What should you do next?

Part of a series helping you maintain your research activity even during busy teaching terms. The first post is here. Or view the whole series here.

Look at your desk. Really look at it.

I bet you have a stack of conference papers that need to be turned into journal articles. And some notes on other things you want to write. Maybe a “revise and resubmit” from a journal that you really just need to get to.

And then there is the thinking and analysing and interpreting you are doing on whatever your current project is. Sooner or later that is going to turn into yet another draft (or drafts) of an article or a book manuscript.

Overwhelmed?

All of those possibilities combined with all the pressure you feel to publish more can lead to paralysis.

Although I am a big fan of having a publishing plan, you don’t need to have a plan to get started.

You might want to make a plan for “things you could finish before term starts” now. But that will still leave a lot of stuff lying around on your desk.

Your desk is like my garden

I recently moved into a new house. The people we bought from had lived here about 5 years. The people before them had established extensive gardens.

There are lovely perennials all over the place — hostas, peonies, iris, roses … If they were all well tended and looked after, it would be amazing.

But the people we bought from were more into horses than gardens. They seem to have kept the front gardens weeded. But it doesn’t look like they ever split the hostas or iris. And the further from the house you get, the more likely the gardens are to be overgrown with weeds.

I don’t really feel any pressure about it. I figure that another year or two is not going to make a huge difference. I’ll do what I can as I can and it will improve slowly.

My approach

I could get overwhelmed with deciding what to do. Maybe I’d be tempted to start with a plan of how I want my gardens to look and systematically work on that plan to achieve that objective.

What I do in practice is to just start weeding. One weed or section of the garden will be annoying me and I’ll put on my gardening gloves and just start pulling stuff out.

There really isn’t a plan, though there are beds that I look at more often and thus get priority. And some weeds look pretty, so they get left.

It is amazing what I can accomplish in 15 minutes.

You don’t need a plan to start

Just like I don’t need a garden plan to pull a few weeds, you don’t need a publishing plan to make progress on your research.

If you only have 30 minutes a day, you can just pick something on your desk and do 30 minutes of whatever needs doing to it.

For some of those things, your first 30-minutes might involve rereading the paper and making a list of what needs doing to paperclip to the top of it. Then the next 30 minutes can focus on one of the things on that list.

Use coloured paper and you’ll be able to find lists of things to do easily when you sit down for your 30-minutes of research time.

You don’t need to deal with everything

Some of what is on your desk is just weeds. It doesn’t need pruning or splitting or any real care. You just need to pull them up and throw them out.

So sometimes you can spend your 30-minutes weeding — going through part of the stack of old conference papers and deciding which ones you aren’t going to publish.

Remember, weeds are just plants that are in the wrong place. Some of them are beautiful.

Just because you decide not to take a piece further doesn’t mean it was crap. It just means that you have moved on and this is no longer a priority or worth the time it would take to make it into a worthwhile publication.

Acknowledge loss

Deciding not to do something, or not to finish something, is a loss. It is not easy.

Acknowledge the loss to yourself. Allow yourself to grieve a little bit.

If you can’t bring yourself to throw that paper in the garbage then create a file in a drawer or a cupboard for pieces that are “hibernating”.

The important thing is to get things off your desk that you aren’t going to work on. You don’t need it sitting there making you feel guilty and overwhelmed. You can acknowledge how important it was in helping you get to where you are now intellectually and then put it in a drawer.

Limit the weeding

Don’t spend all your time weeding out things you aren’t going to take further.

That will only bring you down. Too much of it and you’ll start to question whether you have any worthwhile contributions or any stick-with-it-ness at all.

One weeding session a month might be more than adequate.

Then get back to working on one of the other things on your desk.

All of it gets easier

It might feel weird at first to just grab a paper and do some work on it with no clear plan.

It will certainly feel weird to grab a paper and admit that you can just let it go.

But as you get into a rhythm of spending 30-minutes a day doing these things, they will become easier.

And one day, your 30-minutes will be planning how to get one of those things to “finished”. Or making a priority list of what to work on.

Don’t let planning get in the way of doing. Start anywhere.