The other day on Twitter, one of the people I follow says:

Just realized Fall term lectures start a week later than I thought they did. A week more of prep time, here we come!

You might be able to guess what I replied:

Or a week free for writing!

Yes, I’ve been hanging out on Twitter. Which I’ve decided is the water-cooler for the self-employed.

We talk about the kinds of things you talk to your colleagues about when you run into them at the coffee machine. Or that you say to neighbours you meet in the street.

There is a lot of discussion of the weather, what we’re having for lunch, and how annoying technology is. But also some useful connections to people doing interesting things.

What would you do with an extra week?

I suspect that my Twitter correspondent is not alone in thinking of the time “before term starts” as teaching preparation time.

The question is, how much of the summer needs to go into “teaching prep”?

And at what point does the looming beginning of term start to overwhelm your research?

Does teaching feel like your “real” work?

I wonder if there is a deeper problem.

Despite the importance of research to your own career trajectory and to those that hire/tenure/promote you, we live in a culture that doesn’t really understand your research career.

How many people have asked you whether you are working this summer? How many of them meant teaching?

How many people think you get a crazy long summer vacation?

How many people think you have a cushy job because you only teach a couple of days a week?

No Wonder

Most people think they know what teaching is. So they think they understand what you do for a living.

But they have a student’s perspective on teaching. And from a student’s perspective, you are only teaching when you are in the classroom. Just look at the struggles teachers unions have getting time for preparation included in their daily workload.

You are a researcher, too

Despite what your friends and neighbours think, you do much more than teach. You are paid to do more than teach.

It is thus perfectly reasonable to limit the amount of time you spend on teaching preparation. Especially during the summer, the only time of year when you have large blocks of time to devote to research.

So if you suddenly “discover” an extra week before term starts…

Transitioning

Of course, the balance between teaching and research is going to change. And now is probably a good time to start thinking about and planning for that change.

It might be easier to do the initial creative work on an article now. Produce a couple of drafts that can be worked on in 15 or 30 minute chunks of time during term.

If different tasks will take different lengths of time, break your list up into “15 minutes”, “30 minutes”, and “60 minutes” lists so you can quickly find research and writing tasks for the time available.

If you’ve been collecting data or source material, you might want to transition into analysis in August. Set up the analysis or figure out how you want to work with the source material so that you have a rhythm going that can be sustained in 30-minutes a day during term time.

Creating deadlines

The first week of term is going to be chaos. It is every year. Here is a permission slip to not do any research that week. (Right-click or Control-click to save the image and print it out to hang above your desk.)

And since you are going to take a little break at that point, and maybe even the week before to get ready for the chaos, why not set a deadline for some of the writing you are doing.

If you aren’t going to have time to look at that article or grant proposal for a couple of weeks, why not have it sitting on someone else’s desk?

• If you are writing a journal article, submit it before term starts. Then it can sit on reviewers desks in the fall and you might get a reply back early in the new year. You can then do the revisions during winter term and resubmit at the beginning of the summer.
• If you don’t think it is good enough, then arrange for a colleague to read it. Get it to your colleague by your “before term starts” deadline and make an appointment to meet and discuss it in early October. That way you can make a few changes and get it submitted before the Christmas break.
• If you are writing a grant proposal, send it to someone (me? a colleague? the associate dean?) and schedule time in mid-September to work on it. You’ll come back to it fresh and you’ll have comments.
• Set an early August deadline for stopping data collection or archive visits. Then a late August deadline for planning the analysis/interpretation work and getting the kinks worked out so you can do it in small chunks of time.

Have you got other ideas?

How can you actively transition from a research-dominant summer to a teaching dominant fall?

Share them in the comments.

Need help

Not sure what to do or where to start? Stuck?

A 30-minute “Push out of the snowbank” might do the trick.

Me, on the phone, brainstorming with you on how to move forward and make that transition.

If you are still working on your PhD dissertation, or if you supervise doctoral students, this post is for you.

As you may be aware completion times in the humanities and social sciences are long. Much longer than for other disciplines. And humanities disciplines tend to be longer than social sciences.

