A dialogue with a colleague.
Colleague: I’m so stressed out, I think I’m about to have a nervous breakdown.
Clarissa: What’s happening? What’s bothering you?
Colleague: I’m up for tenure next year, but I have next to no research. This is driving me crazy. I don’t know what will happen to me.
Clarissa: What are you working on?
Colleague: Well, there is this article I’ve been working on intermittently for the past two years but I never have the time to just sit down and finish it off. I haven’t even been to any conferences since 2009 because I don’t have time to create presentations. I’m screwed.
Clarissa: Look, I’m organizing a talk by my colleague Jonathan Mathew. This guy publishes like crazy. And he has created this great method of scholarly productivity. I tried the method and it totally works. So he will come here and tell us how he does it.
Colleague: Really? This sounds exactly like something I need at this point. Is the talk limited to your department or can anybody come?
Clarissa: Of course, everybody is welcome. Do come by. Jonathan is very motivating and inspiring. I’ll send you the poster the moment I have it ready.
Colleague: I will definitely come to the talk. I just hope it isn’t one of those methods where in order to publish a lot you need to write every day. Because nobody can do that. This kind of approach just makes no sense. It isn’t like anybody really just sits there five days a week and writes for 30 minutes.
Clarissa: Erm, well. . .
Colleague: Because if you believe that such a method works you will just waste your time and never publish anything. This talk won’t be on any sort of a “write every day” method, will it?
Clarissa leaves, mumbling to herself: No, of course, it won’t be a method where you have to write to have something written. No, sir. My colleague created an approach where you never write a single line yet keep publishing all the time.
Clarissa's Blog 
People who employ home tutors for their children to get ahead or to make up for a lack of focus of ability also hope to draw from a pool of magical resources. An authority and a payment plan is supposed to impart knowledge directly, from one head to another.
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No magical solutions, but here’s another motivating method that you might find useful (although your colleague probably won’t…), the #madwriting hash on twitter. Bascially, it’s like the Pomodoro technique in that you write in 30min bursts, but the beauty of it is that you make a public annoucnement and a commitment on twitter when you start and then report after 30 min what you achieved. You can do several parts of 30min writing and then report later. This second part makes it easier for me to force myself to really sit and write for this time and not want to go check email or whatever every 5min. It started here:
http://madwriting.posterous.com/
But if you go to twitter and search for #madwriting hash, you’ll see lots of people using it.
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I can never understand how people like this get through grad school or get jobs. I think most of us have at least some periods when we procrastinate and/or binge, but you can’t do that year in and year out: it’s just too stressful. Regular sessions are really so much easier. I do think it’s possible to write successfully by scheduling time (say) MWF or TThSa, rather than every day, but there has to be some regularity. If there is anything your colleague does every day (teach? exercise? brush teeth?) then s/he can write every day.
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“I can never understand how people like this get through grad school or get jobs.”
Yes, this is always my thought.
It also occurs to me that actually, if you are writing, you do write every day or on a regular schedule. Otherwise, you’re not inside your project.
Those gimmicks like the pomodoro or report to Twitter, I wouldn’t do, too distracting, but I have started using them for truly tedious tasks like lower level grading, mailing list maintenance, and things like that, and they do help.
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P.S. But your colleague should not try to save the research situation, it is too late, should not have been kept at fourth year review, actually. Should use the time he has now to look for other kinds of jobs and my big suggestions would be some kind of administrative staff, community college administration, etc.
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We are not that close, I just know him because we were on a committee together, so I can’t give this type of advice. But the person is obviously suffering and I worry about him.
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Someone has to tell him. I quit doing research in my 5th year of a tenure track because I had a nervous breakdown for reasons unrelated to the university. I knew I was disabled and not in control of when I would be cured, and that it would in any case not be in time to make tenure. Nobody would believe me, they decided it was just a problem of self discipline or that it was too delicate a situation to speak to. So all I got was, “just write daily” … as though that were some kind of revelation or as though I had not been doing just that since age 11 or so. I was on job market and making career change plans, because I do not have money of my own and have to work, and people were horrified: they wanted me to just sit there, “try to write,” and hope for the best, it was ridiculous.
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“My colleague created an approach where you never write a single line yet keep publishing all the time.”
Such a method already exists. It’s called ‘plagiarism.’
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Yes, you are right, how could I forget the favorite method of some of my students.
