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You can access those posts here:

Today’s episode asks what happens after the tenure sprint is supposedly over.

The promise of tenure is that the pressure will ease, the finish line will hold, and a more spacious academic life will finally become possible. But for many scholars, the habits formed during the pre-tenure years do not simply disappear.

When you spend years working inside ambiguity, trying to discern what will count as “enough,” overproduction can start to feel like the safest answer. Saying yes becomes more than a habit; it becomes part of how you prove you are serious, generous, collegial, and deserving.

I also look at why advice about “just saying no” often misses the deeper problem.

Not everyone has the same freedom to set boundaries without being judged, penalized, or read as insufficiently committed. Service, mentoring, diversity work, and emotional labor often fall unevenly on scholars whose belonging has already been made conditional.

I want to hold both truths together: individual strategies for saying no can matter, especially as acts of self-preservation, but they are not enough on their own. The deeper work is building departments and institutions where labor is transparent, shared, and recognized and where exhaustion is no longer mistaken for commitment.

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Greetings, dear readers! Last week's post on the tenure sprint toward an invisible finish line got a lot of engagement, and I've been thinking about your responses all week. If you missed it, you can read it here:

One commenter pointed out that departmental culture often feeds the impulse to-do-all-the-things, which raises a crucial question: why does the hustle mentality persist long after people achieve tenure? I'm bringing back this piece from the archives that digs into exactly that dynamic.

Would love to hear your thoughts!

A while back, I found myself in an elevator with two senior colleagues. As we exchanged greetings, one of them asked, “How are you doing?” Without missing a beat, I replied, “I’m okay. A bit overwhelmed by my to-do list.”

What followed was a familiar exchange: stories of overflowing plates, how the semester was racing by, and how none of us were sure how we’d get it all done. It felt like a ritual—a shared acknowledgment of the endless demands of academic life. But as I stepped off the elevator, I realized something unsettling:

I had just lied.

I didn’t feel particularly overwhelmed. Sure, there were some semesters when I felt maxed out, but I worked hard to avoid making that the norm. That semester, I was making steady progress on my book project, my classes were going smoothly, and my life seemed relatively balanced.

So why did I instinctively join in the “I’m so busy” rhetoric? After reflecting on this, I realized that my reaction wasn’t unusual. It was a reflex born of academic culture.

Saying “I’m so busy” has become second nature in our profession, and it brings up a few issues that I think are worth exploring.

Busyness as a Badge of Commitment

In academia, admitting that you aren’t overwhelmed can feel like admitting you aren’t working hard enough. If I told my senior colleagues that I wasn’t drowning in deadlines, would they think I wasn’t serious about my job? About tenure? About the privilege of being a scholar?

Saying "I'm busy" communicates to others your commitment, demonstrating that you're not only fulfilling your responsibilities but also going above and beyond in a system that often encourages overextension.

Busyness is a badge of honor—proof that we’re dedicated to our work. But this narrative isn’t just unhelpful; it’s harmful. It sets unrealistic expectations for ourselves and others, especially for graduate students and early-career scholars who are looking to senior colleagues as models.

To be clear, I blame the system, not individual laborers, for this state of affairs; however, it is critical that we refrain from engaging in harmful rhetoric that strengthens the system.

Academic Work Doesn’t Fit the 40+ Hour Mold

Unlike many other professions, academic work doesn’t fit neatly into the 40+ hour workweek that many people see as an ideal. Research, writing, and teaching are not tasks you can grind through for eight hours straight. Intellectual labor is demanding. Drafting a paper, crafting a lecture, or analyzing data requires focus, creativity, and mental energy—resources that don’t replenish instantly.

We often push ourselves to maintain the illusion of constant productivity, even if it means working inefficiently or spending excessive time on less important tasks just to feel like we’re working hard. In reality, deep intellectual work requires significant focus and energy, which makes regular rest and recharge essential. The expectation that we should be “on” for 40+ hours a week ignores the nature of academic labor and supports the culture of overworking.

Passion Can Be Exploited

Academics tend to be deeply passionate people. We care about our research, we’re invested in our students, and we want to improve our departments, disciplines, and institutions. That passion, however, often compels us to take on more than we can realistically handle. We volunteer for committees, mentor extra students, and say yes to projects because we genuinely want things to be better.

Unfortunately, the academy thrives on exploiting this unpaid or underpaid labor. It is built into the system, which constantly expects more from us while failing to provide a fair exchange of compensation for our efforts.

