scholarly writing Archives - Patricia Roberts-Miller

On Procrastinating Writing Your [Thesis/First Book/Second Book]

[photo of a page from the 2012 version of Rhetoric and Demagoguery]

I’ve written elsewhere a lot about procrastinating…

…in the draft of a book I never finished. I put off finishing it.

We have a tendency to personalize everything, from politics to writing process. By that I mean that we talk in terms of identity rather than behavior (“I’m a procrastinator” instead of “I procrastinated finishing that book”). We really need to stop. Behavior doesn’t have a necessary connection to identity. I procrastinate, and have a lot of half-finished projects. But, I’ve published six books and over a dozen peer-reviewed articles in my career, and six book chapters in the last three years alone. So, I procrastinate, but I also get things done—the two behaviors aren’t mutually exclusive.

Let’s be clear: I made some bad errors in my career, but they weren’t because I’m a procrastinator. I wasn’t procrastinating. I was working like the Tasmanian Devil in the Looney Tunes Cartoons. My errors were, or were the consequence of, being bad at time management, having unrealistic notions about publishing, not having mentors who could give me field-specific publishing advice, not being in a relationship that was supportive of my career, pissing off a powerful realist in the Philosophy Department, and many other things I probably can’t name.

Everyone procrastinates, in the sense that not everyone gets everything done right now—you can’t. Procrastinating means putting some things off till later, and, since we can’t actually do everything right now, putting things off is often a good time management strategy. I never finished the book about scholarly writing because other projects (about our current political moment) seemed to me more urgent. They were. They are. When we have people over to dinner, we don’t set the table till the last minutes. We have cats.

Sometimes procrastinating isn’t a good strategy. It can be a kind of self-sabotage; it can mean getting caught a terrible loop of shame. I think a lot of self-help rhetoric ensures that people get caught in that loop. It says that there is a simple solution, and you should follow it. Since there isn’t a simple solution for how hard it is to write a dissertation, then people for whom the simple solution doesn’t work think they’re the problem. They aren’t. The simple solution is the problem.

There is no simple solution for how hard academic writing is.

Also, the Easter Bunny was your parents. And I have bad news about Santa Claus.

One way to try to distinguish sensible v. self-sabotaging procrastination is to try understand why we’re putting something off. And those ways work differently, I think, for what kind of writing people are trying to do. This post is for scholarly writers who believe that their procrastination is hurting them.[1] In fact, it’s for a specific way that a specific motive for procrastination might be hurting them. In other words, I am not laying down rules that will work for everyone under every circumstance.

Putting off a project can be a savvy time and career management choice if the project requires resources we don’t have (e.g., travel money, fluency in a specific language), is less urgent than something else (e.g., it won’t count for promotion or tenure, won’t be part of a dissertation, or, in my case, is a less urgent argument to make given our political situation), or in various other ways isn’t something we should be pursuing right now.

My personal crank theory is that the unproductive kinds of procrastination, and the unproductive ways of trying to stop procrastinating, all involve shame. But people who’ve done actual research on this say that the unproductive kind of procrastination tends to have one of three triggers: drudgery, existential threat, decisional ambiguity.

And here I want to stop for a moment and point out that writing a thesis, article, or book has every single one of these three triggers and way too much shame, and often way too many advisors who think shame and panic are necessary to the writing process. That’s how those advisors work. That isn’t how you have to work.

Most of the advice out there about procrastination assumes that the trigger is drudgery, and so, if that’s your problem, google away. Lots of strategies —the emergent task planner, giving yourself rewards, breaking things down into manageable steps, telling yourself you have to do either [whatever it is] or a more unpleasant task [e.g., clean the litterbox]–are great advice if that’s your motive for procrastinating.

There’s less about existential threat. This is a pretty good article about that trigger. The short version is that the more we succeed, the more likely we are to worry that we will be exposed as imposters. (The only people I’ve ever known who didn’t have imposter syndrome were narcissists, and were, in fact, imposters.) The temptation is to engage in self-sabotage (e.g., get involved with a high-maintenance partner who doesn’t support your career, take on too many responsibilities) so that it’s always possible to say that no manuscript was your best effort. Therefore, if it’s trashed by someone, that isn’t actually an indication of whether you are a smart and good person.

Weirdly enough, outright failure can be less threatening to our self-esteem than trying hard and turning out something that gets a lot of criticism, or doesn’t have the impact we’d hoped, or is otherwise okay but not great. (I’ve often thought that it was a kind of gift that I have never been the smartest person in my family, friend group, work group, any class I’ve taken, or just about any group larger than me and one of my dogs, and not always then. I still had/have imposter syndrome, but there was always less at stake for me.)

The most effective way to manage this kind of trigger for procrastination and other forms of self-sabotage is therapy. (Ideally with someone who has worked with other academics.) I can’t say that strongly enough.

I want to focus on decisional ambiguity because I think it’s the least-discussed in resources for academic writers. That trigger occurs when we’re pressed to make a decision that we could make in a relatively straightforward way if we had information we don’t have at this moment. The situation is ambiguous, but it could be clear if we had certain information. The impulse is to delay the decision until we get that information.

Just to be clear, that can be a good choice. A very popular book advocates a method of setting aside decisions till you have more information (Getting Things Done).

But, when writing a dissertation or book, while teaching, having service requirements, we can find ourselves suffering from decision fatigue. The tl;dr version is that we make decisions better when we have a limited number of them we ask ourselves to make. If we have to make too many decisions (and “too many” depends on all sorts of factors), then we just stop making decisions, or start flipping coins.

