Rule #13

You will not be less busy in the future than you are right now.


This rule addresses the illusion that there will be a less busy time than right now, located somewhere in the future. I know a guy who plans on writing his book when he retires from teaching! Many people tell themselves they will start working on something once the present business is over, but it never is. During my busiest week I often get an article to review for a journal. I still do it that week, because it is easier to get a lot done when you are already very busy. When it's harder to get things done, paradoxically, is when you don't have as much to do.

By postponing tasks to supposedly less busy times in the future, you are essentially making those hypothetically less busy times more busy, cluttering them up in advance. Do you really want to do that?

Rule #12

Treat writing as part of your job.

Many academic writers see their writing as something to be done after hours, as an add-on, once they have finished every other duty. It is extra work for vacations, weekends, evenings, breaks. I propose that you see writing as part of workaday life. In fact, you could work from 8-5 five days a week and incorporate writing into that day.

If your contract says you should be spending 40 per cent of your effort on research, that should apply to your daily routine as well.

If writing is not truly part of your job, and actively discouraged, you should still treat it as part of your job. Just fuck'em.

Rule #11

Don't Write More Than 3 Hours a Day.

The next set of 10 rules have to do with time and task management.

You don't need to write more than 3 hours a day. Not only that, you probably shouldn't. The reason is that you need to be writing everyday, so you will burn out if you do that and also give your brain no time to rest. By all means go to the library and get research materials or do a planning session when not writing, but don't sit down in front of the computer all day long to write. Remember that your project is a marathon made of individual stages or legs. You don't need to run a marathon every day.

I, personally, have intense powers of concentration, but I think 3 hours is pretty much my upper limit most of the time. There seems little point in trying to write for 5 hours a day. I am getting enough done already. If you write a few hours in the morning, you will have done your work for the day and you don't need to worry about it till the next day. That is a wonderful feeling.

Rule #10

Be briilliant.

Rule #10 is to work smart, read more than everyone else, think things through more deeply. It's hard to have, as a rule of scholarship, that you should be smarter than the next person. Maybe you just aren't that smart? But intelligence can be developed and cultivated like anything else. You could see it more as a habit than as a quality.

See, also, this post on Research as a Second Language.

Rule #9

Festina lente.

The idea here is "deliberate haste." In other words, you should be in hurry to get your research done, with some sense of urgency, but you shouldn't rush yourself on any particular day. Or you can sprint on a particular day, but without forgetting that your writing is a marathon that consists of many individual "legs." The don't have to be fast if you are steady (slow and steady wins the race). Speed is a by-product of endurance, since you won't be able to write an article in a single day anyway.

If you can manage the balance between speed and slowness, you will be the master of time rather than its slave. Small windows will open up where you can get a disproportionate amount of work done. You will have free evenings when you don't have to write at all. That is why "festina lente" is one of the top 10 rules.

Rule #4

Precrastinate.

Instead of telling people not to procrastinate, I prefer to tell people something positive to do instead. Forget about deadlines and meeting them. Instead, plan your time moving forward from now rather than backwards from the deadline.

Most people:

MLA talk. I know I have to have it done before the MLA. Ok, so classes end on December 15, so I have three weeks. Once I turn in my grades, I can start the talk. I might finish it on the plane to Boston.

Jonathan:

MLA talk. It is April and my abstract was just accepted. I might as well write the talk now since it is fresh in my mind. I will look at it again in December to see if I need to change anything.

Why start absurdly early? Because I can. Why do I assume I will be less busy in December close to the deadline than I am now, in April, or mid-March? Maybe I will have something I want to do more in December.

Rule #3

Cultivate a healthy relationship to your scholarship.

Tend your scholarly base.

Write every day.

Rule #2

Rule 2 is "Cultivate your Scholarly Base." That seems to follow logically from the first rule, which is about the healthy relationship of scholarship to your body and mind.

So maybe rule 1 could be "Use your scholarship to cultivate mental and physical health."

Rule #1

I need a more elegant formulation of that rule. "Scholarship can destroy your health, but it doesn't have to." That's not quite it. "Proper application of rules 2-100 will improve mental and physical health." Nope. I'm still not getting it. Maybe I won't understand this rule myself until I can formulate it succinctly and convincingly? What I think I might mean is that the ways people destroy themselves through scholarship are somehow unnecessary, that there is a path that leads to fulfillment as a scholar and excellent mental and physical health.

Scholarship Rules

The book I once wanted to write will now have the title: Stupid Motivational Tricks: Scholarship Rules for Happy Productivity. It will be a list of "rules," 100 of them, that will synthesize my scant wisdom. I will try to develop the 10 fundamental rules first, then work downward toward others.

The first rule will be: "Don't assume that scholarship requires you to ruin your mental and physical health."