By: Sarah Walsh

It’s a strange time to work in academia.  (It’s a strange time to work in just about any sector, but this one’s mine.)

Every day new questions emerge: How will dismantling federal agencies impact the availability of the community services that I study? How will cuts to research funding impact the federally-funded dataset that I use for my research? How will federal and state politics impact job security for my collaborators? How will plans to close the Department of Education impact our students and our institution?

And that is just my research agenda. You are likely grappling with similar questions about your scholarly agenda.  Not to mention very real threats to the safety and liberty of friends and family, both here and abroad.  Like, I said…it’s a strange time to work in academia. So how do we keep going?

Um…

Well…

So, the thing is…

I was asked to write this blog post just as I was sitting down to revise my summer project list.  Every year in April, I write a long, aspirational list of research and writing goals for the summer. And every year in August, I pare that list back to a much shorter list of accomplishments. 

I am a solidly middle-of-the-road researcher, so what makes me an authority on scholarly productivity?

It feels like I am holding on by my fingernails these days, so why should you listen to my advice on persistence in the face of uncertainty?

Two things: 

I’ve tried everything. And I keep trying.

I’m a behavioral scientist by training, so I’m fascinated by the ways our habits and beliefs can support or undermine our goals. I’ve read countless books and articles about how to increase scholarly productivity and I’ve applied these strategies to my own academic writing practice.  Like I said, I’ve tried everything. Most of the time, the strategies outlined below really work.

Consistency and Accountability

Depending on your discipline, academic writing is often a solo endeavor, and our promotion schedule only holds us accountable for scholarly performance every five years or so. To be successful, you need to create guardrails for yourself to build accountability in the short term.

One best practice for writing a lot is to adopt a daily writing practice.  While I’ve never managed to pull that off, I don’t wait to write until I “have the time.” Spoiler alert: you’ll never have the time unless you make the time. I block time on my calendar for my research just as I do for my teaching and service commitments - and I do not accept meeting requests during those times. The FDC’s Research Writer’s Collaborative is a great way to create that consistency and accountability.  If the Research Writer’s Collaborative doesn’t work with your schedule, you can use online resources or work with your friends on campus to build positive peer pressure and hold one another accountable for making progress towards your research goals.

Get the Vibes Right

You absolutely cannot wait to start writing until the stars align and provide you with the perfect conditions, the perfect mood, and the perfect spark of inspiration. But you can do your best to create the conditions where you are most successful.

Reflect on when and where you are most productive. Are you a morning person? A night owl? Try to avoid spending the time of day when you do your best deep thinking in committee meetings. Some people focus best at home, away from the demands and distractions of the office. I am easily distracted by the laundry that needs folding and chores that need doing, so I am not at my best when I work from home. I do my best writing in coffee shops and public libraries, so I make a point to go to those places regularly.

Leverage Technology

A classic piece of writing advice is that you can’t edit a blank page. You need to start somewhere but the blinking cursor on a fresh Google doc can be intimidating. Leveraging technology can help you clear that initial hurdle.

Generative AI tools like ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini are all the rage these days. I am of the opinion that Generative AI is most useful at the very beginning or very end of a writing project. While there’s no substitute for your expertise and original thoughts on a subject, you can ask GenAI to give you an organizational structure for your writing. In my experience, the GenAI outline is either great and saves me a bunch of time, or it is so egregiously bad that it helps me clarify my thinking around how I want to structure my argument instead.  Either way, I come away with a plan.

GenAI is also useful at the end of a project when you need to clean up your writing.  It can help polish my conversational style for an academic journal, or help me translate my dense academic prose for a lay audience.

I realize that GenAI remains controversial in many academic circles and may not be for you. A more established yet underutilized technology is automated transcription.  These tools have improved significantly since the first time I left Microsoft Powerpoint auto-generate captions for my video lectures. The first (very) rough draft of this blog post was written using the voice to text features on my cell phone while I was walking my dog.

I understand that it is possible to do some fairly sophisticated editing using voice to text features, but personally, I like to open a fresh Google doc on my phone - so I don’t mess up my “real” draft - click the tiny microphone button next to the keyboard and just start talking through my ideas.  I’ll defer to my GACET colleagues, but I’ve heard it sometimes helps to have a rubber duck handy.

Find an Undergrad

When in doubt, get yourself an undergrad collaborator. 

One of the best ways to get excited about your work again is to work with someone learning  about it for the first time. It reminds me of all the reasons that I chose this line of inquiry in the first place.  

I mostly teach upper level and graduate courses, so I often don’t meet prospective collaborators until they are nearing graduation. The new ForagerOne platform should help us all find interested students sooner, so we can be enthusiasm vampires for more time!

Er, I mean, so we can have longer and more productive collaborative partnerships with students. 

Finally, Try It All Again Tomorrow

Do these strategies work for me all of the time? No. Sometimes I need to lay on the couch and watch Scandal like it's 2012 and things aren't quite so terrible. But these are the things that work most of the time.

So my last tip for everyone is to give yourself some grace. These aren't ordinary times and all we can do is try our best.  What your best looks like at one point in your academic career may not be what your best looks like today or tomorrow. But your best is enough.

Hang in there. I will too.