II. Process/Product/Consequences

            Teachers of writing often try to get students to distinguish the processes of writing from the products; the more that I thought about procrastination, the more that I found the need to talk about a third category: consequences. In terms of a paper written for a class, there is the process that one uses to generate the product (the paper), and that paper, in turn, has certain consequences—specific and short-term (or first order) ones such as the grade and longer-term (and more amorphous) ones such as the teacher’s opinion of the student. Thus, the grade may influence a student’s ability to get or retain a scholarship, the teacher’s willingness to work with the student or write a letter of recommendation. In graduate school, maintaining the good opinion of faculty often becomes an end in and of itself (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but can be part of a paralyzing process). It’s not uncommon to motivate one’s self to write with grandiose positive fantasies about magnificent long-term consequences, or equally grandiose but negative fantasies about what will happen if the product is awful—the Pulitzer Prize, or finding one’s self shoveling roadkill in west Texas. Hence, the issues in writing look something like this:

In my experience, the more that one focuses on the long-term consequences of the product—the impact on one’s career, the estimation of one’s colleagues or mentors, positive or negative fantasies about the reception one’s work will receive—the more likely one is to get a writing block. It was interesting to discover, then, that others have noticed the same correlation. Rose Fichera McAloon, who specializes in working with ABD students in writing impasses, says of the cases described in her article, “all of whom are women and whose fantasies abouf the meaning and possible out- come of the project impeded progress to completion” (231). It isn’t clear to me whether the issue is that those fantasies are always more pleasurable (or at least interesting) than the gruntwork of writing, or if they are insidiously paralyzing. What one ends up writing is never as good as what one imagined writing, so every sentence is a kind of disappointment (“a wholly new failure” in Eliot’s words). Readers are never satisfied with one’s products, so there is always more work to do. And one ends up submitting something not because it is finished, but because the very sight of it is nausea-inducing. The process of academic publishing is so slow that by the time something comes out I barely recognize it as my own—never to finish means never facing any of those strangely disappointing moments; it means remaining in the place where one can imagine the perfect text.

            W. Somerset Maugham has a haunting story about a man who spends most of his career as a customs official in China trying to get back to London; when he gets there, he finds it doesn’t live up to his fantasies. He begins to fantasize about how wonderful China could be, and heads back there. On the last stop before China, he gets off the boat, and spends the rest of his life in Haiphong thinking about how wonderful China could be, happy with a mirage that was much better—because it was a mirage—than the reality could ever be. Submitting one’s work to others, whether one’s dissertation to one’s committee or one’s manuscript to a journal, means being willing to trade the mirage of a perfect text for the reality of a flawed one. It means leaving Haiphong and going to China. McAloon describes that she couldn’t write her dissertation when it had all sorts of profound meanings about her gender, worth, and identity. Once she realized those were not actually the stakes,

I was then able to demystify the process and come to view the dis- sertation as simply another academic task that needed to be completed. Once I realized that I wanted to pursue it for its own sake and for career advancement, I allowed myself to know that I wanted it more than life itself. (247)

McAloon, a psychoanalyst, found it helpful to keep her “destructive impulses” (including the desire to put off the writing) “front and center” in her mind (247).

            Procrastination is often described by economists as “hyperbolic discounting”—a person who chooses to procrastinate does so because s/he excessively discounts what the consequences will mean in the future. Someone who, in the abstract, wants to save for retirement, but keeps spending all their money purchasing things for current consumption, hyperbolically discounts how unhappy they will be when they have very little money for retirement. Because no single expenditure tanks the retirement fund, and no single cigarette is the one that gives a person cancer, it is difficult in the moment to care very much about what will happen years from now. One strategy is to connect the action to future actions, to frame this choice as indicative of the choices one will make in the future (Ainslie). Or, in other words, you don’t smoke a cigarette because you want to see yourself as someone who doesn’t smoke, or you exercise because you want to see yourself as the sort of person who exercises, or you protect your time for scholarship because you want to see yourself as a productive scholar.

            If, however, one is ambivalent about that self-image (and McAloon suggests that is part of what is at stake), the framing the imminent decision in terms of identity can be a paralyzing strategy. Whuzzerface points out that it’s exactly this tendency to connect the present and future that can contribute to alcoholics drinking—a single misstep means they may as well give up on the larger goal—and my doctor tells me that she has trouble persuading some women to exercise because they don’t want to be “the sort of woman” who leaves her family in order to go to a gym. If the stakes are that high—if writing a chapter, or protecting eight hours a week, feels like adopting an identity about which one is ambivalent—the some form of psychotherapy may be useful, and it may be for that reason that many graduate students and scholars engage in therapy.

            But not everyone does, and there are other strategies. If the consequences of writing a flawed text are unthinkable (and they can be unthinkable to people who define themselves as good writers), then there are various strategies for doing the unthinkable. The first and most obvious is simply not to think about it. That is, some people choose to procrastinate the worrying. Some people find it helpful to block out time for thinking about the consequences—for some reason, it can be especially productive to set that time for the same time that one is engaged in physical activity—while some people find that procrastinating it endlessly is helpful.

            Another strategy is to treat the aversion as a phobia (my favorite definition of phobia is fear of one’s own fear). If one is phobic about flying, the temptation is to liquor up and stagger on to a plane. There is a possibility, of course, that the experience will still be awful and reinforce one’s aversion to flying, and there is a limit as to just how much one can drink and still even stagger. If flying is an important part of one’s job, then liquoring up is likely to have fairly complicated consequences. One of the main problems with binge writing is that it reinforces the sense that writing is a traumatic experience, or can only be done when one is in a complete panic. So, just as some people have had success with deconditioning in regard to phobias, some people have succeeded at deconditioning themselves in regard to writing. They try strategies like writing in smaller bits, under more pleasant circumstances, and with lower stakes. 

            If the stakes are high (e.g., gaining or losing the respect of one’s mentors) it’s hard to imagine the process of writing would be pleasant. And, while imagining dire consequences can certainly serve to get one writing, that’s still keeping panic at the wheel. The difficult finesse one has to pull is to find a way to keep motivated enough to do something fairly tedious without relying on panic. Those long-term consequences tend to be either disastrous or triumphant; that is, negative or affirmative. One strategy that works for many writers whose tendency to imagine grandiose outcomes inhibits their writing (or causes more stress than they want) is to imagine plausible affirmative outcomes—instead of imagining winning the Pulitzer, to think about what more publication will mean in terms of promotion or raises; instead of imagining how shameful it be to be an ABD waitress in Barstow, imagine how good it will feel not to be a student any more.

            People who are very productive, it seems to me, focus on the process and product—they enjoy writing, or they like the research they’re doing, or they at least like some large part of the topic. In a perfect world, we would only research topics about which we are genuinely interested, and pursue questions that deeply puzzle us. Then, we would be more involved in the process, and less concerned about the consequences (if there is one reason to become a full professor, it is because it comes with that intellectual freedom). Believing in one’s argument can mean that one is motivated to get it right, and also so motivated to expose others to it that we are more resilient in the face of delays, setbacks, and outright rejection.

            It isn’t possible, I think, to be motivated purely by interest in the topic or joy in the process—every project involves tedious quote-checking, reading more about the topic than any reasonable person desires, struggling with impossible sentences, and mental fatigue—but the more that one can focus on those affirmative (and affirming) aspects of the process, the more likely one is to do the work.

            While focusing on disastrous long-term consequences is highly motivating, and a fairly common practice, I’ll suggest below that writers consider other strategies. But first I want to talk briefly about the surprising ways that focusing on magnificent rewards can be paralyzing. Because many academics were designated as promising, our sense of ourselves as people capable of extraordinary things can run deep. To produce something merely good is to risk that sense of self. Since academics often suffer from what pop psychologists have made famous as “the imposter syndrome” (the sense that we are not as good as other people think), we can have a kind of double bind when it comes to achievement. To produce something merely good, instead of extraordinary, reveals us for the fraud we have always secretly feared we are; for many scholars and students, the worst possible outcome is not a bad grade, as long as it is on something we can dismiss as not representative of our potential, but a good (rather than excellent) grade on something that represents our best effort. Our very sense of self is on the line, then, with each text we produce. The solution seems to be to avoid producing anything that is our best effort. As long as our full performance is delayed, so is our full revelation, and anyone’s ability to assess our true worth. By remaining in the land of glimpsed potential, we have left open the possibility for the grandiose positive outcomes, and final judgment of our potential must be in abeyance. At the same time, one has not actually risked the grandiose negative ones. One motivation for procrastination—a strangely pernicious kind—can be that it enables our never risking being told that one is not the golden child one wants to be.

            Burka and Yuen have, by far, the best advice for how to manage the kind of procrastination that comes from the imposter syndrome, and it’s fairly complicated—having to do with simultaneously lowering one’s expectations and taking credit for one’s achievements. In addition to recommending their book, I’d note that the syndrome, it seems to me, is closely connected to the “fixed” potential model of the mind, as opposed to the “growth” model. People with the fixed model imagine that we are given a fixed amount of potential, and the precise amount of that potential is revealed as we perform. Carol Dweck has argued that people with a fixed mindset at some point stop trying, and their achievement drops; people with a “growth” mindset (that your performance can get better with practice) are more likely to take risks, recover from setbacks, and, no shock, improve their performance.