I talk about these issues at length in this post:

Changing the Narrative

The culture of busyness in academia is pervasive, but it doesn’t have to define how we approach our work or interact with one another. Pay attention to how often you reflexively say, “I’m so busy.”

• Are you truly overwhelmed, or are you repeating the script?

• Are you feeling overwhelmed because you believe you need to take on more than you can handle in order to be a successful scholar or teacher?

Acknowledge your workload honestly, even if it feels vulnerable. When we’re honest with ourselves, we can start being honest with others—and that honesty can help challenge the harmful norms that make so many of us feel inadequate.

For those of us who mentor graduate students or junior colleagues, it’s essential to challenge the notion that busyness equals quality work. Talk about the importance of rest, boundaries, and pacing yourself for a sustainable career. Our students and colleagues are watching how we navigate these challenges, and we owe it to them to model a healthier way forward.

And for those of us who feel stretched thin, it’s okay to say no. The academy will always ask for more, but protecting your time and energy is not selfish—it’s necessary for doing your best work. For more on that, you can read this post:

In Sum

When I think back to that elevator ride, I wish I had answered differently. Maybe something like, “I’m doing well, actually! I’ve been making progress on my research, and my classes are going smoothly.” It would have been honest. It might even have opened the door to a more meaningful conversation. And perhaps most importantly, it would have been a small step toward dismantling the “I’m so busy” culture that so many of us feel trapped by.

Let’s start choosing honesty over habit. We deserve it—and so do the scholars who are looking to us for guidance.

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Here, I offer a different way of thinking about it: a strong conclusion doesn’t just summarize the manuscript. It synthesizes the argument, helps the reader see what the pieces add up to, and makes the stakes of the work clearer.

I also explore how a conclusion can open outward without becoming inflated or vague. That might mean showing what your analysis lets us understand differently, clarifying the broader implications of your argument, or pointing toward questions that emerge from the work in an organic and grounded way. I share how writing the coda to my book helped me see conclusions differently, not as administrative cleanup, but as a genuine space for reflection, interpretation, and extension.

If conclusions have felt dull, frustrating, or difficult to pin down, I hope this episode gives you a more interesting and more useful frame.

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Dr. Sarah Chen sits in her department chair’s office at the end of her first year on the tenure track, notepad open and pen ready. She asks the question that’s been keeping her up at night: “What exactly do I need to do to get tenure?”

Her chair leans back and considers. “Well, you’re very bright and capable. You’ll want to be publishing in good journals. Stay engaged with service. Keep your teaching evaluations strong.”

This canned response does not inspire confidence, so Sarah continues to push for more. “How many publications?” “Which journals count as good?” Her chair smiles warmly but offers little clarity. He instead says,

It is holistic; we will consider the big picture, but every tenure case is unique.

Over the following weeks, Sarah asks the same question to different colleagues. A senior faculty member says teaching matters more than she thinks and she needs several articles beyond her book project. Another warns her that committee service won’t count much and promptly invites her to join a committee a month later. Her advisor from grad school tells her she’s overthinking it—just keep her head down and produce.

Different advice. Contradictory priorities. An invisible finish line.

So Sarah does what so many of us do in this situation; she does everything. She says yes to every committee, takes on extra advising, reviews manuscripts, organizes panels, and mentors students who aren’t officially hers. She attends multiple conferences a year and gets several papers in the pipeline, all while trying to turn her dissertation into a book.

Nights blur into weekends, weekends dissolve into summers, and through it all runs this persistent undercurrent of anxiety—the gnawing sense that she can never quite slow down because she simply does not know what will constitute “enough.”

Sarah isn’t a real person, but I suspect many of you recognize her—maybe you’ve lived some version of her story, or you’re living it right now. This relentless pace isn’t merely the product of individual ambition or insecurity.

The truth is far more troubling: this pattern is structural. It’s baked directly into the architecture of how tenure and promotion systems are designed and, more critically, into how strategically vague those systems often remain in practice.

As conservative forces attack academia from without, this internal dysfunction ensures we’re quietly collapsing from within.

Tenure was not originally designed to extract maximum output from scholars.

The origin story of tenure in the United States stresses that it emerged primarily as a protection for academic freedom, not as some elaborate mechanism for maximizing scholarly productivity. The AAUP’s 1915 Declaration of Principles emphasizes tenure as a critical safeguard against dismissal for controversial research, teaching, or speech—a way to insulate scholars from political pressures, donor influence, and administrative caprice.