This seems to be have become an accepted fact of life. But I don’t think it has to be that way.

Not only that but timely completion of the PhD is correlated with later academic success. If you want a tenure-track job, you need to get the PhD finished. And if you don’t, I can’t imagine why you’d want to spend 10 years working on it, either.

Here are my top tips:

1. Focus on feasibility

Define a project that can be done in a reasonable amount of time. Your supervisor should help with this. If necessary ask “Is this feasible in 3 years?” Read their body language. Ask for suggestions on breaking it into smaller projects. Then pick one of those.

If you do get a tenure track job, you’ll have another 30 years to do research. Make the PhD the first phase of a longer program.

Yes, the project needs to be substantial. But a PhD is not your life’s work. It is a substantial project that demonstrates your ability to do work at the level required for an academic career. It is an entry ticket.

A crucial role of your supervisor and committee is to ensure that the project is challenging enough for this level and yet feasible.

Not too small. Not too big.

2. Make a file for all the things you’ll write once you’re finished

Research is messy. As you go along there will be all kinds of interesting tangents. There will be several things you could write about the data you collect or the source material you examine.

All of them don’t need to be in the dissertation. The dissertation needs a coherent argument.

All the other stuff can become articles after you are done. Or non-academic contributions. Put them in a file that you can look through when you are closer to the end.

3. The final dissertation doesn’t have to do what the proposal said

The point of the proposal is to offer an opportunity for more experienced researchers to judge whether your proposed project is likely to produce an acceptable dissertation.

They want you to pass. So they check that the project is well designed, likely to meet the standards, etc.

But research is messy. Very few final research reports look like what the proposal said. Because you learn new things when you do research.

So, you don’t have to stick with a proposal that now feels like not the best approach to this data/sources. But you do still need a coherent argument and rigourous analysis/interpretation. Use your supervisor to check on major shifts in direction.

4. Fewer than 6 people will read it.

You are not going to be done with this material when you’ve finished the PhD.

This is only a step. It involves all kinds of jumping through hoops that you wouldn’t have to do for other kinds of academic writing.

Even if you do decide to turn it into a book (which you don’t have to do), you will need to make changes. You need to have some motivation left to go back to it afterwards.

Here is one situation where writing to pass the test is a really valuable skill. Fortunately most people that get this far have that skill. Use it.

5. Use your supervisor

There is a formal system to support you. You have a supervisor. You have a committee. They have roles that are defined in the policies and procedures of your institution.

Don’t ask for support that you are not entitled to. But it is reasonable to see your supervisor regularly. And to expect that they will provide comments on written work in good time. Make firm commitments during meetings.

• set the next meeting date
• agree what you will accomplish before then
• agree dates to discuss comments on any writing submitted

More importantly work out what support you need and what your supervisor’s strengths are and figure out a system that works for both of you.

Keep in mind that your supervisor wants you to complete successfully. Their job is to make sure that you only submit a dissertation that will pass (albeit perhaps with revisions). They know the rules and expectations. Make sure you listen to their advice. (See writing to the test, above.)

6. Build a support network

Contrary to popular belief (especially in the humanities) research is not a solo enterprise. It involves collaboration.

The form of that collaboration varies considerably by discipline but almost always includes regular discussion of work in progress with other researchers, discussion of research approaches with other researchers (new ideas, things that aren’t working, tips and tricks, etc.), sharing data and references, etc.

Build a support network to supplement what you get formally through your supervisor.

Meet with other doctoral candidates. Form a writing group. Set up a brown bag seminar. This may turn out to be more important than your supervisor in terms of regular support.

A colleague of mine, back in the day, once commented that though her (quite famous) supervisor wasn’t very available, the fact that he attracted a lot of interesting students made it more than worthwhile to work with him.

She found the community of students being supervised by the same guy to be incredibly intellectually stimulating and supportive. What other cool people has your supervisor or program attracted?

7. Career support

Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that all you need to do to secure a post-PhD position is get the qualification. A PhD might be a necessary qualification for some jobs but I know of none where it is sufficient.

