Do you often fantasize about writing your book in a countryside cabin with no distractions and only the woodland animals to keep you company? Do you wish that you can drop all of your other commitments to give all of your time to writing your book? Today we’re going to discuss the wishful thinking that academics have when it comes to their writing time and where that wishful thinking rears its ugly head, the sabbatical. If you think you have to wait until your sabbatical to write your book, this episode is for you. Let’s get into it. Welcome to academic book writing, simplified. I’m your host Jane Joanne Jones, a writing coach and developmental editor who’s here to give you some tough love about the way you write. This podcast is for women and non-binary scholars in academia who are writing academic books, but feel as if the process is a little or a lot like a mystery. If you’re ready to trade your confusion and frustration for ease, clarity, and purpose, you’re in the right place. Let’s head into today’s episode.

Alright. Welcome to today’s episode where we’re discussing sabbaticals and whether you need one to write your book. Here’s what we’re going to discuss, the underlying thought processes that make you think you need a sabbatical to make meaningful progress on your book, the assumptions you’re making about the nature of free time and why you should embrace a diversity of approaches to writing your book instead of relying on just one. Let’s start with why you think you need a sabbatical. Now, I know that as an academic you are probably always feeling pressed for time and you think you can’t do the deep work necessary for writing while you’re also teaching, serving on committees and so forth. Now, this my friends, is a workload issue and a time management issue. You may not have full control over your workload, but you have to wrestle whatever time you can away from activities that undermine your book writing time. This means setting and maintaining boundaries, and if you want to crash course and boundaries, go back to episode six, which is a full episode about how to establish boundaries and why you should.

I guarantee you, there are things you’re doing right now that you shouldn’t be doing. I mean, right now you’re listening to this podcast and you definitely should be doing that, but in your broader academic life, there are commitments you’re taking on that you shouldn’t be taking on, and rather than thinking seriously about what you can let go of and making decisions, you would rather throw time at the problem by waiting until sabbatical. You might also believe you need a sabbatical because you can’t get work done in shorter bursts of time. I hear a lot of writers say, short sessions just don’t work for me. I can only write when I have at least four hours like I’m a binge writer. And it’s true that in some instances, short sessions won’t work for you. But what people usually mean when they say this is, I don’t find this approach to writing satisfying, but that does not mean you aren’t making progress.

And let’s be clear here. Different types of writing tasks do require different writing strategies and time commitments. This is something I teach you in all of my programs, so when you work with me, you learn how to calculate the appropriate amount of time to complete a task. What we always find is that you usually don’t need four or more uninterrupted hours to write something meaningful, and quite frankly, most of us don’t have the attention span to write for four interrupted hours, which is why it’s so curious to me that everyone believes they’re going to become a different person when sabbatical starts, but we’ll get into that in a moment.

Now, let’s talk about the risks of pinning all of your hopes on a sabbatical. First, if you go into your sabbatical with poor time management skills and crappy boundaries, those issues are not going to magically disappear. Once your sabbatical starts, you still won’t know how to predict how much you can accomplish while on sabbatical and you’ll still let people steal your time, so you’re not going to make the best use of your sabbatical if you don’t work on that skill building in advance. Second, unless you’ve been writing consistently, you won’t be prepared for the intensity of your sabbatical. That would be like running a marathon without any training you’d collapse. So if you haven’t done any work on your book and expect that you’ll hit the ground running on day one of your sabbatical, I have bad news for you. It’s not going to happen.

Third, a sabbatical is precarious just like any other time, what if something goes wrong? I remember when I was on the tenure track and I had a colleague who had raised her hand for every service commitment. She wanted to be a good team player, and she rationalized this by saying that she would do her writing on her sabbatical. When her sabbatical came, she would give all of her focus to her writing project and she had this whole year and she was going to make so much progress and she was going to finish this book that she was working on. So fast forward a year, I see her after a sabbatical and she told me that a family member had become gravely ill and she spent the bulk of her sabbatical caring for them. Now, this was great. It was great that she had this time to care for her family member who did get better, and it was great that she can devote that time to caretaking in that regard, she wanted to, but she didn’t get any writing done.

Her work did not move forward at all, and this is normally what happens when we put all of our eggs in one basket, in one writing basket. We really are pinning our hopes that everything will work out perfectly. This puts a lot of pressure on us to perform during the sabbatical. We have to be at the top of our game the entire time because we have pinned all of our hopes here, and second, it puts a lot of reliance on external circumstances that we cannot control going our way. She could not control that a family member became sick. You can’t control when a global pandemic happens. There are so many things and on even more minor levels you can’t control if a flood happens in your kitchen and you have to devote a week to dealing with it. If a child gets a minor illness and you have to spend days taking care of them because they’re out of daycare, all of these things can disrupt our writing process, and oftentimes we have to rightfully take time away from our writing to attend to them, but when we expect or hope that things will go perfectly, it often ends up backfiring and undermining our writing process, and we don’t want that to happen during our sabbatical, but sometimes we don’t have control and then we don’t have a good alternative because we have put so much of our hope into making progress during this specific time period.

With that being said, what can you do to ensure that you make steady progress outside of your sabbatical and use your time wisely during your sabbatical? First, create a solid book writing plan. This plan should include a writing timeline that gets you all the way to publication and an inventory of the major milestones you need to meet to stay on that timeline. Second, work on building your skills. These skills might include a focus on time management techniques, enhancing your ability to focus, tracking your time to see how long you need for certain tasks or any writing skills that you think might need some strengthening so that when you go into your sabbatical you feel fully equipped.

Third, give yourself a list of prerequisites. Think about what you would like done before your sabbatical to make your time a success. Perhaps you want to be done reading a body of literature so that you can start writing or maybe you want a zero draft of several chapters so you can focus on revisions during your sabbatical. Make a list of these things. Ask yourself, if I could envision a great sabbatical, what would it look like? What would I be working on? What would I be doing? Instead of just putting everything off until the sabbatical, ask yourself, what can I get done now? What are some things that I don’t want to deal with while I’m on sabbatical? Can I kind of clear the decks? And many of them may be book related and some of them may not. Maybe there are some articles you want to get off your desk so that you don’t feel pressure to work on them during your sabbatical.

Think for yourself what would make the time best for you and really take ownership of this process. Don’t leave yourself to fate during the sabbatical or the expectations of other people like co-authors who you might be in collaboration with. But you might say to yourself, as much as I love this co-authorship during sabbatical, I need to focus on these two or three projects or just one project your book. So make that list and give yourself a timeline for completing those prerequisites. Now, in closing, I want to be really clear. I don’t hate sabbaticals. I think you should fight for your time always, but I also have this revolutionary idea that you should use some of your sabbatical to rest and not feel pressure to fill every moment with work.

I think that you’ll feel better and your writing will be better, not when you turn to your sabbatical as the last resort for finally writing your book, but as one part of a larger book writing strategy. As always, thank you for listening and I will see you in the next episode. Thank you so much for listening to today’s episode. Remember, writing an academic book is challenging, but that doesn’t mean you have to overcomplicate it. If you liked what you heard in today’s episode, please leave a review. This helps get the word out about the podcast so more people will listen and we can continue the conversation. Take care and tune in for our next episode.