In other words, tenure was meant to protect intellectual risk-taking and the pursuit of knowledge wherever it might lead, not to function as a prolonged audition in which scholars must demonstrate an apparently limitless capacity for labor.

Over time, however, tenure became increasingly entangled with institutional performance metrics: publication counts, citation indices, grant dollars, student credit hours, and service contributions.

By the mid-twentieth century, the “probationary period” had been formalized through the AAUP’s 1940 Statement, establishing a relatively standardized timeframe—often up to seven years—before a decision about “continuous appointment” would be rendered.

Importantly, this tenure system developed in a publishing economy where research evaluation became increasingly tied to journal impact scores, allowing major for-profit publishers to consolidate high-status journals, turn scholarly prestige into commercial power, and establish these metrics as the dominant measure of research impact.

This led to a peculiar and deeply consequential situation: the 7-year clock became standardized, while the criteria for success remained frustratingly opaque and governed by a capitalist logic in which productivity is endlessly demanded and “enough” is structurally impossible.

The tenure timeline is fixed, but the finish line is not.

This gap between a rigid timeline and ambiguous expectations creates a remarkably powerful incentive structure.

When you don’t know exactly how many publications will be deemed “enough,” what level of teaching excellence will satisfy the committee, or precisely how much service will be weighed against your research productivity, the rational response is to always do more because more is safer than the terrifying possibility of “not enough.”

In their illuminating article “Strategic Ambiguity: How Pre-Tenure Faculty Negotiate the Hidden Rules of Academia,” scholars Leandra Cate, LaWanda M. Ward, and Karly S. Ford demonstrate how tenure criteria are often communicated not through formal documents or transparent conversations, but through informal channels, inconsistent messages, and sometimes outright contradictory signals that leave faculty scrambling to decode the “real” expectations.

Their research reveals patterns that will feel achingly familiar: expectations are frequently implicit rather than explicit. Faculty must learn the “real rules” through observation, rumor, and trial and error. This ambiguity encourages what the researchers describe as “self-directed overproduction.” When the standards are unclear, doing more feels like the only defensible strategy.

When tenure standards remain deliberately imprecise, institutions reap substantial benefits while individual faculty absorb the costs.

They receive extraordinary output because faculty produce more research, take on more service, and invest heavily in teaching, all because they cannot risk being perceived as insufficient. When someone fails to achieve tenure, the narrative easily becomes one of personal inadequacy rather than an indictment of structural opacity. And strategic ambiguity provides institutions with both flexibility and deniability. Decisions can be justified after the fact, framed as holistic judgments, and insulated from scrutiny.

In other words, unclear standards function as a management tool that extracts maximum labor while minimizing institutional accountability.

And to be very clear, this system doesn’t impact everyone equally.

Cate, Ward, and Ford argue that strategic ambiguity disproportionately disadvantages faculty of color. Access to tacit knowledge remains profoundly unequal. Tenured ranks continue to be disproportionately white in many universities, which means the informal mentoring networks where the “real rules” get shared are significantly less accessible to scholars of color.

When expectations remain hidden, evaluators rely more heavily on subjective judgments that are well-documented to be shaped by racialized and gendered assumptions. And service burdens are uneven because scholars of color are asked far more frequently to take on diversity labor and mentoring work, which is consistently undervalued in tenure evaluations.

In an ambiguous system operating within an unequal social structure, those who already occupy marginalized positions are far more likely to overwork and still be evaluated as falling somehow short of expectations that were never clearly articulated in the first place.

And of course, US-based scholars are now facing an additional crisis.

The very protections that tenure was designed to provide are being systematically eroded across American higher education. Academic freedom is under direct assault from state legislatures, governing boards, and administrators who increasingly view faculty expertise and intellectual independence as threats rather than assets.

We’re watching as states pass laws restricting what can be taught about race, gender, and American history. We’re seeing tenured faculty investigated or pushed out for scholarship that challenges powerful interests. We’re witnessing the dismantling of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs without faculty support. The promise of tenure, that achieving this milestone would provide genuine protection for intellectual risk-taking, is revealed as increasingly hollow.

The situation borders on the absurd: the metrics and unclear expectations required to achieve tenure will remain firmly in place, extracting maximum labor from vulnerable workers, but tenure’s protections—the entire justification for this grueling process—are being systematically dismantled.

This should enrage us. It should make us question whether we’re asking scholars to sacrifice so much for protections that may prove illusory precisely when they’re needed most.

Most conversations about tenure focus on how individual faculty can become more strategic, more productive, and more resilient.