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I know people like that and I find it so frustrating. I think they also have an “all or nothing” approach. For me, I can’t write every day during the school year. I am a slow reader/writer/grader and if I wrote every day, my teaching would become a mess. So I instead commit to writing 2-3 days a week. I’m not as productive as some but I do get things accomplished. I found the “Seinfeld Chain Method” that you promoted on this blog particularly helpful. For some reason, I loved thinking about a “writing chain.” And I couldn’t build a “daily chain” so instead I concentrated on a 3 day a week chain. And I think I mentioned this but the article that I wrote using the “Seinfeld Chain Method” was accepted for publication last year! So it was a “stupid motivational trick” that really worked for me. 🙂 So perhaps, if you are so inclined, advise your colleague to adapt the methods to his own ends. The important thing with writing is that you are progressing and avoiding stasis. If he writes just 2 pages a week (which is about the pace that I write at), he can write an article in 3-4 months. Which is admittedly slow. But it’s still forward progress. Or he can just continue to feel sorry for himself and do nothing. 😉
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I’m really happy this is working for you!
It’s working for me, too, and, oh, the relief of not having to count the months (or years) since the last acceptance! I got into some really bad habits in my second grad school and that was my downfall.
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Another reason not to go to Yale. I got bad habits later, as a professor, when my colleagues, including those senior ones assigned to me as mentors, were from there and were like this.
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Ah, now things are becoming clearer. People who graduate from there do tend to be difficult. I didn’t even mind when everybody viewed me with suspicion during my job search. I knew the suspicion was justified by the encounters with many of my colleagues.
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Some people will try everything, except the few things that are actually proven to work. Even I can barely get away with not writing every day, if I want to make significant progress. If you can do it with 2 days a week, that’s great. It would be more difficult for me.
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The only method that works for me is writing every day. Even if it’s a little, it still has to be every day. Everything else is just a waste of time. But writing every day ensures that new ideas continue to get generated.
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Oh I agree that writing every day is best. And I know that you (Jonathan) and Clairssa are more productive than I am! I guess I was just trying to say that just because it’s hard for someone to write _every _ day (like it is for me) doesn’t mean that s/he should write _no_ days (like Clarissa’s colleague.) I think it’s importnat to establish a “writing routine” that is part of the rythmn of your working life and it’s important to keep up with this routine. The least productive thing is to throw your hands up, declare you can’t write every day, and then do nothing. Also, love your blog Jonathan! 🙂
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Of course, everybody is different and everybody has a different method. What I do find unproductive for pretty much everybody I know (including me) is waiting for ” a big block of time.” I used to wait and wait and wait for me but no block of time was ever big enough.
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“What I do find unproductive for pretty much everybody I know (including me) is waiting for ” a big block of time.” I used to wait and wait and wait for me but no block of time was ever big enough.”
Here here! I agree. I used to do that all the time. I still fall prey to that sometimes. But now I realize it’s a lie I tell myself to excuse my own laziness. And that makes me snap out of it. 🙂
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@Anville, not laziness, fear.
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It is not big blocks of time you need, but enough total time in a week.
I do not understand when these people who know they need big blocks of time, ever had them. Do you know?
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“I do not understand when these people who know they need big blocks of time, ever had them.”
In graduate school. That’s the model that we were trained under. In grad school I taught a 1-1 at most and had additional options for teaching reductions. I think that. while some people might have taught more during grad school, my experience is fairly typical. So when you transition from that sort of model to a 3-3- or even 4-4 teaching load (plus service) it seems like time evaporated….That was my experienc anyway. It took me a few years to understand how to balance things and I still don’t always get it right. 🙂
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OK, I taught 1-1-1 in graduate school and I remember the shock of teaching so much more, but that didn’t stop research. I mean, in college and graduate school we had all these classes to take, all with serious papers, and we were on quarters, and you had to be organized.
Then in dissertation era I remember figuring out that with teaching, RA job on side, and service (union, GSA, grad rep to committees, whatever it was during a given quarter) and later on, that time consuming job market, I only had 15-20 hours a week for dissertation. And getting those hours in meant finding time in each day.
I do remember the last stretch, under contract to a job for the next year and not working because I had double worked the term before, putting in 5-8 hours a day writing and doing writing related things.
But I don’t know, having large blocks of time is different from needing them, although there is much to be said for not being exhausted and mentally overloaded from teaching 3-4-5 out of field classes and so on.
I might be unusual. My reaction to first job, teaching 3 classes, was not “oh, I cannot do research,” but “oh, I cannot do what I would call a responsible job on each of these classes in the time I must allot, given research and service.”
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OK, now I get it. I should post on this. I went to this not for the faint of heart graduate program where it was be organized or flunk out. Then post exams I had by coincidence an obliquely related fellowship and took it for the experience and the funding, but still had dissertation to do, so had to do both — not in great circumstances for dissertation, but I did it on a “write one page a day” theory.
So when I got back from fellowship, 18 mos. later with a draft of a dissertation in a box, everyone else was in this weird state of competitive stasis, spiraling downward. They had had, I now realize, big blocks of time!!! I was told many times that taking the fellowship was a bad idea since it was unrelated, really, but actually one of the best things I ever did was probably get away from those dissertaiton writers.