            It seems to me that the fixed mindset is associated with the thesis-driven writing process, almost as though people with the fixed mindset see writing in terms of products that fully reveal static ability, as opposed to writing being a skill that improves with practice. It is partially that they see writing as something that conveys one’s thoughts, which, like one’s potential, is fixed. If one doesn’t have a fixed substance to convey, then one cannot create good products. People committed to thesis-driven writing processes often describe writing that doesn’t end up in the final product as “dead ends,” “wasted” time, “bad seeds,” or other metaphors that suggest the author would have been better had that writing never happened. It seems to me that productive writers tend to use metaphors that imply that such writing was useful, even if it never ended up in a final text. In other words, it was good practice. Although we understand that getting better at most activities requires practice—we wouldn’t expect much of a tennis player who only played in tournaments and never practiced or played between them—we have trouble seeing writing the same way. If writing is, as everyone says, a craft, then it should seem obvious that it requires a kind of work that is not always oriented toward a final product—artists do sketches, athletes work on skills, competitors play games with low or no stakes, musicians play over and over. A player who competes against team-mates doesn’t describe those matches as dead ends or wasted time.

            Writing teachers very nearly break into hives at the “building blocks” analogy. Behind much very bad educational policy (especially “back to basics” curriculum reform and high-stakes testing), it is a bad analogy in almost every way. It’s based on a bad description of language acquisition, writing improvement, and piano playing. The argument is that learning to write is like learning to play piano, and in both one starts with the “basic” building blocks. Thus, students should spend years working from correct words up to the five paragraph essay. It is assumed, despite years of linguistic research showing this is not the case, that words are the building blocks of effective communication. So, one should work on teaching students to use correct words, then to write correct sentences, and then correct paragraphs, and then to write basic paper forms (the notorious five paragraph essay that, despite what high school teachers say, college writing teachers hate with a deep and abiding passion), before they are allowed to be creative. The analogy is bad because:

·      Words are not the building blocks of meaning, and correctness is a not a separate skill on top of which are built the “more advanced” skills like intention. Trying to instill knowledge of grammatical “rules” in students before they have anything to say is like drilling students on the rules of tennis tournaments before handing them a racket and ball.

·      Correctness is a much more fraught concept than most people think, not simply because linguistic standards change over time, but by region and discipline. It is not a sign of moral worth or intelligence, nor is it entirely separable from content. Because people think it is separable from content, they tend to misunderstand what linguists and writing teachers mean when we say that we don’t teach it separately—they tend to assume that we advocate not teaching it at all. But, obviously, being aware of the rules of tennis (including how they might vary from a friendly game with friends to a tournament) is absolutely necessary if one intends to play competitively. It is, however, neither necessary nor even meaningful to assume that explicit knowledge of the rules of tournament play is a skill that must be acquired separate from and prior to learning enough skills to have a rally.  

·      The analogy to piano playing is made in defense of methods of teaching that keep students writing vacuous and highly formalized writing. Were that analogy applied back to piano playing, it would be the equivalent of making prospective piano players do nothing but finger exercises for years. A good piano teacher doesn’t even make a student play chopsticks for years.

·      People who are serious about piano playing don’t just practice the simpler and more “basic” skills when they first start; they don’t sit down to play the piano only when it is a virtuoso performance with high stakes. We understand that with all sorts of skills—sports, foreign languages, music, drawing—one’s skills improve by engaging in low stakes practice that no one else might ever see. Why can’t we imagine a similar relationship between practice and skill in writing?

In other words, if we took seriously the building blocks analogy, we wouldn’t see correctness as the first concern, limited to some point in one’s education to which one never returned. But neither would we advocate a writing process that depended on only writing when what one wrote would be part of a virtuoso performance. We wouldn’t talk about “dead ends” or “wasted time” in writing—we would see writing that didn’t end up in a published form as practice. And we wouldn’t see writing as a revelation of fixed ability, and therefore find the notion of best effort terrifying, but as an activity that will get better if we do it more.

III. Procrastination

The first very rough draft of the section on procrastination wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class.

            When we think of procrastination, we don’t necessarily think of that kind of behavior—I wasn’t doing excessively fussy cleaning, arranging my pens by points on the rainbow, playing a computer game, trimming split ends, watching TV, eating cupcakes, or in any way “wasting” my time. I needed to do the things I did, and all the activities will benefit someone else. I’m not entirely sure that any of those activities were easier (or even less stressful) than working on this chapter, since it’s a complicated committee, and I overthink comments on students work, I’m bad at learning names and I know it hurts students’ feelings, and so on.

            The term “procrastination” is used to mean three very different kinds of behavior—putting something off, leaving a task till the last minute (that is, till we have the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the task before the deadline), doing something we think we do not need to do instead of something we think we need to do. Common parlance uses the term the first way, but that means that procrastination and setting priorities are synonymous, in which case procrastination is an actively good habit. I generally use the term in the second way—the practice of delaying a task till there is barely time to meet the deadline. But, even using the term that way, it isn’t necessarily a bad choice. When scholars of procrastination use the term, it most often concerns that third kind of activity: it is not that the tasks we do to procrastinate are useless or indulgent, but that we are not doing the task(s) that our long-term analysis of the situation suggests we should be doing. By the first and second definition, I wasn’t really procrastinating by working on teaching and service instead of scholarship, but by the third definition I was. And research on scholarly productivity suggests that kind of procrastination is the more serious problem.

            The situation of an “R1” (that is, Phd-granting) university with a large number of tenured faculty who are not actively publishing scholarship is very complicated. Most such universities once had a 3/2 teaching load—that is, three courses one semester and two the other—but shifted to a reduced teaching load (usually 2/2, but sometimes 2/1) on the reasonable assumption that expecting more publication out of faculty means that one has to expect less of something else. In addition, working with graduate students, especially regarding professionalization, requires time. Thus, from the perspective of many administrators (and taxpayers), faculty who teach a 2/2 and do not publish are being paid for work they aren’t doing. And, while there may be faculty who really are working less than full-time hours because they are only teaching 2/2 and aren’t engaged in scholarship, they seem to be few and far between. Far more common are the faculty who aren’t publishing, but are working long and hard—they are engaged in service and time-consuming teaching. Hancock et al’s survey found that: “the low publishing group (seven or less publications in the five years) and the high publishing group (13 or more articles) both work approximately the same number of hours per week (53.2 versus 55.5)” (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            One study (Milem et al) concludes that higher research productivity has come at the cost of informal contact with students; while they did not find a significant reduction in time spent on teaching, they did find “across all institutions, there was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of time faculty spent advising and counseling students” (467). Other studies do find that scholarship and teaching are in competition with each other for time. Hancock et al’s survey indicated that low publishing scholars allocate 40.8 percent of their time to teaching whereas the high publishing group allocates 29.1 percent (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            But, it is possible that it isn’t that the low publishing faculty publish less because they spend more time on teaching, and, therefore, reducing their teaching will increase their scholarly productivity. In fact, research suggests that the causality is very complicated. Hancock et al report that there are other factors that also correlate to high publishing:

-They rate themselves higher than do lower producers in their ability to organize and manage time;

-They assign greater importance than do lower producers to academic meetings and actually attend more;

-They exhibit greater mobility (measured by the number of institutions since receiving highest degree);

-In choosing research topics, they assign greater importance to the availability of funding and popularity than do lower producers. (28-30)

The first and last suggest that part of the difference is not the time, but how the time is used; that is, high publishing scholars think strategically about their time and their projects. That emphasis on thinking strategically turns up in other scholarship on productivity. For instance, Ito and Brotheridge conclude their study:

Not surprisingly, and in support of existing research, this study found that the amount of time that faculty spent on research activities predicted both their perceptions of their productivity levels and their reported journal publication levels. Strategic focus, a variable often discussed in interviews with prominent researchers and implied in studies relating academic background to research productivity, had a significant impact on productivity, both directly and through its interaction with seeking resources (such as grants). Strategic focus also had an impact, through its interaction with managing ideas, on the perceptual measure of research productivity. These findings support the anecdotal and common sense beliefs that strategic focus is important because it reinforces the influence of building resources and framing ideas. It was interesting that one variable that is often discussed – the need to free up time from teaching and committee work – was negatively related to objective productivity, but positively related to perceptions of productivity. This may suggest that productive researchers learn how to work within the limitations of their commitments or, perhaps, how to work more efficiently. (17)

Thus, simply reducing faculty teaching load will not necessarily increase the amount of scholarly production (although increasing teaching will almost certainly decrease faculty publication). One can imagine a variety of (overlapping) reasons that someone might not be producing as much scholarship as s/he wants:

·      S/he is producing the work, but not finding venues for it;

·      S/he, or someone for whom s/he is responsible, has a seriously inhibiting medical condition, or a set of medical problems;

·      There are no resources for scholarship generally or that kind of scholarship specifically—grants, labs, networks, money to travel to collections or conferences, mentors, colleagues who can read and comment on one’s work, and so on;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, and they cannot be reduced;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, but it is difficult for some reason to reduce them;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but in practice there is always something more pressing to do;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which might still be challenging and important, and which might be pushed to take on by family, administrators, or colleagues;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which are not particularly important, although they might be challenging and even rewarding (e.g., volunteer work, extraordinary housekeeping, high maintenance parenting, a beautiful garden, even a second job).

The list really could go on—my point is not to be exhaustive, but simply to point out that there are wildly different reasons and hence different solutions. Only the last two, it seems to me, are usefully characterized as procrastination, and none of them signifies any moral flaw in the scholar.

 [There. 1000 words—done for the day.]