So, what does that mean for scholarly writing?

If you’re writing a book, thesis, article, grant proposal, or anything else in a scholarly genre, then, even in the first draft, you’re faced with too many decisions. Is this the right organization, should I move this argument there, should I read that [article/book], am I representing that argument fairly, what the hell is my point, should I use this word, should I drop out of grad school/academia, maybe I should read that other [article/book], am I explaining this point, is that the right quote, how much should I cite that [article/book], have I cited this source correctly, will my readers hate/love this, and so many other decisions that range all over the place: your argument, your readers’ possible responses, your relationship to others who’ve written about this, your career, the job market, the text you’re producing (from sentence-level correctness to genre questions).

A lot of conventional writing process advice is useful: expect to have multiple drafts, and begin by focussing on big picture issues (wtf is my argument before you worry about what tense you should use); expect that writing is recursive (so that when you think you’re at editing stages, you might find that trying to correct passive agency or a mixed metaphor might make you rethink important parts of your argument).

It also means: limit the decisions you need to make on any given day.

Decide ahead of time that you’re going to spend certain times in the week writing—don’t leave that till the day. And then, when you’re in that writing time, it might mean that you write a blathery draft in which you don’t try to get much of anything right. (In a first draft, I often have sentences like, “As Blarghy McBlarghy said, democracy depends upon interlocutors blarghing with each other while focused on blargh.” Or it might be, “As Shirer says in that book with the blue cover, Hitler was [effective? that’s the wrong word])”

One friend described “the narcissistic pleasures of the first draft.” Don’t try to get your argument right; decide you’re just trying to get your thoughts—fuzzy, incoherent, rambling, passionate–in writing.

I never have a strict outline at this point (actually I never have a Ramistic outline ever), but I sometimes (not always) have a flow chart of the four or five concepts/cases I want to discuss. It’s never what the structure actually turns out to be. So I don’t decide on an order of ideas as much as throw out a possible order.

It’s like planning a road trip—you throw out the places you’d like to see, and make a guess as to what route makes sense. But, as you travel, you change your mind about where you want to go. You follow the evidence.

The next pass is deciding that I’m going to try to get my argument somewhat more clear. This means that I reread what I’ve written in a purely critical mood (deciding what’s not working, but not trying to decide what would make it better). Sometimes I use different colored pens, or different colored post its. There are: sentence-level gerfuckedness (orange or red), parts that require more research or bringing in research (green), significant rewriting but the argument is good (blue), changes in wording I know are right (black).

Sometimes I don’t do it that way, and each color is a different pass on reading. So, all the comments I made 1/3/2020 are in pink; the ones from 2/15/2021 are in blue. (In other words, don’t get too rigid about your process, or you’ll have too many decisions to make, and too many ways to shame yourself.)

Loosely, my method is: blather, then critique, then blather oriented toward responding to the critique, then critique. Rinse and Repeat. Do that till you’re working on the Works Cited.

And it’s generally working from big picture (WTF is my point) through issues of organization and citation to paragraph to sentence. But it’s pretty common that I hit a “sentence-level” issue (e.g., do I mean “contact” or “impact”) that causes me to rethink important parts of my argument—from the underlying model (in other words, my argument) to organization.

I’m not saying that people should do what I do. That’s pretty much the opposite of my point. I don’t know anyone else who uses this specific method. I’m describing it precisely because I think it wouldn’t work for most people—I’m hoping to inspire people to come up with one that works for them, even if it seems weird.

I’ve long been grumpy that research on the writing process turned into writing procedures [I’m looking at you: mental mapping.] My point is that one way to get around the trigger of decisional ambiguity is to restrict the choices you’re making at any given time. A decision you should not make in the moment is how you will do that.

Everyone should have a day they do not work. (I broke this rule about four times a semester when I had to grade papers, but I tracked my time, so that I got that time back for vacation.) Work needs to have limited space.

There are some other strategies that people find useful. One is sometimes called ‘chutes and ladders.’ When you don’t have the cognitive capacity for the choices that also trigger existential threat, you make the decisions that procrastinate and yet enable that kind of decision. Before leaving your workspace (and, really, try to have a workspace—I know it’s hard; at one point in grad school my workspace was a closet), pull up on your computer (or have piled on your desk) the sources you think you should use (the Blarghs). Or, before you walk away from that space (and you do need to walk away), write out a sentence or two of what you hope to write the next time you’re back to work.

Limit your work time. But, when you’re working, actually work. And give yourself breaks (about ten minutes of every hour). Some people leave a note to future self—here’s what I did, and here’s what I hope to do next.

If there are other decisions important to your writing, then set them up for yourself before leaving your workspace—cue up the playlist, put the coffee in the fridge, set up the coffeemaker, move the shaming books/articles away, organize your pens, clean off your desk, make sure the cat’s bed is up to your cat’s standards.

And procrastinate. Put off till later worrying about whether your advisor or the press or the journal will like what you’re writing, what the response to this book will be, whether it will get you a job or tenure.There are times for worrying about all those things, but not while you’re trying to write the first (or even third) version of your thesis/article/chapter/book.

We procrastinate setting the table because our cats will step all over the plates if we turn our backs. But we do eventually set the table. And we do so before the guests arrive.

Procrastination can be your friend. It can be a sensible way to think about what to worry about now, and what worries to deflect till later. But you do need to get your dissertation done before the guests arrive.

[1] Obviously, not because I think other kinds of writing are less important, but, especially when it comes to decisional ambiguity, the decisions are different.

