The beginning of the calendar year is accompanied by a lot of cultural pressure to reflect on the year just ended and make some big decisions about the year ahead.
Reflection and planning are both practices I encourage. However, if you work in higher education and live in Europe or North America, January really does not feel like the beginning of a new year. In fact, it’s more like the middle of the year, which means it’s really normal to feel like you are in the middle of things.
I know many academics feel that new year energy in the autumn. There is a wider cultural narrative about the new school year too, since the beginning of a new school year affects a large number of households. However, for those that work in higher education, there is a lot more going on than teaching. The fiscal year for higher education institutions starts a month or two before teaching starts. New hires usually start at the beginning of the fiscal year (with the notable exception of casual contracts, which are an increasing proportion of teaching staff). Your research and writing probably follow a different pattern altogether.
This is not the beginning of your new year.
Last spring, I proposed that the beginning of the academic writing year is actually mid-summer.
You are currently in the middle of the year. You are probably transitioning between semesters. That transition isn’t very clean, with grading and other tasks related to finishing semester 1 overlapping with preparations for semester 2 teaching. Those tasks are time sensitive, approaching urgent as inflexible due-dates loom closer.
You might have a gremlin that worries that if you don’t reflect on your year now, you’ll never do it. After all, there won’t be the same level of cultural pressure to reflect and plan at that point. Don’t worry, I will remind you. I even have a class on planning your academic writing year, which I offer as a single-class to those who are not members of the Academic Writing Studio. It will come at a point in the year when it feels more like the end of a year. Although you’ll still have a lot going on, because you always do, there should be fewer urgent things requiring your attention.
You’ll be okay.
What would be helpful right now?
Although it isn’t the beginning of your year, sometimes it’s helpful to pause and make some conscious choices about the path you are on.
A break often provides a natural prompt to do that. An external transition (like the change from semester 1 to semester 2) also provides a good opportunity to do this. Some questions to consider:
- Do the activities you are devoting most time to reflect your priorities?
- Do you want to change your priorities? Or change your activities?
- Are your goals things that are actually within your control? Can you adjust them so achieving them is not dependent on something you can’t control or influence?
- Are you adding magical endings to some of your goals? Do you still want the thing if the magical ending doesn’t happen?
Maybe you need your hopes and plans to be smaller.
The cultural pressure around the new year is also about big transformative change. That’s problematic in the best of times and not at all reasonable in the current context.
This time last year I wrote Are things getting worse? Or is dystopia the new normal?, in which I said:
Things were already bad. You were already more tired than usual before the break. Maybe you’d just started getting your head around how to keep going in a pandemic, even if you didn’t like it much. … You may wonder if it’s even reasonable to keep going in these circumstances.
For many of us things don’t look much different this year. Or, at least, not different enough in the ways we’d like. We’re more tired, too.
The purpose of planning is to inspire action. Small goals often don’t feel inspiring. But maybe small goals have the advantage of being possible, even in the current circumstances.
- What feels possible for you?
- Can you allow yourself to set that as your goal?
- Can you allow yourself to be proud of small accomplishments?
Taking action is what’s important.
For some people, in some circumstances, setting concrete goals motivates them to take action. But sometimes having goals makes it harder to take action. Long term planning and goal setting is always difficult. There are so many things you can’t predict or control.
Research on motivation suggests that action creates motivation rather than the other way around. Taking small steps regularly can give you a sense of accomplishment that motivates bigger steps. Taking small steps regularly also adds up to bigger accomplishments, as popular sayings about long journeys and eating elephants remind us.
It is absolutely okay to do only as much planning and goal setting as you need to take some kind of action right now. Maybe that’s focusing on one task that feels possible. Maybe it’s mapping out your priorities for this week, so you can focus on one thing without worrying about other important things being forgotten. Maybe it’s allocating 15 minutes a day to something important that has been getting dropped.
Regularly noticing what you have done can also help you build up a feeling of accomplishment and efficacy. Doing an annual review can give you a picture of where all your small steps have taken you. Reviewing more frequently can keep you moving. It also helps you build up a stronger sense of what is possible in particular time-frames and conditions.
However this calendar year is starting for you, I hope you are able to protect time for what’s important.
Related Posts:
Making Decisions: planning & scheduling
Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars: making reasonable plans
Starting your academic writing year in mid-summer
Spotlight On: Cycles of the Academic Year
