When I talk to clients or potential clients about specific writing projects, I often ask them what they have already. It is not uncommon for them to reply that they have partial drafts of chapters or articles which are currently in the form of conference presentations.
Clearly there is a role for giving presentations as a way to work on a bigger project. This is not the only reason to give workshop, conference, or seminar presentations. It is a common one, and one that can backfire if you are not careful, creating a situation that makes you feel worse about your project and your ability to do it.
Long projects & motivation
Using conferences and similar opportunities to present work-in-progress is a useful way to address the motivational conundrum presented by the mismatch between the size and complexity of the project and the time and cognitive capacity available.
The work that goes into producing an article or a book is complex. The writing often overlaps considerably with research. It requires considerable effort, including capacity for deep thought.
Most scholars are not writing full time. You have other responsibilities that take up a lot of your time and cognitive capacity. The amount of work you can do regularly is limited. The time and capacity for the deep thought parts of the process are often limited even further.
Your writing often progresses slowly. It can feel like what you are able to accomplish in any given time period is insignificant in relation to the scope of the project.
If you don’t feel like you are accomplishing anything, or that what you are accomplishing is inadequate, it’s hard to motivate yourself to keep going.
Interim outputs as milestones
The basic model here is like the title of the well known book by Anne Lamott: ‘Bird by Bird’:
Break a large project into smaller pieces.
Each smaller piece is more manageable. Accomplishing smaller goals motivates you to tackle the next small goal. You trust that the accumulated small things will feel close enough to the big goal that the remaining work will feel similarly manageable.
Giving a conference or seminar presentation extends this practice.
You’ve taken it beyond the privacy of your own notebook. There are witnesses! You can also put this sort of presentation on your CV and institutional reporting forms as evidence that you are making progress.
Committing to a presentation also does some other useful things:
- Gives you a deadline to complete a chunk of the work
- Generates feedback from colleagues on the work-in-progress
- Helps build an audience for the eventual publication, and thus a sense that someone *will* read this thing if you ever finish it
The risks of this strategy
That said, this strategy is not without risk. A smaller, interim, goal still requires a considerable amount of effort.
If you don’t meet your own expectations, you can feel like you’re never going to meet the bigger goal. You might also start to wonder whether these presentations are competing with your “real” goal, to submit something for publication.
Those negative feelings can create resistance and procrastination, which becomes evidence that feeds your imposter feelings.
You are not alone in having conflicted feelings about using conferences and similar opportunities in this way. The problem isn’t with the strategy. But there are ways to make it more effective for your ultimate goal of publication.
Your goal is to support your writing
If the reason for committing to this particular presentation is to motivate you to work on your bigger project, you need to keep that goal in mind when you decide details like the title and abstract, dates, and so on.
External deadlines will not magically make the time and cognitive capacity you need to do the work appear. They *can* help you prioritize the work you will do with the time and cognitive resources you have available.
You are fully capable of doing this work. You are trying to create the conditions in which you learn to trust that about yourself.
In a post I wrote several years ago I asked:
“How would you work if you trusted that you weren’t lazy and had good judgement?”
You need to commit to presenting something that is possible given the quality and quantity of time available to work on it.
Thinking of this as a “draft chapter” or “draft article” may not be helpful here. A chapter or article is also a big project. You need a smaller piece (unless you are at the stage where a chapter/article is almost complete).
How to define the scope
One of the tricky parts of planning is getting the balance right between a goal that is ambitious enough to motivate you to protect time and cognitive capacity for writing and research from other demands, and yet not so ambitious you risk feeling like it’s not worth protecting that time and cognitive capacity because you are a failure.
The sweet spot is in a different place for everyone and it may be helpful to reflect on what you know about yourself in this regard. Then you can use this knowledge to inform your plan.
There are 2 main axes of division that are usually in play when you use a research presentation as a way to create an interim output.
- A discrete section of the larger piece (e.g. a chapter of a book; a single bird in Lamott’s title story)
- A stage of the writing process (e.g. a draft which you know will need further revision)
The key thing to focus on when deciding what to propose for your presentation is:
What kind of progress do you need to make to feel more confident that your project is moving forward and will eventually become the thing you are trying to write?
IOW, what specific work would be most useful for you to do in the period between now and the presentation, and what would it mean to present the results of that work?
- Analysis of data or sources to present part of the evidence supporting your argument?
- A draft of the relevant scholarly context to introduce your research questions and data/sources?
- A draft of the argument which situates your findings in relevant scholarly conversations in a preliminary way?
- Something else?
A backup plan can help you be more ambitious
In my experience of over 15 years of supporting academic writers, the reasons you don’t achieve what you you’d hoped are usually
- Your goal was too ambitious
- Things that you couldn’t have anticipated or controlled took you away from your writing
You aren’t bad at time management. Even if you are getting better at saying no, the institutional context makes it impossible a lot of the time. You or people you care for get sick, sometimes seriously. People die. There are floods, fires, earthquakes, wars, etc.