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The first very rough draft of the section on procrastination wasn’t too hard to write; it went quite quickly, probably because I’d been thinking (and reading) about the issue for years. But when it came time to work on it again—incorporate more research, especially the somewhat grim studies about factors that contribute to scholarly productivity—I instead reprinted my roll sheet, deleting from it the students who had dropped, adding to my sheet the dates I hadn’t included, composing and writing email to students whose attendance troubled me, and comparing students’ names with the photo roster (in a more or less futile effort to learn all their names). I then printed up the comments I’d spent writing and stapled them to the appropriate student work. I sent some urgent email related to a committee I chair, answered email (related to national service for a scholarly organization) I should have answered yesterday, and sent out extremely important email to students clarifying an assignment I’d made orally in class.

            When we think of procrastination, we don’t necessarily think of that kind of behavior—I wasn’t doing excessively fussy cleaning, arranging my pens by points on the rainbow, playing a computer game, trimming split ends, watching TV, eating cupcakes, or in any way “wasting” my time. I needed to do the things I did, and all the activities will benefit someone else. I’m not entirely sure that any of those activities were easier (or even less stressful) than working on this chapter, since it’s a complicated committee, and I overthink comments on students work, I’m bad at learning names and I know it hurts students’ feelings, and so on.

            The term “procrastination” is used to mean three very different kinds of behavior—putting something off, leaving a task till the last minute (that is, till we have the minimum amount of time necessary to complete the task before the deadline), doing something we think we do not need to do instead of something we think we need to do. Common parlance uses the term the first way, but that means that procrastination and setting priorities are synonymous, in which case procrastination is an actively good habit. I generally use the term in the second way—the practice of delaying a task till there is barely time to meet the deadline. But, even using the term that way, it isn’t necessarily a bad choice. When scholars of procrastination use the term, it most often concerns that third kind of activity: it is not that the tasks we do to procrastinate are useless or indulgent, but that we are not doing the task(s) that our long-term analysis of the situation suggests we should be doing. By the first and second definition, I wasn’t really procrastinating by working on teaching and service instead of scholarship, but by the third definition I was. And research on scholarly productivity suggests that kind of procrastination is the more serious problem.

            The situation of an “R1” (that is, Phd-granting) university with a large number of tenured faculty who are not actively publishing scholarship is very complicated. Most such universities once had a 3/2 teaching load—that is, three courses one semester and two the other—but shifted to a reduced teaching load (usually 2/2, but sometimes 2/1) on the reasonable assumption that expecting more publication out of faculty means that one has to expect less of something else. In addition, working with graduate students, especially regarding professionalization, requires time. Thus, from the perspective of many administrators (and taxpayers), faculty who teach a 2/2 and do not publish are being paid for work they aren’t doing. And, while there may be faculty who really are working less than full-time hours because they are only teaching 2/2 and aren’t engaged in scholarship, they seem to be few and far between. Far more common are the faculty who aren’t publishing, but are working long and hard—they are engaged in service and time-consuming teaching. Hancock et al’s survey found that: “the low publishing group (seven or less publications in the five years) and the high publishing group (13 or more articles) both work approximately the same number of hours per week (53.2 versus 55.5)” (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            One study (Milem et al) concludes that higher research productivity has come at the cost of informal contact with students; while they did not find a significant reduction in time spent on teaching, they did find “across all institutions, there was a statistically significant decrease in the amount of time faculty spent advising and counseling students” (467). Other studies do find that scholarship and teaching are in competition with each other for time. Hancock et al’s survey indicated that low publishing scholars allocate 40.8 percent of their time to teaching whereas the high publishing group allocates 29.1 percent (“The Ombudsman” 28).

            But, it is possible that it isn’t that the low publishing faculty publish less because they spend more time on teaching, and, therefore, reducing their teaching will increase their scholarly productivity. In fact, research suggests that the causality is very complicated. Hancock et al report that there are other factors that also correlate to high publishing:

-They rate themselves higher than do lower producers in their ability to organize and manage time;

-They assign greater importance than do lower producers to academic meetings and actually attend more;

-They exhibit greater mobility (measured by the number of institutions since receiving highest degree);

-In choosing research topics, they assign greater importance to the availability of funding and popularity than do lower producers. (28-30)

The first and last suggest that part of the difference is not the time, but how the time is used; that is, high publishing scholars think strategically about their time and their projects. That emphasis on thinking strategically turns up in other scholarship on productivity. For instance, Ito and Brotheridge conclude their study:

Not surprisingly, and in support of existing research, this study found that the amount of time that faculty spent on research activities predicted both their perceptions of their productivity levels and their reported journal publication levels. Strategic focus, a variable often discussed in interviews with prominent researchers and implied in studies relating academic background to research productivity, had a significant impact on productivity, both directly and through its interaction with seeking resources (such as grants). Strategic focus also had an impact, through its interaction with managing ideas, on the perceptual measure of research productivity. These findings support the anecdotal and common sense beliefs that strategic focus is important because it reinforces the influence of building resources and framing ideas. It was interesting that one variable that is often discussed – the need to free up time from teaching and committee work – was negatively related to objective productivity, but positively related to perceptions of productivity. This may suggest that productive researchers learn how to work within the limitations of their commitments or, perhaps, how to work more efficiently. (17)

Thus, simply reducing faculty teaching load will not necessarily increase the amount of scholarly production (although increasing teaching will almost certainly decrease faculty publication). One can imagine a variety of (overlapping) reasons that someone might not be producing as much scholarship as s/he wants:

·      S/he is producing the work, but not finding venues for it;

·      S/he, or someone for whom s/he is responsible, has a seriously inhibiting medical condition, or a set of medical problems;

·      There are no resources for scholarship generally or that kind of scholarship specifically—grants, labs, networks, money to travel to collections or conferences, mentors, colleagues who can read and comment on one’s work, and so on;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, and they cannot be reduced;

·      There is no time for it because s/he has too many personal or professional obligations, but it is difficult for some reason to reduce them;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but in practice there is always something more pressing to do;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which might still be challenging and important, and which might be pushed to take on by family, administrators, or colleagues;

·      There is time for it, in theory, but s/he keeps spending time on other tasks instead,  tasks which are not particularly important, although they might be challenging and even rewarding (e.g., volunteer work, extraordinary housekeeping, high maintenance parenting, a beautiful garden, even a second job).

The list really could go on—my point is not to be exhaustive, but simply to point out that there are wildly different reasons and hence different solutions. Only the last two, it seems to me, are usefully characterized as procrastination, and none of them signifies any moral flaw in the scholar.

 [There. 1000 words—done for the day.]

It seems to me that one of the least productive ways to think about procrastination is as some kind of sin or character flaw. The more that it is some sort of awful dark monster of the soul, the more likely it is that things associated with procrastination (such as writing a paper, chapter, or article) will become epic confrontations with one’s own darkest side. Scholarly writing is pretty dang hard at its very base; there’s no need to bring in Gilgamesh or Grendel.

Procrastination is just a trait, like being left-handed or far-sighted or curly-haired. Those are actively desirable traits sometimes, sometimes inconvenient, but generally pretty neutral. If, however, one frames them as a sign of one’s spiritual failings, then writing a test or tatting or looking in the mirror become chastening experiences that scourge the soul. And that doesn’t make it very likely one will do them. Procrastination is not a sign of laziness, not the consequence of laziness, and not even related to laziness in any way. It can be related to passivity, and it can even be a sign of depression, but calling one’s self lazy for procrastinating is a complete waste of time. 

My sense about letting panic drive the bus in the writing process is that people do it because it worked for them for many years. Similarly, people procrastinate because it has worked in the past as well or better than any other time and task management strategies we generally use. We get something out of procrastinating, and so we keep doing it. And, even if we beat ourselves up about it, or it is a secret source of guilt and anguish, we still get more out of it than it costs us. The scholars on procrastination even have a formula for this calculation because procrastination is something that provide STR (short term rewards, also sometimes written SS) whereas starting on the unpleasant task only provides LTR (long term rewards, also LL); given humans’ tendency to favor STR over LTR (which explains why people always go for tax breaks, even when it’s clear they’ll be expensive in the long-run), procrastination is in our very nature.

As I said earlier, many people who are not productive in regard to publishing scholarship are still tremendously productive people. Scholarship is fairly thoroughly in the LTR category—one can spend an entire day working on a book project and have absolutely no idea whether what one wrote will ever see publication, or if what one read will actually contribute to the larger project. But spending a day on class preparation (or program administration) will lead to visible and obvious and very gratifying results.

            Defining procrastination as a species of “weakness of will” (or akrasia) may be useful for ethicists, but doesn’t help scholars who put off chipping away at scholarship in favor of completing smaller and more obviously urgent tasks. It may be helpful for thinking about the processes involved in procrastinating beginning one’s diet, or quitting smoking, but much less so for putting off scholarship. In scholarship on procrastination, the contrast is often between something with STR and demonized benefits versus an LTR that has privileged consequences—eating a cupcake versus exercise, for instance. And, while the point is perfectly valid (that eating a cupcake always has more STR than exercising), those aren’t the sorts of choices that I see people making. Part of what makes the choice to engage in scholarship over teaching (or service) so difficult is that scholarship can seem so selfish. In a field in which a successful academic book sells 500 copies, but teaching effectively for five years can reach far more students, the selfish choice appears to be for scholarship. Choosing a cupcake over exercise is choosing what is culturally constructed as a vice over what is culturally constructed as a virtue, but choosing teaching over scholarship is almost precisely the reverse, especially (but not exclusively) for women.