On writing

In elementary school, I was taught to write in pen, and we lost points if we made a correction on something we’d written. When I was 11, my family went to London, and we went to the British museum, and I saw a page of a Jane Austen novel. SHE CROSSED THINGS OUT. My first reaction was as though I’d caught her cheating at cards, or pilfering from the collection plate. My second (and much later) reaction was that punishing someone for correcting their own writing was indefensible.

When I was a newbie grad student, I was TA for a rhetoric prof who, in the midst of a lecture about something or other (he was a good prof, so it was a good lecture, but I don’t remember them) related a story about Yeats. Apparently, there was some filmed interview with Yeats, where the interviewer asked about a particular word in one of Yeats’ most famous poems, and Yeats is supposed to have said something like, “Yeah, I don’t like that word,” and crossed it out and tried a few others. According to the prof, the interviewer was horrified. For him, the poem was an autonomous mobile floating in space. For Yeats, it was something he was still trying to get right. The prof’s point was that no writer is satisfied with what they’ve written; poems are not sacred texts transcribed from a muse, but even the best are works in progress.

I happened to mention to a friend/writing buddy that I love the last part of “East Coker,” and she didn’t know it. It’s this: http://www.davidgorman.com/4quartets/2-coker.htm

So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.

I’ll admit that I deliberately misinterpret this poem. He was the kind of modernist who believed in the objective/subjective split, and so he means something by that “imprecision of feeling…squads of emotion” that I think is nonsense. What I think is true is that we bring to writing a lot of feelings—imposter syndrome, fear of failure, anxiety about readers who are fully committed to reenacting generational trauma, perfectionism—that are undisciplined squads of emotion, attacking us every time we try to write.

And, so I find this poem https://allpoetry.com/Love-The-Wild-Swan really helpful in response:

“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting
Hash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
—This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your . . . self?
At least Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.

When I’m editing my work, I frequently have that first line in my head.

I’ve always assumed that he’s writing about his worrying that he’ll never write a poem as good as Yeats’ “Wild Swans at Coole,” and that may be true. But, as a writer, I like the ambiguity that it’s both about the fear of not measuring up to that poem and not measuring up to the reality he was trying to describe—the wildlife of California at that moment. I suspect he’s writing about a Great Blue Heron. I’ve written elsewhere about what a Great Blue Heron meant in my life, so maybe I’m just projecting. California has no shortage of beautiful birds, and Great Blue Herons don’t have a white breast.

And I love the answer—anything we write will never measure up to reality. We can hate our writing, hate our selves, but still continue to write because we love the thing we’re trying to write about.

Good writing has to come from love, I think. In working with graduate students, I’ve often felt that there was a theme—in the musical sense—in the topics that interested them. So much about being a graduate student is demoralizing, probably unnecessarily, but it seems to me that the students who finish (and the junior scholars who publish enough to get tenure) do so because they’ve heard the music. Or someone has helped them hear it.

I know that there are faculty who believe that their job is to “train” graduate students, “toughen them up,” create disciples. I always thought my job was to help them hear the music.

I’m not saying that people should follow their bliss. That’s toxically bad advice. I am saying that finishing a dissertation (or publishing a first book) is less fraught if people can be passionate about something in their project. Passionate enough to want to write about it, without aspiring to turn it into taxidermy.

Love the wild swan.

Why “You ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off” is in my email signature

Great Dane mix (Chester) with the red ball

This explanation begins, as many of my explanations do, with Chester Burnett, aka, “Howlin’ Wolf.” He was an extraordinary blues singer, and a gifted guitarist. One of the enraging aspects of white musicians’ appropriation of blues songs, melodies, riffs, and so on was that so many of them did nothing to ensure that the artists they were plagiarizing got any credit, let alone money (*cough* *cough* Led Zeppelin). Some, however, leveraged their fame to draw attention to the artists whom they admired. And that’s what happened in the “London Sessions.”

Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts, Steve Winwood, and Bill Wyman played with Howlin’ Wolf and his long-time guitarist Hubert Sumlin. For the most part, Wolf didn’t play guitar on the album cuts, but he’d show them how he played the piece.

On the album version, there is a cut called “Little Red Rooster, false start.” Wolf is showing how the guitar for “Little Red Rooster” is supposed to work, and someone, probably Eric Clapton, says he wants Wolf to play along with them because he isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do. “If you played with us, then we’d able to follow you better,” he says, going on to add, “I doubt if I can do it without you playing along.” Wolf says, and I quote, “Aw, c’mon, you ain’t got nothin’ to do but count it off.” And then he gives simple instructions about how to do what he’s doing.

The unintentional irony is that his simple instructions don’t match what he actually does. The instructions are simple, but he does something much more complicated. It might seem simple to him because he’s been playing that way for years, and it’s clearly in the realm of intuition. Perhaps he’s describing what he used to do, or how he thinks about what he’s doing, but it isn’t what he’s doing.

Perhaps Clapton just wanted Wolf on the recording, and so said he needed to follow. But it’s also possible that he genuinely wanted to follow because Wolf was doing something complicated and possibly new. Wolf is working with seasoned guitarists—they aren’t new to the blues, let alone to guitar playing—but it’s possible they’re new to the specific thing he’s doing.

It’s in my signature to remind me about advice. And I think it’s something we should all remember when giving advice.

One of the things about writing a dissertation, academic article, first book, or second book for the first time is that the people doing it are good writers.[1] They’re very accomplished at academic writing. After all, they are faced with writing a dissertation, or first book, or second book because they wrote well enough to get them to that somewhat new challenge. But they are new to this very specific thing they’re now trying to do.

