Some of your work is scheduled. You know that you will be teaching that class every Tuesday at 2 p.m. (or whatever) for the next 10 weeks or so. You’ve probably also scheduled weekly office hours in which you will be available to students for class-related questions or general advising.

You might even have taken my advice and scheduled some writing time. Perhaps you’ve registered for A Meeting With Your Writing (btw, it’s not too late), are doing the 15 minute Academic Writing Challenge, or have some other way of making sure writing gets done.

You probably have a gremlin telling you that you aren’t going to stick to that writing schedule.

It is not that you lack willpower, stick-with-it-ness, or are otherwise flawed. It is not just the way it is. You are not wrong to think it is possible to write during term time, or keep more sensible hours, or whatever.

In reality, your weeks are not that regular.

For every hour you spend in a classroom, there are several hours spent in teaching-related activity: preparing for those classroom hours, administrative duties, managing TAs, grading, and so on. Those extra hours are not evenly distributed across the term.

Similarly, committees and other service obligations don’t require the same amount of time weekly.

The uneven nature of these activities can result in frustration that your carefully made plans are going off the rails.

Your plan can account for the known variation

Go into your calendar now and block off time for grading. You designed that course and set those deadlines. You know how many students are in this course (± a few). You can estimate how long it takes to grade whatever it is you assigned. Make reasonable commitments to your students about how quickly you will get things back to them based on your plan.

You might also look through your syllabus and note the sessions that require more (or less) than average preparation for whatever reason. Adjust your scheduled preparation time in those specific weeks.

As you schedule meetings for your service obligations, schedule some time before or after the meeting to do whatever work needs doing in relation to it. This might require adjustments as the term goes on. If you take on a task for a committee, look at your calendar and be honest about the timeline. Don’t commit to a deadline that you know requires magic to meet.

With a plan that varies each week, you can make other commitments taking into account the actual time available for other activities (professional or personal) in that particular week.

Scheduling writing time: Minimum +

Start by reviewing your commitment to write. With a better sense of how your workload varies from week to week, determine a minimum amount of weekly time spent on writing. That might be quite small. Remember that Robert Boice’s research indicates that as little as 15 minutes a day is effective. Make this number the smallest amount you know you can do every week. That is your baseline. If you get that much writing done in a week, you have achieved your goal. The plan worked.

Now look at each week individually and add in as much writing as you think is reasonable for that week. The fact that you can’t get a half-day every week doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take that half-day that’s staring you in the face in week 3 (or whenever). Block it off now so you don’t fill that time with something else.

If you start feeling guilty about how selfish you are being in those weeks, remind yourself about all the weeks when you will have to work hard to get your minimum in. Calculate an average for the whole term if it helps calm your gremlins.

The extra bonus to this strategy is that you can make more realistic commitments for submitting drafts to readers, chapters to editors, etc. If you have already committed to deadlines that fall in periods when you have little time for writing, you can make a plan to meet them anyway or renegotiate the deadline now. You are a smart and capable person but you cannot warp time.

If you don’t find regular small amounts to work well for you, That’s okay. You can use the same process to schedule writing blocks.

Edited April 12, 2016.