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During my entire grad school experience, I was completely dedicated to graduating in 5 years. I needed to start making money soon, so I was very organized and very set on my goal. But I was treated like an idiot and worse by everybody for wanting that. Research was discouraged. And I felt very lonely because everybody except ny friend Ol was so different from me.
I did graduate in 5 years but the process messed with my entire personality.
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In our case it was just exhaustion. When I started graduate school they had just changed the PhD exam because it was so stressful nobody had taken it in a long time without having a nervous breakdown, getting a divorce, or both, or failing.
They changed it such that you could take it and keep your health and family together, but it was still a very large undertaking coming after a lot of courses (there were 3 full time years of required coursework post MA, and taking exams while in said courses was not possible, so you started dissertation in year 6 or 7 (counting from beginning of MA), unless for specific reasons having to do with fields and prior experience your program was unusually streamlined. Some few also finished after year 7 if they had been very very organized earlier on, but this was super rare. I took a total of 8.5 years but the average time to degree for the department was 10.
Professors loved to say it was procrastination but I repeat, it was exhaustion. Also, it was having had to spend so very much time in high level out of field courses. You ended up with a supposed field about which you did not know more than you did all the other fields, and you had very high standards for what sufficient knowledge of a field was. Meanwhile, the professors were saying publishing was so hard and you would never get a job because there were none, and that you would not want them anyway or be able to tolerate them because they would be in the US where it snows.
In that atmosphere, people who had started graduate school basically because it *was* a nice post college job (you got a TAship and in those days that was fine), during which you could decide whether you wanted to continue to work in academia or go into something else, and who did not withstand the circumstances well, either (a) went into something else or (b) wanted to, but had drunk the kool-aid, so they floundered and I do not blame them.
I was luckier than they because I had decided I wanted to finish. I also had a very small inheritance that meant I could afford to go to the MLA to look for a job, and so on, not have 100% of the financial anxiety that, as the Reagan cuts came in, drove people to take on extra job after extra job and distract themselves from dissertation.
But I repeat, dissertation lostness isn’t laziness that I have seen, it’s a reaction to emotional oppression, lack of actual support for moving ahead, blind obstacles coming from above, and so on. I have felt this later on as a professor, didn’t go through it in graduate school but have dealt with much later.
I think the profession is structured to discourage and that you lose either way. If you are not discouraged then people resent you, and if you are, they criticize you for it.
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“They changed it such that you could take it and keep your health and family together, but it was still a very large undertaking coming after a lot of courses (there were 3 full time years of required coursework post MA, and taking exams while in said courses was not possible, so you started dissertation in year 6 or 7 (counting from beginning of MA), unless for specific reasons having to do with fields and prior experience your program was unusually streamlined. Some few also finished after year 7 if they had been very very organized earlier on, but this was super rare. I took a total of 8.5 years but the average time to degree for the department was 10.”
– This is how it is done in Harvard. Or was in 2008. I don’t know if the procedure has changed since then.
I felt very alienated from other grad students because their main strategic goal was to guarantee at least 8 years of funding in the PhD program. We did not have nearly the workload that you had, so it made zero sense to me. If you are teaching 1 SPAN 101 course per semester that is completely organized for you by the language director AND have one free funded year, I do not see why you need 8 years to write a dissertation.
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“But I repeat, dissertation lostness isn’t laziness that I have seen, it’s a reaction to emotional oppression, lack of actual support for moving ahead, blind obstacles coming from above, and so on.”
– I agree that people take all this time to do the dissertation because they feel completely lost. If somebody worked with people, mentored them in the way that Jonathan is doing for me now, for example, it would be so much easier to write the dissertation. Most of my PhD colleagues didn’t even do an MA. They came to the PhD straight from a Spanish Major. This often meant that the number of courses, just simple basic lit courses they had taken in Spanish was extremely limited. From there to structuring your won research agenda completely on your own – that’s an impossibly difficult task. I’d been lucky in that I’d had a very intense research-oriented MA program behind me, so I was at least ready to do my own research.
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OK, I have been thinking about this since you posted it. For some kinds of writing, writing every day mey be best. However, when dealing with a really deep subject, it can take weeks or months of work to figure out what you need or want to say. Writing when you have nothing to say leads to pure fluff or drivel. I spent nine years once working on a problem before I solved it and had something important to write. If I had tried to write every day, I would never have solved it.
It seems to me that only if what you have to say is superficial, or if you are writing fiction and the ideas come faster than you can write, is writing every day feasible. In any serious academic pursuit, I think the research takes much more time than the writing–maybe by a factor of 100.
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I posted this entry above a few days ago. I am surprised that no one has responded. I hope it means that people here realize that what I said is correct. In mathematics, at least, we often bemoan that people–both students and researchers–too often worry about ‘communicating’ when they do not yet have anything to say.