And something I noticed was that advanced scholars often gave very “simple” pieces of advice that were tremendously well intentioned, but neither simple nor what that person actually did. “Just write” isn’t bad advice, exactly, but it’s along the lines of, “Just calm down” or “Just cheer up,” or “Just ignore it.” If a person could do it, it would solve the problem. But, if they could “just” do that, they wouldn’t have the problem at all in the first place.

Write for one hour every day, write from four to six a.m., never play music, always play music, never research while you write, write a rigid outline before your start, never outline…and so on aren’t exactly bad pieces of advice, but, like Wolf’s “You just count it off” and “You always stop at the top,” it’s simpler than what we actually do. And I think it’s useful to keep that in mind.

[1] Writing a second book is surprisingly different from writing a first one. I don’t know why.

On planning (especially for dissertation writers)

calendar showing highlights for different kinds of work

A while ago (probably several months), someone said they hated planning, and I’ve been meaning since then to write a blog post about it. It’s even been on my to-do list since then. To some people, that might look ironic–here I am giving advice about planning when I have been planning to do something for months and not getting to it.

That only seems ironic if we imagine planning to do something as making an iron-clad commitment we are ethically obligated to fulfill immediately. Thinking about planning that way works for some people, but for most people, it seems to me, it’s terrifying and shaming.

Planning isn’t necessarily a process that guarantees you’ll achieve everything you ever imagine yourself doing, let alone as soon as you first imagine it. Nor does planning require that you make a commitment to yourself that you must fulfill or you’re a failure. It’s about thinking about what must v. what should v. what would be nice to get done, somehow imagined within the parameters of time, cognitive style, resources, energy, support, and various other constraints. Sometimes things you’d like to get done remain in your planning for a long time.

There are people who are really good at setting specific objectives and knocking them off the list, who believe that you shouldn’t set an objective you won’t achieve, and who are very rigid about planning. They often get a lot done, and that’s great. I’m glad it works for them. Unfortunately, some of them are self-righteous and shaming because they assume that this system–because it works for them–can work for everyone. That it clearly doesn’t is not a sign that the method is not a universally valid solution, but a sign of the weakness on the part of people for whom it doesn’t work. They insist that this (sometimes very elaborate) system will work if you apply yourself, not acknowledging different constraints, and so they end up shaming others. They seem to write a lot of the books on planning, as well as blog posts.

And that’s the main point of this post. There is a lot of great advice out there about planning, but an awful lot of it is clickbait self-help rhetoric. There’s a lot of shit out there. There are some ponies. But there is so much shaming.

There are a lot of good reasons that some people are averse to planning—reasons about which they shouldn’t be ashamed. People who’ve spent too much time around compulsive critics or committed shamesters have trouble planning because they know that they will not perfectly enact their plan, and so even beginning to plan means imagining how they will fail. And then failure to be perfect will seem to prove the compulsive critic or committed shamester right. Thus, for people like that, making a plan is an existential terrordome. Personally, I think compulsive critics and committed shamesters are all just engaged in projection and deflection about how much they hate themselves, but that’s just one of many crank theories I have. Of course we will fail to enact our plan—nothing works out as planned—because we cannot actually perfectly and completely control our world. In my experience, compulsive critics and committed shamesters are people mostly concerned about protecting their fantasy that the world is under (their) control.

People who have trouble letting go of details find big-picture planning overwhelming; people who loathe drudgery find it boring; people trying to plan something they’ve never before done (a dissertation, wedding, trip to Europe, long-term budget) just get a kind of blank cloud of unknowing when they think about making a plan for it. People who are inductive thinkers (they begin with details and work up) have trouble planning big projects because it requires an opposite way of thinking. People who are deductive thinkers can have trouble imagining first steps. People who use planning to manage anxiety can get paralyzed when a situation requires making multiple plans.

I think planning of some kind is useful. I think it’s really helpful, in fact, and I think—if people can find the right approach to planning—it can reduce anxiety. But it is never to going to erase anxiety about a high-stakes project. And a method of planning shouldn’t increase anxiety.

Because there are different reasons that people are averse to planning, and people get anxious in different ways and moments, there is no process that will work for everyone. If a process doesn’t work for you, that doesn’t mean you’re a bad person, or you’ll never be able to plan; it just means you need to find a process that works for you. And, to be blunt, that process might involve therapy (to be even more blunt, it almost always does).

Here are some books that people trying to write dissertations have found helpful. Anyone who wants to recommend something in the comments is welcome to do so, and it’s especially helpful if people say why it worked for them. Some of these are getting out of date, and yet people still like them.

Choosing Your Power, Wayne Pernell (self-help generally)
Destination Dissertation, Sonja Foss and William Waters
Getting Things Done, David Allen (the basic principle is good, but it’s getting very aged in terms of technology)
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey (another one that is getting long in the tooth)
I haven’t done much with this website, but the research is strong: https://woopmylife.org/

There are some things that can help. If you don’t like planning because it’s drudgery, then make it fun. Buy a new kind of planner every year. Use colors to code your goals. If planning paralyzes you because of fear of failure, then set low “must” goals that you can definitely achieve, and have a continuum of what should get done. Get into some kind of group that will encourage you. If you feel that you’re facing a white wall of uncertainty, work with someone who has done what you’re trying to do (e.g., your diss director) to create a reasonable plan. This strategy works best if they see part of their job as reducing anxiety, and if they have a way of planning that works with yours.