Learn about future careers and the kinds of experience you will need to successfully compete for them. Then make time to gain that experience.

Good sources of information include the careers office at your university. Information interviewing to learn more about particular jobs (including academic ones) is also invaluable.

Don’t think the other experience — published papers, teaching experience, internships in non-academic organizations, etc — are a good reason to delay completion of the dissertation, either. You need both.

And timely completion of the PhD is strongly correlated with academic career success.

Need help

I can’t (and won’t) substitute for your dissertation supervisor. But if you want someone outside your institution and regular circle of friends to talk to about your career path and how to prepare for it now (including finishing the PhD), I might be able to help.

In a 1-hour phonecall we could talk about your concerns and issues, clarify your goals, brainstorm some approaches, and come up with a plan that will help you approach this phase of your career in a more relaxed way.

I’ll send you a recording of the call so you can listen to it at any time. That way you can concentrate on being in the conversation without worrying about taking good notes. I’ll also send you a detailed follow-up e-mail. And you can ask for clarification by e-mail later, too.

1-hour Career Coaching $150

• For an academic job?

• For a research grant?

• For a publication?

Do you feel like you need to apply for all of the opportunities out there? Even if they are only vaguely related to your career/research objectives?

Are you spending so much time sending out applications or draft manuscripts that you don’t seem to have time left to do your research and write new articles?

Are you becoming cynical about the whole process because you are receiving rejections and wondering if all the effort is worth it?

Desperation is not conducive to academic success

When you are desperate you tend to take a scattergun approach to things. You expend a lot of creative energy but your chances of hitting your target are small.

You aren’t really aiming. You are throwing things out there in the general direction of the target and hoping something will stick.

Desperate can also come across as lacking in confidence. And if you aren’t confident about the quality of your potential contribution, why should an employer/funder/publisher be confident in your contribution.

Combined with the scattergun, the lack of confidence is actually justified. Some of those things you are applying for really aren’t a good fit. You probably aren’t confident that you would make a strong contribution if you got it. Justifiably so.

You are not desperate

It doesn’t matter how long you have been on the job market. It doesn’t matter how many grants you’ve applied for, nor now badly you need the money to really get this research program moving. It doesn’t matter how close you are to tenure and how few publications you have.

You are not desperate for any of these things. You are well qualified. And you want to do them.

Evaluation is always context specific.

Jobs, grant programs, journals, and presses all have mandates and objectives. No one is looking for an “excellent academic”, an “excellent proposal” or an “excellent article/book”. Their search is always narrower than that.

As the sociologists would say, excellence is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition.

Similarly, you are not interested in any job/grant/publication. You have research and career goals. And some of the opportunities are going to help you advance those goals better than others.

First step: Identify your goals

The most common comment I make when I review draft proposals for the SSHRC Standard Research Grant competition is that the objectives are not clear. Even experienced researchers have difficulty with this.

• What questions inspire you?

• What contributions do you want to make?

• Who do you most want to influence with your ideas?

Having a clear sense of your own goals enables you to identify opportunities that are a good fit. Only applying for opportunities that are a good fit for your goals means less work for you. And much better odds of success.

You need to be able to articulate these goals in ways that are meaningful to (particular) others. That might take practice. And you might have several related goals, some of which will be more important for some opportunities than others.

Clarifying your goals for yourself, in writing, is a very good use of your time.

Then assemble evidence of your excellence

There is a difference between being confident and being arrogant. You must respect the people evaluating your application/manuscript. They know the context better than you do. And making the selection is their job, not yours. No one is entitled to a job/grant/publication.

Respect for the evaluators means that you have to present evidence and let them draw their own conclusions.

You should present your evidence in a way that will make sense to this particular audience. Not only should you follow any instructions they provide, but you should also consider their context and background knowledge.

This is where having someone else look at your application/proposal/manuscript before you submit it can be particularly important. Choose your reviewer wisely and you can gain invaluable advice and save yourself a lot of time and disappointment.