The choice too often seems to be service to others (excellence in teaching or program administration) or service to one’s career (academic publishing). I think that understanding that way of framing the decision is crucial to understanding a number of statistics, especially regarding women’s tendency to get “stalled” or “hung” at the level of Associate Professor. It is not that they have gotten hung because they are lounging on the couch popping bonbons, or requesting that underpaid servants peel them grapes, or whatever fantasy of self-indulgence it is that people have about long-term Associate Professors. It is that they (we) choose activities with visible and fairly immediate consequences over ones with amorphous benefits about which we might feel ambivalent.

If that is the problem, then the solution is for people to stop feeling ambivalent about success in academia, and that’s kind of outside the realm of a book on writing, even if success at writing is dependent on wanting that success and what it entails. I will just say that success in any profession is dependent on wanting it, and on being in a relationship that supports it. Academics, because our time is flexible, are often mistaken for people whose time is free (even by ourselves). I have had so much difficulty persuading neighbors, repair persons, and my dogs that working at home is not the same as hanging out that I took to working at my office. 

There is another source of ambivalence, and it’s far more complicated. Procrastination can have a variety of rewards, and we may be ambivalent about giving up those rewards. After all, procrastination:

• makes a boring task more interesting because it introduces the possibility of failure; as Joseph Ferrari says, “Some people habitually delay tasks in order to self-impose a need to rush at the last minute. This hyperactivity can be a pleasurable experience for the person” (108).

• reduces the amount of time a task can take (this is especially useful with tasks—like grading or prepping class—that will expand to fill as much time as one gives them). • focuses attention—if we wait to start a task till we’re in a panic about it, then the panic will reduce distractions and silence the excessively critical internal voices that sometimes accompany really tough tasks. • It can reduce the number of times one has to do a boring task (if I put off filing, then I don’t have to file as many times—and it’s a lie that the filing will take just as long as if I do it on a regular basis). • Procrastination preserves the oddly narcissistic fantasy that we could do fabulous, rockstar, blow them out of the water, not a single critic level of work. Those whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising—a lot of people who procrastinate don’t want to test whether they really are as promising as they’d like to believe; procrastination enables us to say, “Well, it would have been much better if I’d started earlier.” • It is also a way of managing the imposter syndrome—the notion that others have been fooled in their estimation of our ability; we fear that our best effort won’t match up to their expectations, so we never do our best effort. There’s a milder version of this—the final version of anything we write is never as smart, elegant, or effective as the one we imagine. So, procrastinating delays that “is this all there is” moment. • It can be the consequence of wishful thinking—that the task will magically go away, or one will get some kind of divine inspiration that makes it easier (this is also called “waiting for the grading fairy”). • It’s a project management strategy that saves the time of looking at the big picture of our responsibilities and lives; if you just deal with whatever is most urgent, and you let circumstances dictate that, then you can remain passive in regard to your own tasks, obligations, hopes, and calendar and some people are much more comfortable in that position—looking at the big picture can be too anxiety-provoking.

Much of the scholarship on procrastination involves what seems to me a circular definition of the term—procrastination is often defined as “imprudent delay, where one puts off until tomorrow what one admits would, everything considered, be better done today” (MacIntosh 69). Such a definition presumes precisely what is at stake—that the delay is imprudent—and doesn’t help one to recognize whether one’s procrastination is savvy time-management or irrational procrastination, since it presumes exactly the information one doesn’t have in the moment.

            Were the problem weakness of will, then strengthening one’s intention would solve the problem, but, at least in studies, procrastinators do not demonstrate weaker intentions than nonprocrastinators (for a review of this line of research, see Wieber and Gollwitzer 187). It seems to me that a more useful definition is to emphasize that today’s choice doesn’t look irrational in the moment, but would from a different perspective: it involves delaying an action that will lead to a long-term goal one genuinely (even passionately) wants, on the grounds that one more delay will not have a significant impact on the likelihood of achieving that long-term goal (see especially Andreou). And, as Andreou emphasizes, what makes procrastination so hard to stop in the moment is that this rationalization is, in fact, perfectly true. One can’t write an article in a day, but one might solve the photocopier crisis, or substantially improve one’s course materials, or write a report that will have significant impact on the department’s curriculum. It’s not uncommon for people who have trouble publishing to be in departments in which they are pressured by administrators to make that tradeoff (or to be in relationships in which their partner advocates that tradeoff); any single substitution of STR for LTR does not get one denied tenure, and neither one’s chair nor one’s partner wants one never to publish. In the moment, no one consciously wills failure at the long-term goal of publishing.[1]Thus, it seems to me that seeing procrastination of scholarship in favor of teaching, service, or family is not a weakness of will.

            If it is more usefully described as a miscalculation, and I think it is, then the question becomes how one calculates the tradeoff more accurately. There are two ways to frame the miscalculation. One is to say that no single choice is a bad one, but it is only cumulatively that there is damage, so the miscalculation is in the long series of choices. The other is to say that the choice always looks rational in the moment but only appears irrational in hindsight. The first way of framing the problem, while perfectly accurate, isn’t especially helpful. There is no magic number of times when the scale tips from rational to irrational (for more on this point, see especially Andreou); thus, it is difficult in the moment to persuade one’s self that one has put off scholarship as many times as is permitted, since, in fact, just one more time won’t hurt a significant amount.

            The second strategy may seem logically impossible—since one is always in the moment, by what other standard can one calculate the costs of this choice?—but it actually works. When I first started teaching, I had the bad habit of letting students talk me into delaying due dates on papers. They always had good reasons, and it was (and remains) true that they would write much better papers with another week to work on them. In the midst of the semester, I allowed the extensions, only to find myself and the students painfully trapped in a kind of logjam of assignments at the end of the semester. Since giving more time to one assignment necessarily meant there was less time for a later assignment, the students’ overall grades were no better, and we were all pretty miserable at the end. Yet, during more than one term, I gave the extensions because, during the semester, I was not (am not) good at thinking of the arc of the work as a whole; I can only think in terms of this week and next. Before the semester begins, I can think about all of the work and how to space it all out appropriately. Thus, I quickly (but not quickly enough) developed a rule that I never give an extension of more than one class meeting—it’s a rule I need for me, because of my tendency to miscalculate, and not because students are weak-willed.

            In essence, the syllabus gave me what Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson call “scaffolding.” Many authors on procrastination advise some version of planning to create a new calculus; the basic notion is that one not try to make the calculations in the moment when one is trying to choose between a specific STR and scholarship. Instead, one tries to plan backwards from that moment when one might have the hindsight about how one should have spent one’s time. For graduate students, that is when they need to have filed their dissertations; for assistant professors, tenure; for associate professors, it’s the time when they want to be able to go up for promotion; for others (either people not on the tenure track or people who have the rank they want), it’s whenever they want to have the scholarship done. Then, one can estimate what that achievement looks like—how many chapters will the book (or dissertation) have? How many articles need to be done by that point? It’s relatively simple math at that point; to get X number of chapters/articles in Y number of years, how many does one have to do every year? As will be discussed, later, some people find it helpful to go from those larger timelines down to daily ones, at least for periods when one’s time needs to be relatively inflexible. Or, in Heath and Anderson’s terms, the amount of scaffolding one establishes for one’s self depends on personality, obligations, and time in the semester. Although I’ll talk more about time management strategies in the next section, here I will mention that managing one’s time is much like dieting: setting impossible goals—whether that one will never eat more than 1100 calories in a day or will work ten hour days seven days a week—just results in giving up and living on cookies and chips.

            All of this advice presumes that the issue is that one chooses not to engage in scholarship in specific moments because one miscalculates the costs (or, in George Ainslie’s terms, engages in “hyperbolic discounting”). Another possibility, however, is that one has a deep aversion to doing the scholarship. Presumably, the aversion is not to doing scholarship per se (or else one’s aversion might be an indication that being a scholar is not the best career choice) but to some aspect of your doing this scholarship. Burka and Yuen have what seems to me the best discussion of the various factors—ranging from fear of failure to fear of success—that might be operating at deep levels. While I think that Heath and Anderson’s criticism of that psychological approach has merit,[2] and their practical recommendations strike me as eminently sensible, I still strongly recommend Burka and Yuen’s book to people whose difficulty doing scholarship seems resistant to time management strategies.

            Sarah Stroud gives a hypothetical example of someone who keeps procrastinating applying for a grant:

Grant application season has rolled around once again. Amanda, who has in the past regularly failed to submit applications for research grants that many of her colleagues successfully obtain, feels that she really should apply for a grant this year. She prints out the information about what she would need to assemble and notes the main elements thereof (description of research program, CV, and so on) and—of course—the deadline for submission. She puts all of these materials in a freshly labeled file folder and places it at the top of the pile on her desk. But whenever she actually contemplates getting down to work on preparing the application—which she continues to think she should submit—her old anxieties about the adequacy of her research program and productivity flare up again, and she always find some reason to reject the idea of starting work on the grant submission process now (without adopting an alternative plan about when she will start). In the end the deadline passes without her having prepared the application, and once again Amanda has missed the chance to put in for a grant. (65)

I find this story heartbreaking, probably because the details are so perfectly apt. Of course she would neatly label the folder, and add it to a pile (I used to keep a section of my file cabinet labeled “Good Intentions”). And of course she needs to get “down” to work on the applications—why is it always “down”? When people are beating themselves up about not doing writing (or grading), they tell me, “I just need to sit down and do it” or “buckle down and do it” or variations on those themes. Why don’t people need to “sit up” and work on the project?

            There is no indication whether Amanda’s insecurities are justified, and that seems to me crucial to the example. If her work is not competitive, it would be irrational for her to apply; she shouldn’t have even wasted the paper she used to print up the applications. But if she really thought her research was that weak, she wouldn’t have bothered. Stroud presents this hypothetical example in service of argument about whether procrastination is an instance of akrasia (weakness of will) since it’s debatable whether Amanda ever actually formed the will to apply for the grant. And that seems to me a reasonable question: what does Amanda really want?