One thing that can help is to identify the minimum acceptable standard for this presentation. This can be something that is either already in hand or so close to being ready that you could do it, even if something unexpected happened that meant your initial plan was no longer feasible.
The people who are organizing the event you’ve committed to don’t need to know why you’ve not been able to do the thing you really wanted to do. They don’t even need to know what the ambitious version is.
And you don’t need to devote your precious cognitive capacity to ruminating on all the what ifs.
The minimum motivating factor in giving a presentation is an opportunity to feel like a writer/researcher. In the worst case scenario, talking about your project with interested colleagues will remind you that the project exists and that there are good reasons you want to work on it and eventually publish something.
Your minimum viable presentation allows you to keep the commitment and have some time in which you can forget about all the chaos and engage with colleagues about something that is interesting and meaningful to you. It will remind you that you *are* a writer.
A guiding star can pull you forward
This minimum viable version of the presentation does not meet your bigger objective of motivating yourself to do additional work on the project over the next few weeks or months. But it does prevent you from being further demotivated.
Now that you aren’t worried that it’ll all come to nothing if your kid gets sick again, let’s think about how you can meet your goal to motivate you to work on this project.
Having a goal that feels like it might be impossible unless all the stars align can help motivate you to work on your writing in bits of found time you might otherwise fritter away. It makes the writing seem more important than the myriad other small things that are always floating around but feel less meaningful.
Even if a full chapter or article draft is not a useful goal at this stage, it can be used as a guiding star. When making decisions about what to work on, that “star” helps ensure you are going in the right direction.
It may also be helpful to identify a couple of levels of progress from your minimum. You want to be prepared if things go sideways and you aren’t able to do as much as you would have liked. However, it’s also nice to be prepared for good fortune as well.
A gentle stretch
In between your minimum viable presentation and this version that might require the intervention of your fairy godmother, you can set a comfortable stretch goal. You aren’t going to injure yourself with this stretch, but you will feel it.
This might be the kind of stretch that reminds you that writing in the time you’ve blocked for writing really is more important than whatever other task is currently distracting you.
Did you think you were the only one who did that? Trust me. You are in good company. It’s hard to prioritize your writing. That other thing may well be time sensitive, but it’s unlikely to be so urgent it can’t wait an hour or two.
Or, this gentle stretch goal might be the kind of stretch that keeps you from going too far down all the interesting rabbit holes that open up as you work. It’s like a second star that helps keep you from veering too far off course.
There is no doubt you’ve found something interesting. It may even turn out to be relevant to the bigger project. But right now, you don’t have time to really explore the details because you have this presentation you’ve committed to. Make notes so you can find the entrance to that particular rabbit warren again and explore it more intentionally.
This gentle stretch is the thing you will probably present. It’s an advance on where you were. It feels like a real milestone.
How this might look in practice
One of my clients has a chapter that still needs some primary source analysis. They’ve got a good sense of the argument and the key events they want to discuss to make that argument. Their minimum viable presentation is to present this overview of the chapter.
They have broken the chapter down into chunks around the key events. Completing the detailed analysis of sources for each event creates milestones. Each of those chunks feels feasible in a month even with all the teaching and service responsibilities they also have.
Committing to presentations in a couple of departmental seminars over the course of 3 or 4 months provides some additional motivation to do the analysis. It also helps out colleagues looking for interesting people to invite. And they’re small and local enough that if essentially the same paper gets presented more than once, it won’t be a problem at all.
Another client, whose book is organized by author with one key text per author, used a conference focused on one of the authors they’re including to work out some of their thoughts on this author’s work. It ended up being slightly tangential to the focus of their book.
However, although it took my client on a bit of a detour from their book plan, it was incredibly helpful to have done this presentation (and the resulting chapter for an edited collection) to sort out some of the context and conceptual entanglement. The chapter writing went more smoothly for having done it.
Deciding if this is strategy is right for you
Motivating you to work on your project is not the only reason to give presentations. It is one among many reasons.
You don’t have to do it. But if you think it would help you, you need to be deliberate about how you do it, keeping that objective in mind.
Choose appropriate conferences, workshops, or seminars. You need to be confident that presenting work-in-progress is welcomed and that the audience will respond appropriately.
Use what you already know about how you respond to different kinds of pressure to set yourself up for success. You are not trying to become someone else. You are trying to support yourself in doing the work you want and need to do.
If aspects of this strategy seem like they might be useful to you, but the thought of presenting work-in-progress to strangers creates resistance, then you might consider setting up a writing group among trusted colleagues in which you share work regularly, instead. It doesn’t go on your CV in the same way, but that might be irrelevant in the long run if you finish and publish more work than you would otherwise.
Related Posts:
You don’t have to start with an abstract
Motivation and accomplishment in your writing practice
Thoughts on accountability, deadlines & goals
Making Decisions about your writing
This post was originally sent to Newsletter subscribers on 17 January 2025.