Last step: Let go

You can’t guarantee the outcome. So at some point, you have to decide to be evaluated. Send it off. And forget about it until you hear the result. Work on something else.

You are not desperate. It would be nice to have this particular job/grant/publication, but it is not the end of the world. There are other projects on your desk.

Not as easy as it sounds.

It’s easy for me to sit here and explain, calmly and rationally, how getting away from desperation can be more effective. Your rational self probably even agrees with me.

It’s your irrational self that is causing all the panic. We all have one. No need to feel bad about it.

Sometimes you need some help. Help articulating your plans. Help dealing with irrational fear and panic.

If it’s a SSHRC Standard Research Grant that is causing your current feeling of desperation, just book a grant review.

In addition to getting detailed comments on your draft, and a few encouraging e-mails to keep you on track, you also get my e-book “Writing Your SSHRC Grant Proposal”. Here’s what one client said about the e-book:

Thank you for the e-book. It calmed me down and allowed me to focus on what I wanted to do instead of panicking about all the forms. (Daniel Burgoyne, Vancouver Island University)

I can help with other things, too. Contact me for a free 30-minute consultation to discuss your needs.

And fill in my quick 4-question survey.

Thanks.

P.S. I wrote about the job search in a special edition of my newsletter for the PhD students on the list. You can find that here:

It is all well and good for me to say that you already have an RTS and you just need to use it. But what does that mean in real life?

Where do you start in your quest to keep your research active during the fall and winter?

Start small.

Could you find 15-30 minutes every weekday to devote to research? I bet you could. That’s not a lot of time.

Research has shown that even that small amount of time, used well, can make a big difference to your research productivity.

Robert Boice is a psychologist who spent many years in faculty development researching successful faculty and running workshops for new faculty based on his findings. I highly recommend his book Advice for New Faculty Members (even if you are no longer a new faculty member).

Not all hours in the day are of equal value

Research is creative work. When do you do your best creative work?

Possibilities include:

• After breakfast before you leave for the university.
• Lunchtime: lock the door. Don’t answer the phone. And shut down the e-mail program.
• A regular time during the day

Choose a time of day when you can do your best work. If you are a morning person, first thing has real advantages because you can do it before you get sucked into other people’s needs.

But if your best time of day for creative work is mid-afternoon, you’ll need to figure out how to let go of the other stuff and work on research then.

Schedule time and protect it

If you are working in your office on campus, make it clear that you cannot be disturbed during that half-hour. Put a sign on the door. Let the voicemail pick up. Don’t look at e-mail.

Put an appointment in your diary so you won’t be tempted to schedule something else in that slot. You don’t need to tell other people what the appointment is. Just say “Sorry, I’m not available at that time. I have a previous commitment.” and then suggest a different time for the meeting.

You probably have less control over things like teaching schedules so you’ll have to work around that. But there are a lot of hours in your week that you do control.

Do research/writing

At first this might be difficult. And you will be tempted to just check e-mail or do something else.

But do something research related during your designated time every day.

• write notes about possibilities in a notebook
• edit a draft paper
• make a list of things you need to find in the library
• read an article
• schedule some interviews
• write a job description for a (hypothetical?) research assistant
• write the next paragraph of an article you are working on
• write an outline or a mind-map for a new article
• freewrite for 10 minutes around an idea you have (set a timer; there’s an online one here)

Your goal is not to finish anything. Your goal is to make progress.

Make things easier

You might need a little ritual to divide this time from whatever came before. This will be particularly true if your best time is anytime other than first thing in the morning.

• Make a ritual around putting your sign on the door. Turning off the phone ringer. Closing your e-mail program.
• Just sit for 30 seconds. With good posture. Feet planted on the floor. Eyes closed. Take a couple of deep breaths.
• Do a few stretches, get a glass of water or a cup of coffee.

Whatever it is that makes the transition, try to do the same thing every time. Your body and mind will start to recognize this little routine and switch into research/writing mode more quickly. (A bit like having a ritual at bedtime makes it easier to sleep.)