            If she wants to get grants and be a productive scholar, but she thinks there’s no point in applying because her research project isn’t competitive, then it might make sense for her to find out if that self-assessment is accurate. If it’s false, she should go ahead and apply for the grants; if it’s true, she should either improve this project or develop a new one. Her indecision about the grant, and the interrelated procrastination, isn’t an ethical failing, but indecision that results from lack of information. Getting that information is important, and that may be the part that she procrastinates (in the same way that many of us procrastinate going to the dentist for fear that we’ll have to have work done).

            Joseph Heath and Joel Anderson condemn many approaches to procrastination for being excessively “materialistic, individualistic, and voluntaristic” (see, for instance, 248). As they say, “traditional-time management advice has been mentalistic in assuming that solutions will come from individuals thinking more rationally about how best to achieve their goals” (248). While I think that rational assessment of one’s means and ends is helpful for time management, and I highly recommend Burka and Yuen (whose approach Heath and Anderson dismiss), I recognize not only the wisdom of Heath and Anderson’s recommendations, but the simple fact that their aversion is shared by others. Ted O’Donoghue and Matthew Rabin divide people into three types in regard to procrastination: time-consistent, sophisticated, and naïf. Since procrastination is generally defined as the practice of shifting one’s assessment of one’s actions over time (later one will think that one’s choices at a given time were poor), time-consistent people are ones who don’t engage in the “hyperbolic discounting” that typifies procrastination. What O’Donoghue and Rabin call “sophisticates” are people who have self-control problems (they will make decisions they will later see as having been hyperbolic discounting) and are aware of it. “Naifs” are people who procrastinate, but “are fully unaware of their self-control problems and therefore believe they will behave in the future exactly as they currently would like to behave in the future” (“Procrastination on long-term projects). That is, although they have procrastinated in the past, and may even be aware that this practice has caused them grief, they make decisions predicated on the assumption that they will not procrastinate in the future.

            In my experience, “naifs” are the most likely to get into and stay in a vicious cycle of procrastination. But because they won’t recognize that it is a problem, let alone one that is deeply entangled in their personality, they are deeply averse to the approach of Burka and Yuen (they won’t even finish the book, as far as I can tell). Instead, they sincerely believe that the problem is simply to will themselves out of procrastination, just to “sit their butts down and do the work.” The fact that this method has failed dozens of time in the past is not taken as a problem with the method, but with their willpower. O’Donoghue and Rabin conclude that naifs are more likely to incur the greatest costs from procrastination. They say:

The key intuition that drives many of our results is that a person is most prone to procrastinate on the highest-cost stage, and this intuition clearly generalizes. Hence, for many-stage projects, if the highest-cost stage comes first, naive people will either complete the project or never start, whereas if the highest-cost stage occurs later, they might start the project but never finish. Indeed, if the highest-cost stage comes last, naive people might complete every stage of a many-stage project except the last stage, and as a result may expend nearly all of the total cost required to complete the project without receiving benefits.

Because writing the dissertation, book, or article is the highest-cost stage in scholarship, naifs will procrastinate that part without being aware they will (thinking this time they can will themselves into doing the writing). There is, therefore, a tricky sell here for someone trying to work with such a person—suggesting that procrastination is a deeper issue is off the table, yet the procrastination is entangled in the very ways the person works.

            Part of the solution is for the person to change their work habits, and this is where Heath and Anderson’s argument is eminently sensible. They point out that people tend to procrastinate two kinds of tasks: ones that are boring, and ones with a distant payoff. For boring tasks, they recommend making them less boring—reframing it as a more interesting task (instead of seeing one self as “picking up crap around the house” you are “getting ready for friends to come over”), using the Mary Poppins strategy of finding the “element of fun” in every task, bundling distasteful tasks with more interesting ones, making the task mindless (by making it a habit instead of something one must choose to do), leveraging willpower in one area to gain it in another (something also recommended by Chrisoula Andreou), or “structured procrastination.”

            Andreou argues that people generally have strong willpower in some area; she describes how she used her strong willpower about spending money to strengthen her resolve to exercise. If she didn’t exercise, she didn’t get to go out to dinner on Friday. That example surprised me, as people have a tendency to try to gain willpower in one area by promising a reward from another area in which they have weak willpower—if I grade two papers I can eat a cookie. But, she is absolutely right; if I have trouble resisting cookies, I’ll eat it anyway, even if I only grade one paper. Similarly, she argues that one shouldn’t try to prevent procrastination through punishment that is more of the same—if I don’t exercise today, I will have to exercise twice as much tomorrow typically ends up with my needing to exercise for 72 hours straight.

            Structured procrastination involves tricking yourself into doing an unpleasant task by setting the goal of doing something much more unpleasant. While Heath and Anderson are persuasive that it could work for some people—you motivate yourself to do the dishes by setting the goal of cleaning the oven—it has never worked for me. I just end up with neither the dishes nor the oven cleaned.

            Heath and Anderson are more persuasive about the importance of external structures that help one avoid procrastination. “Triggers” are cues that set a process in motion or make it stop (245). Many things trigger procrastination—sitting down to the computer can trigger social networking, email, computer games; it’s harder to identify things that trigger doing one’s scholarship. But, combined with the notion of a habit, a trigger might work (such as people for whom closing the door and unplugging the phone are triggers to working). There are programs that limit access to social networking sites, and filters and timers that set time limits on browser programs or computer games.

            “Chutes” make it easy to slide into the right activity, such as by laying out ahead of time everything that one will need to get started. So, for instance, if one arranged one’s desk when leaving in the evening in such a way that starting with a particular piece of scholarship would be extremely easy—instead of Amanda putting her material in a file on her desk, she cleaned off of her desk everything except what was necessary for revising her CV, and left that out and open. “Ladders” make it harder to engage in the activities one uses for procrastination—putting away (or at least putting out of sight) the books and papers related to teaching (if that’s your procrastination apple), making it slightly harder to open distracting computer programs, and otherwise removing things that are distracting.

            Their best advice is “one way to avoid self-control failures of a particular sort is to avoid the company of those who suffer from such failures” (247). Or, in more positive form, to be productive, hang out with other people who are productive. That may seem simple, but it’s almost astonishing how easy it is to find academics who snipe about scholarship. It can wear on the soul. Get into a writing group, ideally with people in one’s field (that isn’t always possible, unless it’s a long-distance arrangement), and make sure there are beings in your life who like hearing about the progress of your work (it’s amazing how great dogs are for that purpose—cats won’t pay attention).

           

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[1] Someone might, of course, unconsciously will that failure—a topic described in more detail in Burka and Yuen. The problem of subtle forms of self-sabotage are considerable; even though better time management doesn’t solve those problems, my experience is that it makes them easier to explore.

[2] Heath and Anderson note that psychological and self-management strategies, when empirically tested, do not seem to be very effective. While I can imagine that would be true, it seems to me a flaw in the testing, and not necessarily in the methods themselves. That they are long-term solutions, and that even some form of counseling or therapy may be necessary, does not, to me, mean that they are ineffective. But they are slow. As with other kinds of personal change, there is no reason to think that short-term and long-term strategies are incompatible. If aversion to working is the consequence of deep psychological issues, then no amount of time management or external scaffolding is going to do much. But, simply sitting and working through one’s psychological problems does not get articles published.

Chapter Three: Time Management for Scholars

No one who is in the process of writing a dissertation knows how to write one; it’s just enough different from other genres that it’s a new process.  And, since very few people write more than one dissertation, it isn’t a genre that anyone is very likely to master. I remember spending the whole time I was writing it with no sense of what I was writing. And then I was supposed to turn it into a book, and I’d never written a book, so the sensation of trying to master a game I’d never played before continued. I could try to rely on my sense of the genre of academic book—I did read an awful lot of them, after all—but that put me in the position of knowing the product and not process. And, as it happened, I picked the wrong product anyway. The books that I admired and wanted to emulate were third or fourth books written by well-known scholars whose learning and reputation meant that they were both able and allowed to use much broader strokes than would be allowed in a first book. Thus, I was trying to write the wrong book the wrong way; it didn’t go well.
            Robert Pirsig tells a story in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance of a student who wanted to write a short paper about Montana, but suffered from writing block. Pirsig kept telling her to narrow her focus, till she was writing about one brick on the face of one building in a downtown area. Then she had no problem writing. Like Pirsig’s student, once I significantly scaled back my topic, claims, and audience, I was able to write much more and much more effectively. Recently, while working with graduate students, I was trying to figure out when it was that I learned how to write a book—it certainly wasn’t while I was writing my first one, but somewhere during the second. Then the question became just what it was I learned, and I think I learned how much I can get done and when. In other words, I learned to plan backwards.

            The two time management books I recommend most frequently are David Allen’s Getting it Done and Steven Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Because they operate from nearly opposite premises, the two books nicely complement each other—if one doesn’t work for you, then the other one probably will. Loosely, Covey’s book works from big goals down to daily tasks, and Allen’s book works in the opposite direction, from listing every small task. It seems to me that, despite the different premises, they work well together, at least for academics. Covey’s strategies are good for ensuring that the long-term projects get reflected in day-to-day planning, and Allen’s are good for keeping track of smaller autonomous tasks. One of his best pieces of advice, I think, is to externalize your memory—not to try to remember things, but to write everything down.