I do believe that those conversations matter. One of the reasons Publish Not Perish exists is to support individuals navigating these unfair systems. But framing everything as an individual challenge obscures the structural problems that need addressing.

• What would academic work look like if tenure criteria were genuinely clear, transparent, and equitable?

• What if tenure primarily protected intellectual freedom, as originally intended, rather than extracting maximal output during prolonged insecurity?

• What if saying no were interpreted as healthy boundaries rather than a career risk?

I understand the impulse to defend tenure as it currently exists, especially when academic freedom faces unprecedented threats. To be clear, I believe academic freedom remains essential to the entire enterprise of higher education. But defending academic freedom and defending the current tenure system are not the same thing. We can fight to preserve the protections tenure was designed to provide while simultaneously demanding radical transformation of how we earn those protections in the first place.

Until we grapple with these structural questions and demand genuine transparency from institutions that benefit from this system, the sprint continues.

Sarah Chen and thousands of scholars like her will keep running until something breaks—their health, their relationships, and their love for work they once approached with joy. The cost of this system extends far beyond individual exhaustion. It determines whether higher education can continue to produce the knowledge and critical thinking our democracy depends on.

Regressive forces attacking academic freedom are destroying higher education from the outside in—but our insistence on tying academic freedom protections to unclear metrics and opaque evaluation processes is destroying us from the inside out. We cannot afford to lose on both fronts.

If we want to preserve what tenure was meant to protect, we need to radically transform how we decide who deserves those protections in the first place.

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Earlier this week, I walked you through five common patterns behind one of the most destabilizing comments you can receive on your book manuscript: “clarify your argument.” If you missed it, you can read that post here:

Now let’s talk about what comes next.

If you’ve just received a reader report or a colleague’s feedback asking you to clarify your argument, your first instinct is probably to open that document and start revising immediately. Maybe you’re already mentally rewriting your introduction, second-guessing your framing, or wondering if you need to reorganize the whole manuscript.

Take a deep breath and pause, my dear readers.

This comment requires diagnosis before action. Panic revision rarely addresses the actual problem because you’re still too close to your own thinking to see what readers are experiencing. The urge to correct it immediately is understandable, but responding effectively means slowing down enough to understand what kind of clarity problem you’re actually solving.

Here’s the reframe I want you to carry into revision: The goal is not to make your argument louder. It’s to make it easier to follow.

I’ll walk you through how to do just that.

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In this episode, I talk about how that belief takes hold, why it’s normal to desire these blocks, and why it reflects a model of academic life that does not match the reality most scholars are living, especially those juggling teaching, service, caregiving, health concerns, and the constant interruptions of institutional life.

I also make the case for a different way of thinking about writing time. Progress does not depend only on having more hours. It depends on matching the kind of time you have to the kind of task in front of you. Not every part of book writing requires the same level of focus or energy. Freewriting, outlining, revising, note-making, and drafting all ask different things of you, and some of them fit surprisingly well into smaller windows.

When I stopped treating “working on the book” as one single activity, I could make meaningful progress in the time I actually had instead of dismissing it as insufficient. That shift changed more than productivity. It changed my relationship to the project itself. The book stopped feeling distant and accusing and started to feel like something I was genuinely in conversation with again.

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There is a certain kind of panic that comes when you receive a reader report or even a note from a colleague on your book manuscript that asks you to "clarify your argument."

If you’re anything like me, your stomach drops. You reread your book manuscript with fresh dread, suddenly doubting everything you thought you knew about your own project. The confusion intensifies when this comment appears alongside praise for your research, your evidence, or your theoretical framework. How can your work be compelling but your argument unclear?

Let me first calm your nerves, my dear readers: “Clarify your argument” is rarely a verdict on the quality of your thinking. It’s almost always a signal about how your reader is experiencing the manuscript.

This distinction matters because it changes how you respond. Rather than questioning whether you have an argument worth making, you can focus on the more tractable problem of helping readers encounter that argument more readily. The intellectual work is already there. The issue is one of visibility, explicitness, and reader experience.

This is one of the most common comments I see in feedback, and it appears across disciplines, career stages, and publication venues. Unfortunately, it is also extremely ambiguous feedback, and we are left to interpret what the reader means by “clarify your argument.”

In today’s newsletter, I’ll walk you through the most frequent culprits—the common patterns behind requests for argumentative clarity that I see again and again in reader reports. Understanding what reviewers typically mean when they say these words can transform a destabilizing comment into actionable revision guidance.