One of the toxically seductive things about being a student is that you don’t have to have a plan through most of undergraduate and even graduate school. You have to pick a major, but it’s possible to pick one not because of any specific plan–it’s the one in which we succeed (a completely reasonable way to pick a major, I think), and then we might go to graduate school in that thing at which we’re succeeding (it makes sense), and in graduate school we’re given a set of courses we have to take. The “plan,” so to speak, might be nothing more than “complete the assignments with deadlines set by faculty.” Those deadlines are all within a fifteen week period, and it’s relatively straightforward to meet them through sheer panic and caffeine. Then, suddenly (for many people), we are supposed to have a plan for finishing your dissertation, with deadlines that are years apart, for things we’ve never done—a prospectus, a dissertation. We have to know how to plan something long-term, with contingencies.

In my experience, planning in academia means being able to engage in a multiple timeline plan. Having one plan that requires that you get a paper accepted by this time, a job by that time, a course release by then increases anxiety. It seems to me that people tend to do better with an approach that enables a distinction between hard deadlines (if this doesn’t happen by that date, funding will run our) and various degrees of aspirational achievements.

I think this challenge is present in lots of fields: you can’t determine to hit a certain milestone, as much as hope to do so, and try to figure out what things you can do between now and then to make that outcome likely. Thus, there are approaches out there helpful for that kind of contingent planning. But, just to be clear, there are a lot that really aren’t.

I also think it’s helpful to find a way of planning that is productive given our particular habits, anxieties, ways of thinking. People who are drawn to closure seem to thrive with a method that is panic-inducing for people who are averse to it, for instance. So, it might take some time to find a method (it took me till well into my first job, but that was before the internet).

Writing a dissertation is hard; there is nothing that will make it easy. There are things that will make it harder, and doing it without a way of planning that works fits personality, situation, and so on is one. But there is no method of planning that will work for everyone, and there is no shame if some particular method isn’t working.

Graduate school writing as a transition to scholarly writing

The video is available here, along with various other UT Writing Center videos.

Difference between undergrad and grad (if oriented toward academia)
• Undergrad: smart insight (“At first it might look like this, but if you look more closely you see…”), good close analysis, good organization
• Scholarly: insight that changes a scholarly conversation
• Grad: insight that extends a (possibly very specific) scholarly conversation in some specific way

Some things that make scholarly writing hard for graduate students (and junior scholars)
• We think of “the scholarly conversation” in terms that are too broad (“rhetoric,” “teaching writing,” “Victorian Literature,” “history of slavery”)
• We are accustomed to starting the writing process by coming up with our thesis
• Asking a graduate student to make a significant contribution to “the field” is like asking a guest to give you advice on redecorating your home when they’re still standing in the front door and haven’t seen the rest of your house
• The metaphor of finding a “gap” is advice that made more sense many years ago when it was possible to read “everything” written about a subject
• We’re accustomed to letting panic drive the bus (partially in order to manage imposter syndrome)
• You read things that write in a way that might be rhetorically unavailable to you (unsupported generalizations about a field, neologisms, swipes at major scholars) and don’t read the genres you’re writing (so you don’t have the templates)

Some potentially useful strategies
• Write to learn, to think through things, to imitate others, get some ideas on paper—in other words, be willing to write crap
• Get a first draft by imagining a friendly audience (e.g., another student in class, an undergraduate teacher), writing inductively (start with the close analysis), and generally not feeling that you have to write the paper in the order it will eventually have
• Start with a question: a puzzle, apparent contradiction, confusion (existing scholarship suggests we should see this here, but we don’t—we see something else; why?)
• Write an introduction that works for you (why are you writing about this, what’s the best way to formulate the question, what makes this an interesting question, how did you come to this question) and then write a new introduction as your last step in the writing process
• Instead of thinking about a gap, try to formulate a question that might put you in a different posture in regard to existing “literature” on the topic
o Additive
o Definitional (redefining the question—the “prior question” move)
o Methodological (proof of concept)
o Refutative
o Synthesizing
o Taxonomic

Three triggers for procrastination: drudgery, decisional ambiguity, and existential threat

The short version of this post is that there are three triggers of procrastination, or three situations in which procrastination is a very tempting choice, and writing a book, grant proposal, article, or dissertation falls into all three areas.

Some tasks involve a lot of uninteresting drudgery, and many people procrastinate those tasks partially because the panic of being up against a deadline makes them slightly more interesting. Some tasks require that we make decisions without adequate information, and so the temptation is to delay making the decision in the hopes that we’ll get more information. Some tasks threaten our sense of self–failure at the task feels as though it would be the end of the world.

One scholar, Baker, takes those three situations and points out personality types prone to one or another (but, again, all three are part of academic writing) Amanda, the procrastinating grant-writer mentioned in a previous post, fits into the category that Baker, following Ferrari, calls “avoiders,” “who seem to have issues of self-esteem that they are confirming by putting off needed tasks and who are also very concerned with the opinions of others (they promote the idea that they did not have time rather than that they were not up to a task)”. (Baker Thief 169) That is, “avoiders” avoid tasks that have existential stakes (“am I an imposter?” “am I good enough?”). Failing to get around to the task, rather than failing at the task, leaves open the possibility that one could have succeeded if one had tried. In my experience, “avoiders” sometimes avoid scholarly tasks by taking on unnecessary service responsibilities, picking up time-consuming hobbies, or getting involved in organizations (procrastiworking). That isn’t to say that everyone engaged in service is procrastinating, or that no one should take up a hobby or get involved in community work, but that those choices might be subtle forms of procrastination.