            Academia has some very firm deadlines, such as when final grades are due for a class, and some that are fairly firm, such as class time (you’re either prepared for class by the time it starts or not), and a lot that are flexible up to a point (although one can set one’s own schedule for returning student work, if it isn’t done in a fairly timely manner, there should be ugly consequences). With some of the tasks, there are no externally established intermediate deadlines; in many graduate programs, there are no deadlines between a time at which one must have entered candidacy in order to maintain funding and when one must file the dissertation. Getting through undergraduate and graduate coursework does not necessitate learning the skill of setting one’s own intermediate deadlines (although I’d argue that skill is useful during undergraduate and coursework); finishing a dissertation is painful (but possible) without that skill, and it becomes extremely important for finishing a first book, and absolutely necessary for finishing a second.

            Many people know that they should set intermediate goals, but they don’t know what those goals are, or how to ensure that they’re reasonable. Since writing a book seems impossible at the beginning  (I still have stretches of time when I cannot imagine that what I am doing will result in a book), setting intermediate goals for writing a book means figuring out the stages in a journey to an unknown destination.

            What I learned was not how to set that destination, but how to do that sort of planning. It means setting (or acknowledging) the deadline, and then articulating exactly what I have to have to meet that deadline. It can be helpful to distinguish between the ideal and the minimum. So, for instance, for a graduate student, it would be ideal to complete the degree in the spring of the final year of funding, with an article published in a refereed journal, a book review, and a number of conference presentations. The minimum is more likely to be filing the dissertation by the summer deadline. For assistant professors, it is crucial to know what the tenure deadlines really are, and that can only be inferred from recent practice—whatever you were told when hired isn’t worth the paper it wasn’t printed on. It’s sensible to try to overshoot the tenure standards, in case they change, or there is some kind of delay. Thus, if one is supposed to have a certain number of articles by the time one goes up for tenure, one should not assume they’ll get done in the last two years—getting them done earlier not only gives a person a cushion if plans collapse, but gives one career mobility. Academic publishing in the humanities is a very slow process; it can be a year between when the final version of the manuscript is submitted and when it is in proof pages, let alone published. So, if a book “in press” is expected for tenure (which is usually at the end of one’s fifth year), then a completed manuscript is necessary in the third.

            But, that isn’t really an intermediate goal, just an intermediate deadline. Since many assistant professors have trouble working on their project precisely because they can’t grasp the project, moving up the deadline just increases the panic without giving any more information about the process. While it’s probably impossible to know exactly what the final version of a book will look like, as it will necessary change during the research process, it is possible to do a rough sketch of the number and topics of the chapters. Similarly, while one can’t know ahead of time exactly how many articles research will generate, it is possible to make an initial estimate. Most scholarly books are between 75 and 100,000 words (that is a price point for publication, so presses are hesitant about any manuscript longer than that); most journal articles are between 7 and 10,000 words (with that latter number being on the long side). Since readers will always ask for more, and rarely suggest what can be cut, a book or article manuscript should be well within the upper limit.

            Given those numbers, one can make rough guesses about what the book might look like—six chapters of 10-15k words (an introduction and conclusion and four body chapters); or perhaps five body chapters of 15-17k words and shorter introduction and conclusion; or perhaps the introduction and conclusion will be worked into the material, so that there are six body chapters. If tenure requirements are articles, then one can similarly make educated guesses about how many articles one get out of one set of data.

            The mistake that people tend to make about this kind of planning is to plan for chapters or articles that are too diverse from one another. This is a mistake in several ways. First, it obligates one to master a new set of secondary for each chapter/article. Second, if they are very diverse, the text may end up with multiple primary audiences, and that’s fairly ambitious for a first book. Of course, being too narrow also has problems; in my field, there is little demand for texts about just one author, and it seems to me that the day of the highly specialized scholarly monograph is over. The solution is not to try to strike that balance in the early stages of sketching the project; instead, come up with a stretch and talk to editors, colleagues with strong publication records, and mentors to see if there is interest in its current form. The goal is to talk to editors who go to the conferences you go to, not necessarily the presses with the most prestigious names. You can also look to see what press publishes most of the books you use in your research—that indicates it’s a topic about which they publish. Sending out a prospectus early is unlikely to get an advanced contract (especially for first books, presses usually want to see a completed manuscript) but will give early feedback about the project.

            If one can get clear about the tenure standards at one’s institutions (which is more or less difficult at various places) then it’s more straightforward to backplan. In addition, the process of publication can be confusing. For a book, an author might submit a query or prospectus (submitting a query to a journal editor is recommended in some fields). Each is a brief summary of the text (in the case of a query, it’s the abstract) with page length and, in the case of a book, date of expected completion, manuscript status (how many chapters are finished). The exact parts of a prospectus vary from press to press, and an author should check “submission guidelines” for each press. While it is fine to submit a prospectus to multiple presses, it is generally considered bad form in many fields to submit the manuscript to more than one press at once. If the editor is interested, s/he might send the prospectus out to readers, or to the editorial board, or simply review it. An author might get an advanced contract, but, for a first book, an author is more likely to be told whether the press is interested at all. If interested, they will probably want to see the completed manuscript. For article and book manuscripts, one should follow the “submission guidelines” for the specific journal or press. If the manuscript seems appropriate to the press’ list or the journal’s audience, and the press/journal is not already over-committed, the editor is likely to send the manuscript to readers.[1] The readers might take as long as six months to review the manuscript. People, including me, complain about how slow this process can be, and six weeks is plenty of time to review an article (and four months for a manuscript), readers don’t always respond as quickly as we should.

            Readers will respond to the editor with a recommendation that the text be accepted as it is, accepted with minor revisions, resubmitted with major revisions, or rejected. They will include a set of comments describing the reasons for their decision, and, if suggesting revisions, a description of what those revisions are. The editor sends those comments to the author (usually called readers’ reports), along with a statement of his/her decision. If the text has been sent out to readers, even a rejection gets an author useful information about how audiences are likely to react to the piece. Sometimes an author decides that the readers have useful advice, and sometimes s/he decides they don’t. If the suggested revisions take the piece too far away from where the author wanted, s/he might choose not to revise and resubmit to that press/journal, and may instead submit it unchanged elsewhere. If the article is rejected, the author might choose to revise on the basis of the readers’ reports, and then submit a revised version to a different press/journal. Some authors find it useful to share the reports and the manuscript with a mentor or colleagues, especially if (as they often do) the two or more reports seem contradictory.

            If the author has been given a “revise and resubmit,” it is generally a good idea to communicate with the editor about one’s plans—paraphrase the major concerns of the readers, describe how those concerns will be addressed, and give a timeline. An email is usually adequate, and it is helpful if it is in a timely fashion. Even the decision not to revise and resubmit is useful for an editor to know. Once the manuscript is revised, then it’s resubmitted, possibly with a cover letter explaining what changes one made. The manuscript usually goes out to readers again; if possible, to the same readers (but that isn’t always possible). If the responses are positive, the editor may be willing to write a contract. While most publishing contracts give more leeway to the press more than the author—they don’t actually obligate the press to publish the piece, but they do obligate the author to publish it there—they are tremendously useful for promotion. It is rare, in my experience, for a press to renege on a contract, although they do sometimes delay publication (in cases of financial exigency). The contracts for academic books usually have fairly minimal royalties, and it’s common for a scholarly press book to sell only around five hundred copies, so some authors are surprised at the terms of the contract—scholarly publishing (unless it’s textbooks) is not especially profitable for most people (including the presses, which often run at a deficit).

            The author may be asked to revise one more time, but presses are hesitant to send a manuscript to readers a third time. Once the truly final manuscript version is sent in, the press sends it to a copy-editor, and then the author gets back a copy-edited version. It may take two to three months for the copy-editing to happen, and the author rarely has much time to check it. As with proofing, it is intense, time-consuming, and difficult. After the author checks the copy-editing (accepting or rejecting the suggested changes), the press has the manuscript put into proof pages. The author is responsible for proofing the pages, usually at the same time that the index is being prepared. Some authors choose to do both; some hire an indexer; some allow the press to hire an indexer (the cost of which comes out of the royalties). Since both copy-editing and proofing have to be done quickly, and are very time-consuming, it’s helpful if the author can schedule time for it—communicating with an editor about a timetable benefits both parties. Because the index is being done at the same time, the author should not alter the manuscript in a way that throws off the pagination. That would require the press to cover the cost of repagination (which is not trivial). The author should be looking for typos, not ways to edit the manuscript. Once the proof pages are returned to the press, it may be anywhere from three months to a year before the book appears (depending on the press).

            For articles, the process may be slightly different. Some journals expect that the author will do the copy-editing, and the process of both copy-editing and proofing are much faster. Because editors are trying to keep issues balanced in terms of length (and may be trying to balance individual issues in terms of topic, audience, and other concerns), it is very helpful to them if authors stick to deadlines. It is not all the same to an editor if one gets a manuscript to them somewhat later than one promised.

            Given this schedule, there is a terminology for where in the process one is, and this terminology is important for hiring, tenure, and promotion. I’ll use terms as they’re defined at my institution by the College of Liberal Arts Committee and Promotion and Tenure:

·      “Book in hand” means that the book (or articles) are actually out—“you can stop a door with it,” as my dean says.

·      “Forthcoming” is the term used for a text (book or article) that has a specific publication date, set by the publisher; there is an explicit or implicit contract. It should not be used for manuscripts that are simply under submission.

·      “In press” is even more specific than “forthcoming”—it means that the text is in the page proof stage or beyond.

·      “Under contract” means that the author has a contract (I would use that even more specifically—it is a functioning contract, so if one has a contract with deadlines that one has missed by a year or more that isn’t really “under contract” any more.)

