, fear, or anxiety, you lose any possibility of satisfaction.
So essentially what I’m saying here is that you really need to ask yourself: what in this entire process of research and writing, do I enjoy the most?
In other words, when it comes to my own work, where do I come alive? What feels juiciest to me?
In my case, I always enjoyed writing stories or ethnographic vignettes. I still do.
I could write them relatively easily because I felt free when I was painting a picture with words without the pressure of making a big theoretical or analytical intervention.
At the same time, I enjoyed the challenge of crafting stories that would lead readers right into the take-home points of my chapter.
When I would get stuck with my first book, I would often turn to writing creative non-fiction stories from my data, most of which ended up making it into the manuscript.
The point is that when you are doing things that make you feel alive, you GET energy from it.
It’s easier to do, and it’s faster!
I’ll give you another example from one of my clients. For many years this junior faculty member felt like an imposter because her mind operates in terms of images rather than words.
She would literally draw diagrams and then use them to write up the translations with words.
She then hid those diagrams from everyone else because she was ashamed that her mind worked differently.
But because drawing pictures is what felt easiest, quickest, and most fun to her, I encouraged her to just start there and consciously choose to withhold judgment while doing it.
And just by giving her permission to do what came most naturally, she was able to use her drawings as a launching pad to start writing prolifically.
Summing Everything Up
So let’s sum everything up.
I gave you three questions that I think are very different from typical how-to, productivity- oriented stuff.
Here they are again:
- What’s the easiest thing I can do?
- What’s the most efficient thing I can do?
- What’s the most fun thing I can do?
The fundamental idea is that if you can focus on the parts of your work that are easy, efficient, and fun, you’ll be far more likely to WANT to write even when life gets hectic.
There’s a bonus here too: if you prioritize these three qualities in everything you do, not just with writing, your whole life will work better and things will happen more dynamically.
So I hope I’ve convinced you that continuing to write during the semester is indeed possible without overtaxing yourself.
It comes down to prioritizing what makes you feel most alive.
Good luck with the start of this semester, and reach out to me if you want to get a handle on your writing or your career this fall.