In a Part II follow-up newsletter for paid subscribers coming later this week, I explain how to strategically revise your book manuscript after the “clarify your argument” comment.

1. Readers can’t see the claim you see.

Book writers live inside their arguments for years. We know our claims intimately, including their nuances, their boundaries, and their stakes. This proximity creates a dangerous illusion: we confuse knowing our argument with showing it.

In the humanities and qualitative social sciences, we often build arguments through careful contextualization. We establish theoretical frameworks, situate our intervention within existing scholarship, and provide rich descriptions of our cases or texts before arriving at our central claim. This approach reflects how we think and how we were trained. The problem emerges when reviewers encounter this structure while reading strategically rather than devotionally.

Colleagues reading to provide feedback are not as attentive as your dissertation advisor (or at least I hope you had an attentive dissertation advisor!). They’re skimming your introduction to identify your contribution, jumping to your conclusion to see where you land, and scanning section headings to understand your organizational logic. If your argument doesn’t surface clearly in these high-visibility moments, readers will struggle to track it through the manuscript’s interior.

Ask yourself this diagnostic question:

If someone read only your introduction and conclusion, would they be able to state your argument in one sentence?

If not, your claim may be embedded too deeply in the manuscript’s middle sections, visible to you but elusive to readers encountering your work for the first time.

2. The argument evolves, but the text doesn’t.

Writing is thinking. We often discover our arguments through the process of drafting, revising, and wrestling with our evidence—especially in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. The claim we arrive at after months of writing often differs from the one we imagined when we started.

This generative process is intellectually honest and methodologically sound. But it creates a structural problem: our manuscripts don’t always evolve in lockstep with our thinking.

You might have sketched your introduction when you had a nascent sense of your argument, then refined that argument substantially as you worked through your chapters or case studies. The conclusion reflects your most developed thinking, but earlier sections still carry traces of your preliminary framing.

From a reader’s perspective, such an arrangement creates internal inconsistency. The promises made in your opening don’t quite match the payoffs delivered later. The theoretical framework emphasizes concepts that recede in importance by the end of the book.

Your argument is clear in your conclusion because that’s where your thinking ultimately landed. The issue is that earlier sections haven’t been revised to reflect and support that fully developed claim.

3. The evidence is carrying too much weight.

In qualitative, archival, and textual scholarship, we often operate under the myth that data should “speak for itself.” We present our cases, our sources, and our textual examples with detailed care, then move forward assuming readers will draw the same interpretive conclusions we’ve drawn.

They won’t. And academic readers don’t enjoy guessing at your argument.

Rich description and careful evidence presentation are necessary but insufficient. Readers need explicit interpretation that connects evidence to claims. They need you to narrate the significance of what they’re seeing, to draw out the patterns and tensions that support your argument, and to explain why this particular evidence matters for your broader intervention.

When readers say your argument needs clarification after reading chapters or sections heavy with evidence but light on analysis, they’re not asking for more evidence. They’re asking for more guidance. They want to see your interpretive work made visible. Analysis is where arguments become legible to readers, and when analysis remains implicit or underdeveloped, even compelling evidence can’t compensate.

4. The stakes are underarticulated.

Sometimes an argument is technically precise but still feels unclear because readers don’t understand why it matters. This is the “so what?” problem, and it plagues academic writing across disciplines.

There’s a crucial distinction between topic importance and argumentative stakes. Your topic might be inherently significant—climate policy, historical memory, educational inequality—but that doesn’t automatically clarify what’s at stake in your particular argument. Readers need to understand not just what you’re studying, but why your specific claims reshape how we understand that topic.

An argument can be precise and still feel unclear if the reader doesn’t know why it matters. When reviewers ask for clarification, they may actually be asking for significance.

5. Structure obscures the argument.

Here’s a pattern I see often in the developmental editing I do: manuscripts organized according to the logic of research rather than the logic of argument.

Sections divided by case study, archival collection, or theoretical text. Headings that describe content (”The 1970s Campaign” or “Foucault’s Approach”) rather than claims. An organizational structure that made perfect sense for conducting the research but doesn’t serve readers trying to track a developing argument.

The result? Readers feel oriented locally—they understand what each section discusses—but lost globally. They can’t see how sections build toward or support a central claim. The argument exists, but it’s hiding in plain sight, obscured by a structure that doesn’t foreground argumentative progression.

If your outline doesn’t read like a sequence of claims, your argument may be structurally invisible regardless of how clearly you articulate it within individual sections.