·      “Under submission” is the broadest category, and means that one has submitted the text to a journal or press. For cvs and annual reports, it’s often advised that one specify if it has been revised and resubmitted. Some people advise sending off poor manuscripts, just to be able to claim that lots of things are “under submission,” but that strategy will backfire if anyone keeps track.[2]

·      “In progress” is how people describe topics on which they’re currently working. While some fields strongly discourage job candidates or assistant professors from putting anything on the cv that isn’t complete, in other fields (mine included) that one is working on a particular topic is considered relevant information.

This terminology is not just important for the documents a scholar creates, but for being clear on the standards for promotion and tenure. Because of how slow the publication process is, if a candidate for tenure must have a “book in hand,” s/he should have a manuscript ready much earlier than if the standard is “under contract” or the extremely vague term “manuscript in hand.”

            If you can make an educated guess as to the number of chapters your manuscript will have (or the number of articles you will write), then you schedule backwards from when they must be done. Here, for instance, is a possible long-term plan for completing a manuscript in time for promotion and tenure at an institution that requires a book “in press” for tenure. It presumes a fairly heavy teaching load, such that getting scholarship done during the “long calendar” is challenging.

Year	Book	Other
1st year	Come up with a revision plan (calendar, reading list, description of changes); read; makes notes about a potential second project	Figure out where the grocery store is; draft a repertoire of classes; two conferences directly related to this or your next project
1st summer	Article version of one chapter from the dissertation; submit by August 1.	The impulse is to teach summer school, as the money would be very helpful, but that would make the goal of completing a chapter extremely difficult to achieve.
2nd year	If there is a new body chapter, write it—start with whatever part of the dissertation requires the most new work/reading/writing. NOT your introduction or conclusion.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
2nd summer	Revise the body chapter that requires the second most new reading/writing. Polished version by August 1.	Same caveat as above about teaching summer school.
3rd year	Revise body chapter and submit prospectus to between 4 and 7 presses.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
3rd summer	Revise remaining body chapters.	Same caveat as above about teaching summer school.
4th year	Revise intro and conclusion. Submit completed ms. to press by June 1.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
4th summer	Article version of new project; submit by August 1.	Teaching summer school is a possibility only if you can definitely do it and the article.
5th year	(Should hear back from the press by November; till then work on your next project.) If rejected, then resubmit (after, at most, two months spent on revisions). If you get a revise and resubmit, then draft a revision plan (with consultation with colleagues, your diss chair, people you know from conferences) and get that plan to the press within two to four weeks. Revise.	During all the “down” time on this project (e.g., when it’s being read by the reviewers, while it’s being copy-edited), work on designing and planning the next project.
5th summer	Submit revised ms. by July 1. Prepare tenure case.
6th year	Go up for tenure.

Possible calendar for promotion and tenure at a university that requires a book “in hand” for promotion to associate professor:

Year	Book	Other
1st year	Come up with a revision plan (calendar, reading list, description of changes); read; makes notes about a potential second project	Figure out where the grocery store is; draft a repertoire of classes; two conferences directly related to this or your next project
1st summer	Article version of one chapter from the dissertation; submit by August 1. Revise one body chapter.	Even though someone on this schedule has more time, I still recommend against teaching summer school, at least until the publication record is secure.
2nd year	If there is a new body chapter, write it—start with whatever part of the dissertation requires the most new work/reading/writing. NOT your introduction or conclusion.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
2nd summer	Revise the body chapter that requires the second most new reading/writing. Polished version by August 1.	Same caveat as above about teaching summer school.
3rd year	Revise remaining body chapters and submit prospectus to between 4 and 7 presses.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
3rd summer	Revise intro and conclusion; submit completed ms. by August 1.	Same caveat as above about teaching summer school.
4th year	You should have readers’ reports by Jan 1 at the latest. If rejected, then resubmit (after, at most, two months spent on revisions). If you get a revise and resubmit, then draft a revision plan (with consultation with colleagues, your dissertation chair, people you know from conferences) and get that plan to the press within two to four weeks. Then revise. If asked to revise and resubmit, then resubmit ms. by July 1.	Two conferences directly and clearly related to this or your next project.
4th summer	Article version of new project; submit by August 1.
5th year	Work on revisions on article; copy edit ms.	Two conferences on whatever you want.
5th summer	Work on next project. Prepare tenure case.
6th year	Go up for tenure.

I will emphasize that all of that advice could be criticized as arbitrary—five year calendars always have enough guesses that the final version is necessarily somewhat arbitrary—and that plenty of people have been successful with very different calendars. It presumes, as mentioned above, a heavy teaching commitment, and some universities give new faculty reduced teaching loads. The advice about summer school is the most controversial, and is admittedly cautious. If someone is making good progress during the long calendar (able to get two chapters done, for instance) then it would be excessively cautious. What this calendar is trying to prevent is the classic time management arrangement of the bulk of one’s time spent on teaching for the first three years and on scholarship for the second three. That arrangement is, at best, risky, and an ill or dilatory editor, bad luck in terms of the outside reviewer, financial troubles at a press, or any of a dozen incidents could make it disastrous.

            Most graduate programs have students teach one course per semester, and so graduate students can struggle at the transition to teaching two or three courses per semester. For those of us who teach writing, it’s extraordinarily difficult to keep teaching to some kind of reasonable amount of our schedule. At many universities, especially Phd-granting, faculty are told that the promotion to Associate Professor (and consequent granting of tenure) is 40% dependent on good teaching, 40% dependent on scholarship, and 20% dependent on service—some universities protect junior faculty from service, so that it isn’t taken into consideration at all. Some universities put little emphasis on teaching, so as long as one doesn’t leave the bodies actually in the classroom, a good publication record is all that’s necessary, and some universities have minimum expectations regarding publication but very high expectations regarding student satisfaction. Obviously, one would create a different weekly calendar with different promotion and tenure expectations. But, assuming the 40/40/20 split, a normal week should have two days (16 hours) spent on teaching, two days (16 hours) spent on research, and one day (8 hours) spent on service. If one is teaching two classes, that is six hours in class, and only ten hours per week of class preparation and grading. Those ten hours include office hours, usually required to be 3-4, during which time one might be able to get some class preparation done. That sounds like plenty of time, but it isn’t, especially if the classes are writing classes. If you try to turn this abstract set of principles about time commitments into an actual workweek, you can see that it initially can look fairly straightforward:

It quickly becomes complicated, however. I typically teach two writing classes per semester (at one institution, I taught three per semester). Hence, approximately once every three weeks, I have about 45 papers to grade, and it takes me 30-40 minutes per paper to grade them, or an additional 23 hours I need to find in a week. At least once per semester, I confer individually with each student for 20-30 minutes, so I lose another 20 hours that week. For six of the fifteen weeks in the semester, then, I will get no research done. Still, that should leave nine weeks in which I could work on scholarship for sixteen hours a week, plenty of time to get an article or chapter done per semester. And that isn’t what happens during most weeks for me—instead, I generally have four to five weeks in which I can do that much scholarship.

            Burka and Yuen recommend that people make a schedule of what they actually do with their time (just as people dieting are advised to keep a food diary); they call it an “un-schedule.” As with the food diary, the difference between the schedule we think we should have and the one we really have can be surprising. Here is the one they show for a teacher, Marsha, who is having trouble returning students' midterm papers:

There are several things that are striking about it—notice that the schedule exemplifies the “double shift,” that she is cutting up her schedule in order to take the kid(s) to and from school, for instance. By cutting back on the time during the weekdays, she obligates herself either to make up that time evenings and weekends, or to have what is, in effect, a part-time job. Assuming no commute time whatsoever (that she can drop the kids off and get to work by 8, and leave work at 3 and still pick them up), and that she works through lunch (never a good idea), she works 8-3 five days a week, or 35 hours a week at most. That’s a problem. It’s even more of a problem if one looks at her actual schedule:

  

She is actually working just over twenty hours a week, very nearly a half-time job. No wonder she can’t get her grading done. This is a deeply problematic schedule for other reasons as well: there is no indication in the book that he is being paid for a half-time job; it’s suggested that she’s being paid for full-time work. While Burka and Yuen are supportive of the changes she is trying to make, and that’s probably the best stance for a therapist to take, someone needs to have a serious talk with her about her schedule. It’s unlikely that her department is filled with people working 25 hours a week, so colleagues are likely to be resentful (with reason, I think) if there is committee work that others are having to pick up—notice that she isn’t even doing as much service as is expected. If she is in a position in which scholarship is expected, this is a very grim schedule indeed.

            One of the problems with the kind of free-form schedule that academics often have is that it is easy to lose track of how much time is spent on work, with the consequence that a person can be working either much less or much more than it seems. When I was in graduate school, a very productive friend explained that he got so much done because he worked 9-5. And when was working, he was really working, not just hanging out in the TA office whining about how much work he had to do (something I spent so much time doing that I should have gotten a degree in it). I was convinced that working 9-5 would be a reduction in the amount of time I worked—work seemed to loom over my life the way Godzilla looms over a city. After all, I was working evenings and weekends. Once I tried to make a schedule, however, I discovered that my sense of how much I worked was wishful thinking—in fact, I’d really start work at about ten a.m. (after I’d gotten coffee, read various things, sharpened pencils, and engaged in other forms of dithering), and work till about four p.m., with a couple of breaks for coffee and one for lunch. I’d work an hour or so most evenings and several hours on Saturday and Sunday. But, since I was working about 25 hours during weekdays, even picking up the evenings and weekend work got me to about 40 hours a week, or what I was actually expected to work (and what most of the taxpayers who paid my salary generally worked). I wasn’t exactly the long-suffering martyr I was imagining myself to be.