You should also make it easy to find the thing you are going to do. Don’t spend time thinking about what you could do. You want to sit down and start doing it.

• Use the last 5 minutes of your time to decide what to do the next day. Write it down. Collect the materials you’ll need.
• Keep your research/writing stuff in a dedicated space, maybe a basket. That way you can easily pull out what you are working on and get started.
• If you have enough space, your dedicated space could be a special chair or desk. If so, sitting in that space will be part of your transition ritual.

It is not going to be convenient to tidy everything away at the end of each short session. What if you are in the middle of a sentence or paragraph? You want to sit down the next day, read what you wrote and just keep on writing. So find some way of keeping things so that they can remain open waiting for you to come back to them.

Anticipation is motivating

If the thought of stopping mid-sentence or mid-paragraph bothers you, you are not alone. But Boice’s research suggests that in the long term it might actually be more productive. You stop at peak productivity. Ideas are buzzing. You are eager to get back to it the next day.

The problem with writing until you are all written out, is that you are all written out at the end of it. You need recovery time.That and you don’t have time for that anyway.

You have 15 minutes. But 15 minutes a day, 5 days a week, for 10 weeks is 12.5 hours of writing a term.

If you manage 30 minutes a day that’s 25 hours of research/writing a term that you weren’t doing before.

Sound too good to be true?

Try it. What do you have to lose?

Commit to 15 minutes a day each weekday for the fall semester.

Do it properly. Make it the same time every day. Have a transition ritual. Do some research/writing for that 15 minutes (thinking counts, doodling about research ideas counts, writing outlines and random thoughts counts, writing about what a stupid practice this is counts).

And evaluate at the end of the semester. If it didn’t work, unsubscribe from my blog/newsletter and go on the way you were before.

Need help?

Do you think this could work for you but you need help getting started? Would it help to talk through the possibilities and make some plans together? Do you want someone to check in with every week or so to keep you on track and reassure you?

Let me know what you need and we can work out a support system that works for you. E-mail me to set up a free 30-minute phone call to discuss your needs.

(and if you haven’t filled out my survey, would you be able to spare a minute to do that, too? Click Here to take survey)

“It’s almost worse having the grant without RTS.”

“The only reason I need funding is to buy time. If the grant won’t pay for my time, what is the point?”

How many times have you heard someone (maybe yourself) say something like that? I suspect that with the demise of the Research Time Stipend (RTS) program at SSHRC, cynicism about research grants has increased.

But what if you already had a research time stipend and you just weren’t using it?

An RTS subsidized teaching load for one is the normal load for another

The researchers I’ve met in presentations and workshops, or when reviewing their grants, have a wide variety of working conditions.

Some have a standard teaching load of 2:2 (two courses each semester for 2 semesters). Some have a standard 3:2 load. Some even have a 3:3 load.

Some always teach in fall and winter unless they make a specific request to do otherwise. Some teach summer term and one of fall or winter, because their department runs co-op programs. Some are able to voluntarily unbalance their load to turn a 2:2 into a 3:1.

Some teach in programs that run on a different timetable so that while most of their colleagues are finished with exams at the end of April, they are still teaching and marking for several weeks.

You have time for research

If your contract requires you to do research …

If you are rewarded for research …

If your institution has a VP Research, a Research Office, and other support for research …

Then you have time. The institution is paying you to do research as well as to teach.

The proportions will vary among institutions. The type of research valued will vary among institutions. But most tenure-stream academics in Canada have time for research.

If you were on a teaching-only contract, you would probably have a teaching load about double what you have now. You would have to teach in the summer, or you wouldn’t be paid for the summer.

What are you doing with your de facto teaching release?

I’m willing to bet that you are just spending more time on each class you are teaching.

Which leads me to wonder what you would do with the time released if you actually had funding to buy-out one of your teaching commitments. Would it really release research time?

Or would that time fill up with teaching related activity the way new bookshelves fill with books almost as soon as you buy them?

If you can only do research when you have no teaching obligations, you are in trouble.

Autonomy has it’s downsides

Because you have autonomy, you can use that autonomy to decide to work full-time on teaching despite what your contract says.

