Writing an academic book is challenging, but it doesn’t have to feel like torture. Join me, Jane Joanne Jones, writing coach and developmental editor to Women and non-binary scholars in academia. As I teach you how to write your academic book with ease, clarity, and purpose, let’s bend the rules, expose the hidden curriculum and write your book the right way, your way. Hello. Hello. Welcome back to the podcast. If you are listening to this at the time it was released, you’re probably a few weeks into your academic terms, so I hope that’s going well for you. And it’s a perfect time to talk about productivity because you probably are feeling like you’re not productive right now. So there’s a lot of noise in academia about productivity, and you are likely bombarded with opinions about how much time you should be writing, how many publications you should produce each year, and how you’re wasting your time on mentoring service and teaching. 

Now, when it comes to writing books, I ask people all the time, how long do you think it should take you to write a book? And I’m surprised by the number of people who tell me things like, it should take six to nine months. It should take a year to revise a dissertation into a book. And you know how I feel about revising dissertations? I don’t believe that’s a thing, but that’s a different episode. But I’m going to say this as gently as possible to the folks who believe it should take six to nine months or even a year. This is delusional. You’re not writing a well-researched academic book in a year or less. But you know what? I don’t blame you for thinking this. The reason you have this thought or this conviction is that you believe that you’ll have six months to a year of uninterrupted writing time. 

That’s why you think you’re going to be able to write your book so quickly. It’s rarely the case, even for folks with a postdoc or who are on sabbatical. Your book is not going to be your priority for the entire time you spend writing it. And I say this as a coach who focuses on helping people find more time in their calendar to work on their book. So even though the book isn’t your full-time job, you create a lot of drama with your thoughts about when you’re supposed to be working on your book. Now, because I like to keep these episodes brief, this episode is going to be one of two parts. In part one, I’m going to explain why you weaponize your productivity against yourself and what that might look like. In part two, which will be the next episode, I’m going to show you a more humane way to assess how you use your time. 

A way that I’ve taught a lot of book writers who are juggling competing demands on their time. So let’s get into part one. I’m going to speak about two instances where academics weaponize their productivity. This is where I see it most often in the writer I coach. The first is that you should prioritize your book at the expense of other writing projects. The second instance is that you should prioritize your writing at the expense of all of your other commitments. The fact of the matter is that if you are a busy academic, then you’re going to have other writing projects besides your book. You’re going to have deadlines, and those deadlines are also important because your book is just one part of your tenure portfolio or your broader research agenda. I want to draw an important distinction about prioritizing your book at the expense of other writing projects. 

It is natural to feel conflicted, right when you are making headway on your book. And then another writing project pops its head up and is like, give me attention to, I think there’s nowhere, this is more kind of not stressful, but more obvious than when you get a revise and resubmit on your desk. So for instance, you’re working on your book, you get a revise and resubmit, and you’re like, yes, I’m excited. I have a revise and resubmit. But you’re also like, oh, damn, I have to take time away from my book, and I wanted to maintain that momentum. You’re going to feel conflicted, you’re excited, but you’re also a little bit bummed, right? That’s normal. It’s normal to have those conflicting emotions. Where you get into trouble is when you decide that these conflicting commitments are somehow the results of a failure in your project management. 

And this is what I mean when I say that You weaponize your productivity. You create a narrative about what you should be doing in the name of being productive. This narrative is influenced by your own thoughts, and those thoughts are influenced by the norms of your department, your discipline, and academia more generally. So what are these norms and expectations? I’ll go through some of them. They’ll probably sound familiar. Always having multiple projects in your pipeline, regularly trying to get out of teaching and service so you have more time to write. The general disdain we see for teaching in many corners of academia, placing more value on scholarship than any other part of the tenure packet. Judging people based on their publication record, not just at the tenure and review stage, but the more casual judgment from peers, colleagues, and mentors. Here’s a concrete example. I was once at an institution where it was suggested that there should be a point system for publications. 

You’d be awarded points for your publishing, and you can use those points to get out of teaching if you choose. Some faculty loved this idea, while some other faculty argued that this system implied that teaching was a punishment for not publishing. So norms and expectations like this and suggestions for systems like this put you in a thankless position because even though you’re actually not a full-time writer, you’re expected to behave like one. And that creates a lot of pressure on you. And it also creates fear, fear, fear that you’re not showing up the way a good academic should. If you are not focused on your writing a hundred percent of the time, fear that you’ll never catch up to your colleague who publishes more than you do faster than you do, and fear that you won’t produce enough to earn tenure. And what do all of these fears have in common? 

What is the underlying thought that you might be incompetent? So how do you stop weaponizing your productivity in this way? How do you stop using productivity or your perceived lack of productivity as a way to talk down to yourself as a way to diminish your belief in your capabilities? How do you stop this? I have a couple of suggestions. First, recognize that this focus on output and quantification is inhumane. You’re not a machine on a factory line. Your goal in life, no matter what academia tells you, is not to achieve maximum output just for the sake of being productive. That’s not your goal. You’re not a robot, you’re not a machine. So recognize that this focus on output and quantification is inhumane. Second, value, and consistency while also acknowledging ebbs and flows. For instance, in my coaching program, elevate, we encourage everyone to set a number of hours per week that they’ll work on their book. 

It’s a book writing program. That’s what they’re there to do. But we also do a recalibration every single Wednesday. We do our midweek check-in so that everyone has the opportunity to account for unexpected disruptions, tasks taking longer than expected, and so forth. Because we’re humans who live in the world and we can’t control everything. In order to express compassion for the fact that we cannot control everything, we have to be able to recalibrate without blaming ourselves so that we don’t get to the end of a month and say, oh my goodness, I thought I was going to accomplish A, but I only accomplished B, I’m so lazy. I didn’t do what I was supposed to. Instead, we look at our calendar and say, these four things popped up, and that’s the reason why I was still able to do my best, and this is what I was able to achieve in those circumstances. 

So valuing consistency, but also acknowledging ebbs and flows. And finally creating a clear demarcation between what academia would have you believe about yourself and what you actually believe about yourself. I am not naive to the fact that you have job requirements, right? So when you feel this pressure to publish, it’s not imaginary, but these expectations are quite arbitrary. They’re impactful, but they are arbitrary. So it’s really important to get clear about what academia would have you believe about yourself and what you actually believe about yourself. Because I know that when you really stop to think about it, you’re not lazy, that you’re putting in a lot of effort. You know that you actually care about your students and want them to have a good experience in your classroom. Even if that means you have to actually devote sometimes to course prep, it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad book writer or that you’re a bad scholar if you take some time away from writing to focus on the other aspects of your job that are meaningful to you. 

Alright, so in part two, we are going to explain what you should be doing instead. We are past the 10 minute mark here, and I really try to stay under 10 minutes. But to summarize, when we weaponize our productivity about ourselves against ourselves, we begin to create a narrative about whether we are a good or bad academic. And that narrative can cause a lot of self-doubt, fear, and really unnecessary pressure. So in order to combat that narrative, it’s important for us to focus on ways to stop weaponizing our productivity and recognize that we are doing good work, and that we are working hard. Even if you don’t meet every single arbitrary norm of academia, you are still doing a lot of good work. So now that we’ve talked about some of the thoughts and feelings surrounding productivity, I’m going to give you a really clear way to assess your actual progress in the next episode. So stay tuned and I’ll see you there. Take care. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. If you like what you heard, please share the podcast with a friend. Or if you’re an Apple listener, leave a review. It helps other folks find the podcast so we can continue the conversation and make sure that when it’s time to write your book, you can do it on your terms, your way.