Rose Fichera McAloon describes her undergraduate writing process: “I was terrified of criticism, of being unmasked as a fraud, of being stripped of my self- esteem, of being irreparably crushed. I wanted to write the papers, fuss over them lovingly, craft them to perfection—but would not and could not. They were always written in a slapdash way, never reread for content, and turned in with the hope that a miracle would happen and that I would beat the odds once again. It mostly worked.” (239)

Amanda’s situation (above), like McAloon’s, is one in which applying for the grant appears to have more pain associated with it than delay: if writing the grant means confronting her sense of personal inadequacy and risking rejection and exposure, why do it? The route of shoving the grants away and hoping that something comes up down the road can seem very, very attractive.

Procrastinating can seem to protect one’s self-image as a talented person. Our talent remains untested, since we didn’t fully apply ourselves. Also sometimes called “fear of failure,” or “imposter syndrome,” this strategy of procrastinating the immediate task in order to evade existential challenges is, it seems to me, difficult, but not impossible to overcome, particular with a combination of strategies (discussed in the next section), most of which involve some method of removing, reducing, or even procrastinating the shame and anxiety that writing raises for us. One strategy for managing this kind of anxiety, perhaps paradoxically, is to write through it; as a method of desensitizing, working even when feeling almost paralyzed by self-doubt becomes a foundational experience on which we build future experiences. Having done it once, and survived, we know we can do it again.

The best way to get over the anxiety that you might get a savaging review of a book or article is to have a book or article savaged. After all, it isn’t the savaging we fear, it’s some suspicion that we will be entirely destroyed by the savaging; if our identity is “a good writer” or “a smart person,” then it might seem that we will lose our very identity if an editor, committee member, reader, or reviewer tells us that a piece is badly-written, stupid, or wrong. Once you get savaged by a reviewer, and it happens to everyone, you learn that your cells did not cease to adhere, you did not melt into the floor, your friends will not shun you, and you’re okay. Sometimes you decide the piece really was pretty bad, and sometimes you decide it wasn’t that bad, and sometimes you decide the reader’s responses should be entirely ignored, and sometimes you bounce around among various responses. But, whatever response you have, you are still you, maybe a slightly more resilient you, and that might be good.

Baker notes two other kinds of procrastinators (relying on Ferrari’s research). There are “’arousal types’ who experience a ‘euphoric rush’ by putting off their work until it is too late” (Thief 169). Ferrari’s description of this kind of procrastination is similar to Piers Steel’s discussion of people prone to procrastinate boring or tedious tasks, a character he calls “Time-Sensitive Tom.” By introducing the possibility of failure, a dull task becomes more interesting; in addition, living in crisis mode is gratifying—comfortable even—for some people. A colleague once speculated that filling out book order forms a day late or rushing one’s grades in at the last minute can make it seem as though one’s life is so busy (and, by implication, the person is so important) that getting simple tasks done on time is difficult. It struck me as a cynical interpretation, till I caught myself thinking almost exactly that about myself: getting tedious tasks done on time is what drudges do; tossing too many balls in the air is what interesting people do. “Arousal types” tend toward what is described above as “just in time” procrastination. When JIT procrastination goes badly, it is the consequence of a failure to estimate time correctly and/or correctly calculate the costs and risks of failure.

Steel argues, convincingly, that impulsivity strongly correlates to procrastination (see especially 25-26), which is worsened by the fact that “We tend to see tomorrow’s goals and concerns abstractly—that is, in broad and indistinct terms—but to see today’s immediate goals and concerns concretely—that is, with lots of detail on the particulars of who, what, and when” (25). Also called “hyperbolic discounting,” this tendency to value the immediate (the bird in the hand) is one of the fundamental biases, and is implicated in a lot of bad decision-making of various kinds.6 We know the pleasure we will get from playing another computer game; the pleasure we will get from getting an article published is distant (I will later discuss how I think this tendency to favor immediate reward is one reason that people put too much time into service and teaching, since they both provide immediate rewards).
Whereas it’s useful to reduce drama in order to reduce avoidance-type procrastination (and make the task more routine), increasing the drama makes boring tasks more likely—arousal types may procrastinate to make something less routine. Steel emphasizes the importance of planning, saying, “Proper planning allows you to transform distant deadlines into daily ones, letting your impulsiveness work for you instead of against you” (39). Thus, the method for dealing with “avoidance” procrastination can be very different from the best method for dealing with “arousal” procrastination.

Similarly, the best methods for managing “Decisional procrastinators”—people “who procrastinate because they cannot make up their minds” (Thief 169)—are somewhat different from the avoidance or arousal procrastination. For some academics, grading, serving as an outside reviewer (for journals or presses), or reading dissertations trigger “decisional” procrastination. Afraid that we might assign the wrong grade, or that we might unfairly reject an article, we put off making the decision. Decisional procrastination is not necessarily a bad choice; in fact, David Allen’s very useful Getting Things Done is largely about being deliberate regarding decisional procrastination. If it is a decision about which it is possible to get more information, and plausible that we will, then deliberately delaying it (but not losing track of it) is a rational strategy. The strategies for managing this kind of procrastination are also discussed later, but mostly involve setting reasonable deadlines, not just for completing the task, but for trying to get the information that would make the decision easier to make. People who have an aversion to closure are particularly prone to decisional procrastination, and so can benefit by finding ways to make decisions that are contingent (this can be done in regard to grading in various ways, also discussed later).