The thing is no one ever checks on how you spend your time. Not even in a good way.

If you don’t do any research this week, no one is going to notice.

The message we get from friends, family, the general public, and even the administrative staff is that teaching is our real work.

Consciously limiting the amount of time you spend on teaching and giving some priority to your research is not valued on a day to day basis in our institutions. It is derided.

But most of those people only understand teaching from the perspective of the student.

From a student perspective teaching is all about what happens when the student is in the room. A student doesn’t even recognize the time it takes to prepare that class or mark the papers. Just look at what happens when high-school teachers unions ask for more time for those activities.

You value teaching.

You want to be a good teacher. You want to be available to help students who need it.

You aren’t selfish. And you don’t want to be seen to be selfish.

So you autonomously privilege teaching over research, at least during term time. And then find it hard to get back into the research in the summer.

And then fall arrives and you are back into a vicious cycle in which you aren’t doing as much research as you want to.

It doesn’t take long before cynicism about research starts to set in.

You need to recognize your baseline RTS

It might be worth thinking about your workload differently. Instead of seeing it as a full-time job with a 2:2 teaching load (or whatever). You need to see it as a full-time job with x% teaching and y% research. (The administrative stuff would be there regardless and largely services these two aspects of the university mission.)

The teaching load you have isn’t a full time job. It is x% of a full-time job. The other y% is your RTS. Fully funded by the institution.

That x% isn’t evenly distributed throughout the year

You have 16+ weeks in the summer when you will do relatively little teaching related work. Some preparation for the fall and winter, but nowhere near as much as you will do between September and April.

Similarly, between September and April you will spend more than x% of our time on teaching and teaching-related tasks.

But if you are spending 40 hours per week every week during term time on teaching and teaching related activity, you are mis-using your autonomy.

And just because all your friends do it, doesn’t mean it is right. Remember what your mother said about jumping off the Brooklyn Bridge?

Autonomy isn’t easy

I bet your mom had something to say about that, too. And she would have been right.

You can autonomously choose to balance your actual workload to match your contractual obligations. Including taking vacations.

The arithmetical calculations necessary to figure out how x% looks in different terms are probably the easy part.

The hard part is going against the discourse that says that your real work is teaching. That research is some hobby you have that is nice, but should happen in the holidays, weekends, and evenings. That valuing teaching means having no boundaries about when you are available to students.

You might need some support

Some people have the strength of will to carve out time for research and to guard that time. Some people find that much harder.

You might struggle with internal self-talk in which setting boundaries is selfish and bad.

You have gremlins you didn’t even know about that call you names when you  say “no” to an unreasonable student request, or jeer at your pretentious desire to be a “researcher”.

You might struggle with perfectionism and find it hard not to tweak that lecture just a little more. More gremlins who taunt you with the possibility of poor teaching evaluations.

Or maybe you can see how to carve out small amounts of time for research but have no idea how to use those small time slots effectively. Maybe you have money for a research assistant but aren’t sure what to do with one.

And if you’ve been in this cycle for a while, it might just be hard to get out of. Sometimes you need a push to get out of the ditch.

Here’s where I get stuck

I can help. I know I can. I’ve done it for friends. I’ve done it for other researchers as almost a side-effect of helping with their grant proposals.

Some of the help is just having someone to talk to who you know is on your side. Who won’t agree with the gremlins and might even help you work out how to make the gremlins go away. Or at least sit quietly under a tree.

And I know I can do that.

What I don’t now is what you need.

I’ve been going around inside my own head trying to figure it out and I’m coming up blank. Or I put an offer out there and then no one responds. And I don’t know if that’s because I’m not framing it properly, or not pricing it properly, or not talking to the right people.

I want to help you achieve your research goals. And part of that is finding the time to do research and using that time effectively.

So, instead of guessing, I’ve designed a small survey (just 4 questions). I’d appreciate it if you would take a few seconds to fill it out.

Click Here to take survey

Thanks. If you have friends who might be interested, please pass the URL on to them, too.