The academic year has cycles. There are periods, like the summer, when there are more opportunities to make writing your priority, even dedicating full days to intensively work on a writing project.

Most academics look forward to those parts of the cycle. And there is something really important about the kind of work that sort of time makes possible.

However, there is no way you can do all the writing you want and need to do if you only write during the summer and your sabbaticals. Furthermore, if you haven’t looked at your project in months, it’s going to take a while to get back into it, reducing the time available to be immersed in it.

You must find a way to write in the busy parts of the cycle!

It’s hard to write during term time. But it is possible.

The trick is to figure out a way to do that that works for you.

Let’s take a closer look at what your term looks like

Some of your work is scheduled. For example, you know that you will be teaching that class every Tuesday at 2 p.m. for the next 10 weeks or so.

It is tempting to try to schedule everything else you have to do, too. A routine is comforting. It drastically reduces decision fatigue.

If you write every Monday at 10 a.m., you don’t have to decide anything. You get up on Monday morning knowing that at 10 a.m. you are going to write. Just like on Tuesday you know you are going to teach.

You’ve probably heard that routines help you establish habits.

If you write every (work) day at the same time, it becomes habitual. No decisions needed. Linking that writing block to some other regular daily activity (e.g. putting it right after breakfast or lunch) further reinforces that daily habit.

Scheduling may be part of the solution

It is very important to take into account how much time you really have available for writing and schedule a reasonable amount. This will probably feel like “not enough”, but it’s still worth doing.

I have had clients who have been able to schedule one 2-hour block each week for writing, despite a heavy teaching load. Others have been able to schedule an hour at the beginning of every day and maintain that practice at least 3 or 4 days a week, most weeks.

A Meeting With Your Writing, the hosted co-working sessions in the Academic Writing Studio, makes it easier to protect that time.

Most people also struggle emotionally with working on writing during that scheduled time when they have so many other demands. It can feel selfish. If you are working on a particularly tricky part of your writing project, it can feel like any of your other tasks would be a more productive use of your time than slow painful progress on your writing.

In reality, your schedule is not that regular.

Some days are more heavily scheduled by others. You have very little control over when you teach, though you probably don’t teach every day. This variation messes with your plan to write every day, much less every day at the same time.

Not only that, but your weeks vary considerably, too. The scheduled classroom time is the same every week but everything else fluctuates. Grading and advising have their own cycles. The amount of preparation you need to do also varies.

The uneven nature of these activities means either that regularly scheduled writing time gets cancelled to fit in some irregular demand, or that you try to shoehorn these irregular but not unexpected activities into your week, often by working evenings and weekends.

All this can result in frustration that your carefully made plans are going off the rails or that it is just not possible to do all the work you are supposed to do in a “normal” work week.

It is not that you lack willpower or stick-with-it-ness, or are otherwise flawed. Nor is it that you can’t accomplish what’s important in a “normal” work week.

You need to plan differently.

Your plan needs to account for the irregular but not unpredictable demands on your time. And you need to set goals for term-time writing that are achievable alongside those multiple demands.

You can probably set a baseline of scheduled writing time that you can stick with while other things fluctuate. Noticing the crunch weeks in advance, allows you to give yourself some grace when things are extra busy, like end of term grading to hard deadlines.

It’s also important to notice where there is more spaciousness. If you schedule extra time for writing during those weeks in advance, possibly even blocking a full day or two, it is easier to protect them from encroaching demands. You can adjust as you go along if necessary, but extra time for writing rarely appears by magic.

Getting the most out of infrequent longer sessions.

Even people who really love teaching and have service commitments that play to their strengths and make a real contribution to the things they value about higher education often wish there was more time for writing.

The time you are able to schedule during term time will probably feel insufficient for the amount and type of writing you want and need to do. That’s okay. It’s better than not writing at all.

There are also certain types of intellectual work that are very difficult or impossible to do in these conditions. Those aren’t the only types of work necessary to complete your writing project, which means that you can save them for the kind of time you have available in summer or on sabbatical.

Use your term time writing for tasks that can be done in shorter blocks of time, when your capacity to hold onto key ideas between sessions is limited by the number of other things demanding your attention.

Identify specific concrete tasks you can do next at the end of each session so you have somewhere to start next time that doesn’t rely on your memory. Use some of your sessions for planning. Or reading. Or annotating your draft.

It’s worth experimenting with making use of much shorter bits of time between longer sessions. Keep your project simmering so it comes back to the boil more rapidly in your next session.

The 15-minute Writing Challenge helps you structure that experiment over 4 weeks. I know you can find 15 minutes a day to write. The Challenge will help you learn how you can use that kind of time, and what you can achieve if you do that consistently.

You don’t have to do this alone.

I created the Academic Writing Studio to support people like you with their writing, whatever their employment status, teaching load, or stage of career.

We offer Quarterly Planning Classes to help you make plans that take the specific cycles of *your* academic year into account.

A Meeting With Your Writing is a hosted virtual coworking group that helps you stick with your commitment to write at a specific time each week, and provides micro-coaching to get you unstuck when you find yourself struggling with your project.

It is surprising how much of a sense of community develops just from seeing the same people turn up every week to write at the same time. You don’t have to communicate with them or even share your video if you don’t want to.

Writing Clinics offer an opportunity to connect with that community and get coaching support for whatever you are writing.

If you’d also like to try A Meeting With Your Writing as a way to support scheduling time to write on Mondays, we have a 30-Day Free Trial (no credit card required). There are 3 sessions every Monday to suit different time zones and different work schedules. We also have 1 session on Thursdays.

Or pick one thing to try and see what happens. Maybe a trusted colleague would also like to write more in term time and you could support each other with your experiments…

You can do this!

Related Posts:

How much writing can you do in term time?

Maintaining your writing practice when things get busy

Unpacking busy’ & the importance of being proactive instead of reactive

Do you have to finish your grading before you can write?

This post was originally published on Aug 7, 2014. It was edited in February and August 2015.
Major revisions were made in June 2025.