It’s because these various kinds of procrastination can happen at different moments during the same project that I’m dubious about the accuracy or utility of identifying them as different kinds of people: a person might be an “avoidance” procrastinator in regard to writing an article, an “arousal” procrastinator in regard to preparing the Works Cited, and a “decisional” procrastinator in regard to where to submit the manuscript. The same task might trigger different kinds of procrastination in different people: some people find that grading triggers “arousal” procrastination (because they find it tedious), and some people find that it triggers “decisional” procrastination (because they are unsure about their grading), and some people find that it triggers “avoidance” procrastination (because reading papers raises insecurities about the job they have done as teachers).

So, I think most of us are prone to all three kinds of procrastination, especially since academic writing presents all three situations. Still and all, knowing about the three can help figure out which one we’re doing right now, and that will help us decide which strategies might work. I think understanding the different triggers also helps reduce shame. There are so many books of advice out there–Destination Dissertation, Writing Your Dissertation in Fifteen Minutes a Day, Getting Things Done–and they all work for a bit and under some circumstances because they’re useful for one or two of the kinds of procrastination. But they all stop working at some point or in some situations. In my experience, grad students or faculty can then fall into a shame/anxiety spiral, thinking they suck, and they’ll never finish. It’s just that they need some new strategies–not for ever, but for this moment.

Procrastination: introduction

weekly work schedule — “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper.” (E.B. White, “E. B. White, The Art of the Essay No. 1” *Paris Review*)

Reason #3 I wanted to retire early was so that I could finish a bunch of projects. One of them is about scholarly writing. Someone asked that I pull out the parts about procrastination–that was about 10k words. Even when I brutally whacked at it, it was 4k, which is just way too much for a blog post. So I’ve broken it into parts. Here’s the first.

I haven’t edited or rewritten it at all, and I wrote this almost six years ago. I tried to move footnotes into the texts, but it’s still wonky as far as citation. I didn’t want to put off posting it till it was perfect (the irony would be too much), so here goes.

Procrastination is conventionally seen as a weakness of will, a bad habit, a failure of self- control–narratives that imply punitive behavior is the solution. Those narratives ignore that procrastination isn’t necessarily pleasurable, and often doesn’t look like a bad decision in the moment. Putting off doing scholarship in favor of spending time and energy on teaching or service is not a lack of willpower, the consequence of laziness, or inadequate panic. But it is putting off tasks that Stephen Covey would call important but not urgent in favor of tasks that are important and urgent. Since it isn’t caused by lack of willpower or inadequate fear, it isn’t always solved by self-trash-talk or upping the panic.

Procrastination isn’t necessarily one thing, and so it doesn’t have one solution. Nor is it always a problem that requires a solution; dictating barely enough time to a task can ensure we don’t spend more time on it than is necessary can make a dull task more interesting, as it introduces the possibility of failure, and it can be efficient. I once tried preparing class before the semester began by doing all the reading and making lecture notes during the summer. I had to reread the material the night before class anyway, so the pre-preparing meant I spent more time on teaching, not less. Grading papers is a task that will expand to fill the time allotted, as I could always read a little more carefully, word my suggestions more thoughtfully, or give more specific feedback. Leaving the most complicated four or five papers till the morning of class means I had to get up at 4 in the morning, but it also meant I could only spend half an hour on each, and I was forced to be more efficient and decisive with my comments.

Many self-help and time managements books promise an end to procrastination, but that is an empty promise. As long as we have more tasks than time, we will procrastinate. The myth that one can become a perfect time manager who doesn’t procrastinate can inhibit the practical steps necessary to become more effective with one’s time. People who procrastinate because they don’t want to be drudges, and like the drama of the panicked writing, resist giving up procrastination, since it seems to suggest they have to become a different person. Some perfectionists procrastinate because they won’t let themselves do mediocre work—hoping to do perfect work, they may spend so much time doing one task perfectly that they get nothing else done, or they may wait till they feel they are capable of great work (if that moment never comes, they complete nothing), or they ensure that they have good excuses (such as running out of time) for having submitted less than perfect work. Unhappily, the same forces—the desire for a perfect performance—can inhibit the ability to inhabit different practices in regard to procrastination.

The perfectionist desire for procrastination can cause us to try to find the perfect system, product, or book–a quest that can will someone into a person who never gets anything done. It’s possible to procrastinate by trying all sorts of new systems that prevent procrastination. We can fantasize about ending procrastination—so that we will, from now on, do all tasks easily, effortlessly, promptly, and without drama—in ways that are just as inhibiting as fantasizing about writing perfectly scholarship. The point is not to become perfect, but to become better. The next few posts will describe some concepts and summarize some research that I found very helpful.

Time management for associate professors

I posted something about time management for graduate students and assistant professors, and so now I should write something about associate professors, and that means writing about imposter syndrome.

The presumption, not always true, is that associate professors are oriented toward promotion to full. The advice I’m giving here is oriented toward finding a manageable and sustainable career–whether it’s to get promoted, or to remain at the associate level.

My crank theory is that people who developed a sustainable set of work practices (that is, ones not driven by panic or binge writing) as a graduate student or assistant professor just need to keep doing what they were doing once they get tenure. They’ll face many the same decisions—whether to take on a leadership position in the department, college, or discipline, what the next set of scholarly projects should be, how many new courses to develop—but, if they negotiated those shoals well as an assistant professor, things should be okay.