            Although it’s far from the most common reason for academics to fail to get scholarship done, trying to get a full-time job done in part-time hours is one reason some people aren’t as productive as they’d like to be. If Marsha wants to work a 25-35 hour week, then she needs to scale her expectations for herself to that amount of time. And this is another piece of advice that gets people angry with me (or with anyone who gives the equivalent advice). There is, in fact, a limited amount of time in the day, but a potentially infinite number of things we would or could do with that time. It’s hard to imagine ways of increasing how much scholarship we get done that don’t necessitate spending more time on it. And, if we are going to commit more time to any task or goal, we have to spend less time on something else. If, like many of us, she wants to be an excellent parent, scholar, teacher, and colleague, and she can’t do it in 35 hours, she needs to find more time or decide to be less than excellent at one of those things. There is no point in beating one’s self up for failing to do the impossible, and it's impossible to spend more time on one task without reducing time spent on something else.

            More common than the person who isn’t getting scholarship done because they aren’t working full-time is the person who is working more than full-time and still doesn’t have enough time for scholarship. This can be a time management issue in all sorts of ways--unreasonable expectations, only working on what's urgent, or various others. Paradoxically, it can be partially solved by reducing the overall time one spends on work. At another point in my life, I became aware that I was working eight hour days, and then working after dinner, and working three or four hours both days of the weekend. And when I wasn’t working, I was feeling guilty about the fact that I wasn't. This was a case when I didn’t need to work more, but I did need to work much more efficiently, and one way to do that was to be more rested when I was working. When I set Sunday and after dinner off-limits, so that I would not work during those times, I became more efficient with my other time. Granted, I sometimes got up awfully early in the morning, but that worked more effectively for me than staying up late. The soul needs rest.

            As with the disparity between a food diary and an ideal diet, there are multiple ways of reconciling the real and the dream schedule. In addition to scaling back one’s goals, another is to make the ideal schedule more realistic. Particularly because of my obligations to the amorphous kinds of teaching—graduate students writing dissertations or in conference courses, undergraduates doing independent studies or theses—and partly because I put a lot of time into reading student material, I simply plan for twenty-three hours on teaching per week, and more for those weeks in which I’m grading. Were I an assistant professor with a book expected for tenure, that would be a professionally suicidal commitment. I would have to change my teaching strategies to make them much less time-intensive.

            If one decides to go the other route, and make one’s real schedule more idealistic, Burka and Yuen recommend doing so over a long period of time—setting goals for how much time one spends on scholarship, and (at least visually) rewarding one’s self for moving toward those goals. From the perspective of a writing teacher, this makes tremendous sense—setting manageable goals, rewarding small progresses, and making those goals process rather than product. That is, many people would be tempted to set the goal of a product; instead of “I will work on scholarship an average of eight hours per week” to say “I will get an article published this semester.” Of course the first is framed as step toward the latter, but the former way of seeing the goal keeps the achievement within one’s own control much more than the latter. But it does mean that one has to set reasonable goals about one’s time, and then protect it (so we’re not entirely free from the possible interference of others). Hence, some people work at home if they tend to get interrupted on campus, but others find they get too many interruptions at home and so work on campus. Sometimes protecting one’s time means training other people (or, in my case, people and dogs) not to interrupt during certain periods unless their hair is on fire and no one else but you can put it out.[3] For the most part, the people I have known who had trouble finishing scholarship are people who have trouble setting aside and protecting that time.[4]

            A third option is to procrastinate some of the many things one wants to do. I love teaching, and I would never have gone into this career if I couldn’t read student work carefully, get to know my students individually, and spend as much time on teaching as I do. But that doesn’t mean that every year has to have the same level of commitment. Some faculty have a difficult time saying no—to requests from administrators, colleagues, or students—so it may be easier to say, “Yes, but not now.” Restricting one’s commitment to teaching and service while an assistant professor doesn’t mean being a selfish jerk who doesn’t carry the same service load as others; it means focusing on this kind of work at this point in one’s life.

            A fourth option is to protect larger blocks of time, such as a month. I have learned that September, the latter half of December, March, May, June, and half of July are times in which I can get a lot of writing done. Research leaves are, of course, the exception, but I have a caveat about those as well. Sometimes friends and family don’t understand the nature of a research leave (just as many don’t understand the concept of working at home), and will assume that time with a leave is a good time for travelling, DIY home improvement projects, keeping kids out of daycare, and all sorts of things other than working eight hours a day. Some scholars fall for that trap as well, and overschedule their own leaves so much that they couldn’t possibly put the time in that is necessary for scholarship.

            I am a big believer in desk organizing products. I’m not sure how many sorters, hutches, baskets, little sets of drawers, and shelf sets I’ve bought over the years. They never work, of course, because I fail to put things in them consistently. But I still look with longing at cunning little products, as though that product would make all the crap on my desk leap into the right places. If I want a cleaner desk, I need to put things in the little products. I think the same thing happens with some people and leaves. Sometimes it seems to me that people who fail to set aside time in a normal year for scholarship assume that getting a leave will magically organize their time for them. A leave won’t organize their time anymore than a new hutch will organize my desk. Doing scholarship takes time; people have to commit the time to it.

            All sorts of things (and people) keep scholars from committing time to their scholarship. One of them, ironically, is being a “good citizen” to the Department. Administrators, even one’s Department Chair, are not in the same role to an assistant professor as one’s advisor is during graduate school—they are not necessarily looking out for you, let alone for your best interest. That isn’t criticism of Department Chairs; I’ve never known one who wanted Assistant Professors to be denied tenure and promotion. It’s simply that they have other things to do that are, to be blunt, more important in the grand scheme of things than any individual in a department. So, while it can be very helpful to have periodic discussions with one’s chair about one’s career, don’t expect them to remember those conversations in much detail. Therefore, when a chair asks you to do something—to be on a committee, for instance—s/he hasn’t calculated whether, given your various other obligations, that service is the best use of your time. It is your job to look out for your time.

            That doesn’t mean being a jerk; it means working out a rational plan, ideally with the consultation of your chair, regarding the kind and amount of service you will be doing while an assistant professor. Then it becomes your job, not your chair’s, to think about each additional request in light of that plan. Similarly, teaching obligations should be a reasonable negotiation among what the students need, what is convenient for you, what your department needs, and your research. In (too) many departments, the most loathed teaching assignments are dumped on assistant professors because they can’t say no. If that’s the case, then you may not have much control over how pleasurable at least that course is, so try to make sure at least one other course is related to your research (since, presumably, your research gives you joy).

            I’m often surprised by the advice that is given by supposed teaching experts on how to improve teaching. For instance, a colleague in another department whose lectures on a difficult and fairly boring topic were, in fact, boring, was told to put all his lectures on powerpoint slides, that he was to read off of during class, and which he would make available via the web to students who hadn’t bothered to come to class. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that his evaluations, already weak, plummeted. Everyone has a bad semester from time to time, and one often has to teach a deeply problematic class (usually a required introductory class for students who would rather be doing anything other than be there). But it should be, on the whole, tremendously rewarding. If it’s going badly, then get help from people who do it well (not just one person).

            If the only way to keep it from going badly is to spend too much time on it, then it might be useful to try to work with a good teacher on how to make one’s teaching more efficient—not in the sense of being more stream-lined, but in the sense of getting more bang for the buck. I don’t mean to give specific recommendations, but to persuade people that teaching, like scholarship, is something that is well-considered in a kind of big picture way. Thinking about one’s course rotation over a five-year period, for instance, and then spending the first year trying to develop a repertoire of classes and deep set of teaching resources (handouts, notes for teaching, assignment prompts) that can be refined rather than reinvented, is far more likely to lead to good teaching than developing a new course every semester (as I spent far too much time doing).

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[1] Editors may ask an author to make recommendations for outside readers—different presses have different policies as to whether it must be someone unknown to the author. While the identity of the readers is unknown to the readers, the readers do know the author’s identity; this is not true of “blind-reviewed” journals, in which case neither author nor reader knows the identity of the other.

[2] And they might. Although graduate students and assistant professors are often advised to use the most eulogistic terms possible in the cvs and annual reports, and even engage in a little wishful thinking (listing as “forthcoming” something that is actually “under submission”)—that was certainly the advice I was given—I have seen fairly ugly consequences of that practice. My advice is to be as precise and accurate as one can.

[3] At another institution, I had an administrative position. I could spend all day sitting in my office and do nothing but handle whatever crisis arrived in the form of a person at my door or a phone call. When I moved some distance away and worked from home two days a week, and those same people would have had to make a long-distance call or send me email, they didn’t bother. Being accessible is over-rated.

[4] Ferrari and Dovidio, for instance, argue for a correlation between procrastinators and people who are easily distracted (“Examining Behavioral Processes”); certainly, while there are seem to have trouble focusing on a sufficiently specific topic, and whose writing processes is impeded by throwing more books to read in the way of writing, I’m not persuaded that they read those additional books because they’re distracted. When I was in graduate school, a friend pointed out that the male ABD students all had fastidiously –tended bears, and that most of us (I was the exception) had cleaner apartments than we ever had before. It seems to me that, for many people, the additional reading serves the same function as beard-trimming, cleaning out under the refrigerator, or taking up a new hobby have; it isn’t that a person is genuinely distracted by the detritus under the fridge. Such tasks are only attractive because they provide a mildly self-punishing way to procrastinate.