Switching Productivity Gears

Fall semester is literally just around the corner, and like many of my colleagues, I'm gradually pulling myself out of my summer work mode. This year marks the first time in my professional life when summer translated into 3 very distinct activities: travel, research, and writing. (Research-related travel meant that I spent 4 weeks in Brazil and I also saw more music than I normally am able to do. It was awesome.) Since I am now living 3 flights away from my wife, recreational travel was very important to my emotional health even if it took a toll on other aspects of my life. For those who don't know, my partner and I both live about an hour or so away from the nearest regional airport and visits mean 8-14 hours of travel time. Now I am becoming one of those seasoned travelers contemplating expensive, travel-related purchases like noise-canceling headphones, an airport wifi package, and an ereader. All of that travel aside, writing actually happened, and very soon an article will be off to a journal. All of this is exciting.

I have been thinking about how much we academics need summers to get our research and writing done. Many academic bloggers "go dark" during the summer months, and many others get out of town with laptops in tow to web-challenged locales just to get some work done. I've found that I am the opposite. I actually tend to do worse with unstructured time and prefer to have some sort of constraint on my time, but not too much. During my fellowship-supported grad school years, I would often volunteer for various non-profit causes, and I wrote most of my dissertation while being a teaching assistant. A big appeal of a loose structure is the feeling of productivity and accomplishment. On the days when I have tangible results from my other demands, I feel more motivated to sit in front of a computer and tinker away at whatever project is before me. It really is too bad that the academic year is structured in feasts and famines of free time. I think the trick is that the other demands need to not take very much time of my day. In the real world, however, most demands take over when given the chance. And this is why so many young faculty fall into the trap of spending too much time on teaching or service.*

In other words, I am currently neck-deep in a self-assessment mode. As I face another year of clear structural demands on my time, I wonder if my anxieties about the daily grind of sitting before a word processing program will slip away? Or will they just change? In the distance I can anticipate the demands of students, colleagues, and more travel on my time. And let's not forget another year on the academic job market. It's going to be an interesting ride.

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* Most of Robert Boice's Advice for New Faculty focuses on this problem. See also Kerry Ann Rockquemore's advice columns for InsideHigherEd.com.

On Writing Binges

It is conference season, and with it comes understandable professional pressures. As you may or may not know, I presented a part of my second chapter from my dissertation at SEM last weekend. In just a few days, I will be getting on a plane for Nashville to attend AMS. Normally conference season is my most unproductive. Whatever work I do is generally focused on older projects, and I direct the rest of my energy to other professional activities, like schmoozing and thinking about all of the new ideas circulating in the field(s) of music research. But this year is a little different, not just because I am on the job market, but also because I haven't altered my writing schedule.

I discovered sometime on Friday evening that I have inadvertently slipped into chapter draft completion mode. (This is not to be confused with final revision mode, which shares some attributes but is really a separate animal altogether.) This became glaringly obvious when I chose an evening of working on my dissertation over two very enticing Halloween parties. Something is clearly wrong with me!

My understanding of my own writing process is that sometime after I do the majority of the research on a chapter, I finally assimilate the information and my subconscious works out some of my major theoretical blocks. And then I decide that the blocks are mostly gone and I can work out the chapter in a first draft form. In short, the fretting and worrying that hinders me gives way to a firm belief that I can produce something coherent even if it needs to be rewritten/revised in the very near future. I solve a version of the dissertation puzzle, and then I really want to write. And write. And write.

This is what I call "chapter draft completion mode." In this mode of existence, everything else in my life fades away, even really enticing things like friends' parties, and I just want to get the darn chapter done. It eventually becomes compulsive. I binge. I treat my computer as an appendage. I carry many books around with me just so that they will remind me of certain crucial points. My sleep patterns change. I have to remind myself to eat. I can't sustain my focus on much of anything else.

I first experienced this mode of writing about a year ago when I promised an outside member of my committee a completed chapter draft by October 1. I proceeded to spend the last week of September hiding in a TA office on campus with my computer and books, finally hashing out all of the little details of my very first chapter. The final result was a predictable disaster, and it took me many months to clean up that mess. I've been trying to avoid that kind of overly messy writing binge ever since.

The good news is that I know what this is. And hopefully I will have this monster known as my chapter 4 relatively under control by a self-imposed due date hanging in the future. One can only hope.