There is a lot of shaming rhetoric about people who remain at the level of associate professor, and that shaming makes me ragey. An awful lot of departments (not my current one, btw—the full profs have heavy service responsibilities) enable full professors to focus on scholarship because the whole department is functioning on the backs of those “stalled” associate professors. There are lots of reasons that people lose the thread of their scholarly life, many of which I’m not talking about here (ranging from bad, such as a family health crisis, to good, such as deciding that promotion isn’t desirable), but one of them is that there are some very toxic narratives about writing and scholarly productivity.

A lot of people say our world is oriented toward extraverts, but it really isn’t; it’s oriented toward narcissists. A lot of narcissists flame out in grad school; a lot of flame out as assistant professors. But, in my experience, narcissists who make it to associate make it to full.

So, this leaves us with non-narcissists, and why so many really good and smart people who have produced enough good writing to get where they are have trouble producing enough to get any further. One common explanation is imposter syndrome, but I don’t think that’s the problem; I think the problem is how people try to get past it.

Every reasonable accomplished person I have met has imposter syndrome—feeling that they have gotten more rewards and praise than their work actually merits, that they only got where they were through luck. The only people I have ever met who don’t have imposter syndrome are narcissistic fucks. So, there is no “getting over” imposter syndrome. In fact, we are always pretending to be more sure than we are; we fling ourselves into new projects when we don’t know what we’re doing; we make claims we aren’t entirely sure are accurate; we decide we can make a contribution to a field even when we haven’t actually read everything in that field. And people who succeed haven’t done so entirely on merit—only narcissists think that—hard work is necessary but not sufficient for success. People with imposter syndrome are honest about the intellectual precarity of our work; narcissists don’t know they’re imposters, but they are. They don’t know they’re imposters because narcissists can never really look at themselves from the position of a reasonably skeptical group of people who know things they don’t; they dismiss those people as fools. People with imposter syndrome know there is that group, although we don’t always know who they are.

One way that people manage imposter syndrome is through perfectionism. Some people refuse to submit anything for publication unless it’s perfect—that way, no one will expose them as an imposter. These are people who spend years working on things that they refuse to submit until perfect—that is, beyond criticism–, and so they don’t submit it. Or they don’t write at all, and just imagine the perfect thing they would write if they weren’t so swamped by obligations that they keep taking on.

Another way that people manage imposter syndrome (and fear of failure, and various other related issues) is by letting panic take the wheel. People who have succeeded in writing through high school, college, and coursework often have a truncated writing process: they are faced with an assignment, and they first decide on their argument, and then they decide on the organization for that argument, and then they write it out. (A lot of writing teachers think they’re teaching “the writing process” by teaching this linear method. They aren’t.) If you’re not a narcissist, and you’re trying to follow the “process” you’ve been taught, then, when you sit down to write, you’re trying to write, critique, and revise all at the same time.

And that’s how you get a writing block.

One of my crank theories is that some people have gotten to associate professor through generating enough sheer panic to make it past the crunch points. But that doesn’t mean the solution for either associate professors or people who want to mentor them is to panic them. (I’ve had full professors tell me that the reason that associates can’t publish is that they aren’t panicked enough—a sweet example of how Strict Father Morality is a pond into which supposedly lefty academics dip their toes from time to time). People who let panic take the wheel seem to think that people should spend their entire career in a panic in order to produce enough.

A lot of “stalled” associate professors are people who have been given that advice, and told that narrative, and have said, “Fuck that shit.”

And so they should. So should we all. It makes sense to reject a toxic narrative about productivity.

If you’ve never developed a long-term sustainable work practice—if your only method of motivating yourself to write is to be in a white-hot panic about your situation (and it appears that the only other method is to be an asshole narcissist) then the decision to remain a permanent associate professor seems not only sensible, but compassionate to the people in your life.

The problem isn’t that associate professors are insufficiently panicked—the problem is that far too many people promote a writing process dependent on panic and valorize a toxic narrative about success.

Once you get tenure, you get committee assignments. It looks different from the challenges of being assistant, but it really isn’t—you still have to figure out what scholarly projects to pursue, what committee assignments to take, what new classes to develop. The difference is one I have a hard time describing. Despite academics’ reputations for being lefty, far too many academics (including several department chairs I’ve known) have thoroughly embraced the neoliberal narrative of what it means to be a good worker—you throw yourself on the pyre of your own career to meet the standards of “good work” of your institution. You live and breathe in a world of panic, 60-hour work weeks, and self-congratulation for having no boundaries about work.

There is another option. It’s about creating a sustainable relationship to work.

And the first step in that creation of a sustainable relationship to work is stepping away from a writing process that relies on panic. A responsible graduate program would ensure that first step happens in graduate school, but we aren’t in that world (although there are many graduate advisors who are trying to do exactly that).

The best way to respond to imposter syndrome is to stop approaching every step in the writing and publication process as the moment we might be exposed to the world, but to be comfortable with writing shitty stuff, submitting things that someone might slam, and to know that we will never reach a point in our career when we are not being told that what we wrote is shitty by someone. And they may be right. So?

That response involves a lot of possible moves— most of them involve abandoning thinking about each publication process as risking everything, and they mean working because you want the outcomes the work will get, you’re interested in the crafting of the work, you want others to know about these insights you have. It also involves breaking the writing process into at least three different kinds of work that don’t happen all at once—creating, critiquing, revising. It involves walking away from perfectionism. It involves rejecting (and getting help rejecting) toxic narratives about how much we should be working; it involves finding allies and mentors. It doesn’t necessitate giving up on scholarship, although that might be a viable and joyful choice (some people decide they really love administration, for instance), and it certainly doesn’t necessitate living life in a state of panic.