As the long summer break nears an end and the beginning of the academic year looms larger on the horizon, you may have a tendency to panic about your writing and research.
You wonder whether you’ve done enough over the summer.
You fear that you won’t get to it at all once teaching, student advising, and meetings return, not to mention once you have student work to mark.
Extra fear and panic may be induced by how close your next review is, whether you are up for confirmation or promotion, or the proximity of some institutional performance measurement exercise.
At the beginning of summer or a sabbatical, you probably had 2 goals:
- This is an ideal time to make substantial progress on your writing projects.
- And, you need to rest and recharge so you are less tired when you go back to teaching than you were at the end of your last teaching term.
Like all plans, by the end of the summer, you may not have achieved as much as you would have liked.
With a busy teaching term fast approaching …
- Are you tempted to push yourself beyond what you know from experience is the optimum amount of writing you can do well in a day?
- Are you tempted to cancel a vacation? Or stop taking a day or two off every week?
- Are you telling yourself you don’t have time to eat well, exercise, or sleep as much as you know you need to because you have all this writing to do and it’s almost term time?
If so, pause. Take a few slow breaths.
No one makes their best decisions in panic mode.
The panic is normal.
We all doubt ourselves sometimes. No one is so self-confident they don’t panic a bit every once in a while.
The key to loving your work, sustainability and all the rest is how you deal with the panic when it arises.
Let’s look at what might be causing that panic and see if we can address some of the underlying issues.
Has writing/research become seasonal?
Have you ended up in a pattern where you focus on research and writing only during breaks in the teaching year?
The seasonality of writing will always be there. You have more time and more long stretches of undivided time when you aren’t teaching. There are ways to engage with your research and writing during those periods that just aren’t available during term.
What if you knew you could keep working on this project once teaching starts?
In “Hiking as a Metaphor for (summer) Writing” I proposed a way of thinking about the relationship between the kind of intense focus you can give your projects in the summer, and the kind of writing you can do when you are also teaching and all the other things you do in the rest of the year.
Instead of trying to cram more intensive writing into the last couple of weeks of term, think of this as a transitional period.
- Review what you have done on your projects this summer.
- Allow yourself to be pleased with your progress, even if it doesn’t match up to what you hoped.
- Then assess what your project needs to keep moving forward, and identify which of those things you could do in the kinds of time you have available once teaching starts again.
You might also look at your calendar and identify when you could next block a longer period for intensive writing. Maybe you have a reading week half-way through the term. Or maybe it won’t be until the winter break.
Knowing when you will be able to give it more intense focus will quiet the gremlin who is telling you that if you don’t push through now, you’ll never finish.
Experiment.
Figure out what kind of time is available for writing when teaching starts again and decide what you’d like to try.
- Can you touch your project every day even if for just 15 minutes?
- Can you block one or more longer writing sessions every week?
Use your transition weeks to set yourself up for that kind of writing. What kind of work could you do now to make it more likely you can use the time available?
Also consider what kind of support would make it more likely you’ll actually do this? Do you have a friend that might join you? Do you need support to not do something else during the time you’ve set aside for writing? What else?
Additional support
If you have never successfully written during teaching terms before, you might want to try The 15-Minute Writing Challenge. It can be used to create a wedge that you can later expand to longer than 15-minutes once you’ve established a habit. Or to keep your project alive in your mind even when you can’t do much work on it.
If you can find at least one 2-hour session to devote to writing each week and would like support to help you protect that for writing, you might find A Meeting With Your Writing helpful. It is a weekly virtual co-working session that we run 50 weeks a year in The Academic Writing Studio. If you’ve never tried it before, there is a completely FREE 30-day trial (no credit card needed).
We also have Quarterly Planning Classes to help you determine just how much time you have for writing and how you might use it. We plan in calendar quarters and pay particular attention to transitions in your working patterns. These classes are included with a full membership or you can purchase them separately.
Enjoy your writing!
Related Posts:
Planning your summer writing time
Turning Summer writing plans into Autumn writing plans
Hiking as a metaphor for (summer) writing
This post is a combination of 2 older posts, replacing a similarly titled but shorter version, and an earlier 2014 version which included references to “binge writing” which we no longer believe is a good metaphor to use due to its trivialisation of eating disorders. It has been completely revised and retitled for republishing and the old versions have been privately archived before deletion.