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I think that in this case “writing” means more that just actual act of writing, but includes all the parts of research that you mention, thinking about problems, finding solutions, etc. At least that’s how I consider it (although I am in ICT, so things might be different in other fields) – the whole process from the idea, to reading up about it, to thinking of solutions, to implemetations and in the end the actual writing of a paper (which is a minor part of the whole process). All of these steps are essential in order to produce academic papers and so by doing “writing” in this way every day is the only way that does actually lead to publications (which I think Clarissa’s colleague is missing in this whole picture).
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No, writing is the actual act of writing. I used to spend years trying to convince myself that I need to do more research, read some more, think some more before actually sitting down to write. Now I have discovered that these are delaying tactics, nothing more. Now I write every day and the publications have started to come. If one writes for 30 minutes a day, then there is a lot of time left to engage in other parts of the process after the writing for the day is done. Right now, for example, I’m writing a conference talk. In the meanwhile, however, I’m conducting research, reading, etc. for my new project.
I have discovered that writing every day helps generate new ideas a lot faster than just sitting there and trying to generate them without writing.
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“we often bemoan that people–both students and researchers–too often worry about ‘communicating’ when they do not yet have anything to say.”
– I know somebody who keeps saying, “How am I supposed to do research when I don’t know what I’m supposed to write about? I never have any ideas.” I don’t know where she is hoping to get ideas from if all she does is sit there and wait for ideas to come out of nowhere.
The process of sitting down to write, looking at what you have already written an working on improving it makes the ideas start sprouting. Where the ideas are supposed to come from if one doesn’t do this, I don’t know.
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Having an idea is only the first step. I, at least, need to do pages, maybe hundreds of pages, of work, calculations, etc before I am ready to write. A physicist may need to collect large amounts of data and then do a lot of calculations with them before anything meaningful can be written. It would be similar to you, Clarissa, beginning to write a critique of some work that you have never read. Have you read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Would you sit down to write an essay about them before you read any of them?
It is most distressing that some academics think they can (and do, apparently) publish an idea without doing the hundreds or thousands of hours of spedework necessary to make it more than an speculation. It does nothing for our reputation. It is tantamount to a journalist reporting about Syria while sitting in a room in California, having read nothing about Syria, nor having ever been there, knowing perhaps only that it is somewhere north of the equator.
I have had the idea of writing a paper outside my field proposing that a thirty hour standard work week rather than 40, would be a help in solving our economic troubles. I would not even consider doing this without spending a lot of time collecting information in support of this (mostlikely years.) It would be worthless otherwise. Which menas that I will probably not do it, since I would rather spend my time working on properties of homogeneous continua, for example.
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” It would be similar to you, Clarissa, beginning to write a critique of some work that you have never read. Have you read Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales? Would you sit down to write an essay about them before you read any of them?”
– I read new works of literature all the time. That doesn’t prevent me from dedicating 1 hour each day to writing. These are not mutually exclusive endeavors. 🙂
“It is most distressing that some academics think they can (and do, apparently) publish an idea without doing the hundreds or thousands of hours of spedework necessary to make it more than an speculation. ”
– I agree completely. Still, I don’t see how this contradicts the idea of the post.
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When I proved, in 1976, that there exists a compact Hausdorff indecomposable continuum with two composants, I had worked on it for nine years. It would have been impossible to write anything meaningful before I had solved the problem.
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I have lots of ideas, but having the idea is only the first step. There is a lot of work to do before sitting down to write. I had the idea mentioned in my above post while I was a grad student in 1967, but I had no idea how to proceed to solve it. Writing about something you do not know how to solve is impossible. It would be like Julius Cæsar having the idea that if he could fly and see what his enemy was doing from above, it would be helpful, and immediately beginning to build an observation helicopter without any knowledge of how it might be done.
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I think we are not understanding each other. I feel like you are trying to convince me of something that I agree with completely. 🙂
I have 2 entirely different projects right now. One is in the writing stage. I have been working on it since 2007 and have conducted massive research. I have over 40 primary sources and over 200 secondary sources. I can almost recite my entire bibliography on the spot. Now I’m doing the final rewriting of the entire thing.
The second project is in the initial stages at the moment. I’m still only beginning to select primary sources. That involves a lot of reading. Then I will proceed to work with the library sources. After that, I will start elaborating the plan for this new project.
In the meanwhile, the first project will be finished and submitted to publishing houses.
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I am the opposite of Clarissa, used to start writing first and do research next, and only the minimum amount to get something written, because, you know, only by writing can you get a written product, and those are what are required … the work you put into research is invisible but if you have an offprint, that is visible! Now I do read before writing, and I find that writing before reading is a delaying technique because it sends me in circles.
These things having been said, writing in humanities is part of the research process in a way it is not in math/science, i.e. you do, in fact, start writing before you have solved the problem.
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