Revision Is Not Rejection

I want to emphasize something before we close: receiving the “clarify your argument” comment doesn’t mean your book is failing. In fact, it often appears on promising work that’s intellectually substantial but not yet optimized for reader experience. It’s revision guidance, not rejection.

These patterns I’ve described aren’t failures of rigor or intelligence. They’re the natural byproducts of how we research and write. It’s the proximity that creates blind spots, discovery that outpaces revision, evidence-gathering that overwhelms interpretation, and significance that feels obvious to us but remains tacit for readers.

Part 2 continues later this week for paid subscribers, where I walk you through exactly how to respond to this comment strategically—without tearing your book manuscript apart or second-guessing your entire project.

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I walk through three common reasons deadlines keep slipping:

1. Sometimes the work requires a strategy you haven’t developed yet, so the real task is not producing faster but figuring out how to proceed.

2. Sometimes the deadline was built around a fantasy version of your week rather than the one you’re actually living.

3. And sometimes the problem is that the manuscript is asking for a decision you haven’t made yet, so you stay busy without truly moving forward.

What I hope this episode offers is a more useful way to read your own patterns. Instead of treating missed deadlines as a verdict on your character, I want you to see them as information. If you can identify whether you’re dealing with a strategy gap, an unrealistic plan, or an avoided decision, you can make a much better next move. That might mean testing a few approaches before setting a new deadline, planning from the evidence of your real life rather than your ideal week, or writing your way toward the decision the project is demanding.

The goal here is not to become harsher with yourself. It’s to become more accurate so your deadlines can start supporting your work instead of quietly undermining it.

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At the end of March, I flew back to the U.S. for my annual disciplinary conference in Chicago and to see family back in the southland. It had been a minute. My partner and I left Texas and the U.S. fairly publicly—I wrote about it here and talked about it openly—so I knew the trip would involve more than panels and catching up with old friends.

What I didn’t fully anticipate was how many people would seek me out to subtly ask a question that had been circulating in their minds. No one asked outright, “Do you regret it?” —but the question was there underneath so many of my conversations.

They wanted to know if leaving academia and the country had broken something in me. They seemed to be afraid to find out that it had but were relieved when I confirmed the opposite. They asked because they wanted to know if an intellectual life that had been reconfigured was worth what I lost.

My dear readers already know the answer to the regret question: “Hell no!” But I want to talk about why they asked it, because I think many of you will recognize yourselves in them.

The scholars I spoke with are navigating an extraordinary convergence of pressures.

The Trump administration’s attacks on higher education — slashing funding, targeting any program that touches diversity, equity, and inclusion, and wielding federal dollars as a weapon against academic freedom — are landing on top of trends that were already destabilizing: declining enrollments, the chronic devaluing of humanities programs, and a job market that was brutal long before any of this started.

Layer onto that the personal stakes, such as a trans child whose safety feels uncertain, a partner whose immigration status is precarious, or a department that might not exist in two years. You begin to understand why so many people I spoke with looked like they were holding their breath.

These are not people who want to leave. They love research. They love teaching. They love the scholarly networks they have built over years of painstaking work. They want to remain close to family and communities. But they are also clear-eyed enough to recognize that loving something does not make it sustainable and that the forces bearing down on them are not ones they can will away with passion or persistence alone.

What struck me most was not the fear itself but the desire to avoid paralysis. Smart, capable people who can see the trajectory but don't want to feel frozen because every option feels impossible. Stay and endure conditions that may worsen? Leave and lose the identity that has organized your adult life? The uncertainty is its own kind of suffering, and it compounds daily. What people want is a way out of what feels like an impossible binary—and I think there is one.

One conversation about drawing a line in the sand stuck with me.

A friend who teaches courses on race, gender, and difference—the very subjects under political siege right now—told me she had already decided where her limit was.

When they start interfering with how I teach my courses or how I do my research, that’s when I exit. Until then, I love this work, so I will keep at it.

I found her clarity bracing. Not because I think everyone should draw the same line, but because she had drawn one at all.

Your line might be different. Maybe it’s when your family or you personally feel threatened by your institution or the public climate around it. Maybe it’s when you are forced out because of declining enrollments. Maybe it’s when the intellectual freedom that drew you to this work in the first place has been so eroded that the work no longer resembles itself. The specifics matter less than the act of naming it.

I want to suggest that this is something each of you can do, even if you are nowhere near your limit yet.

Determine now what your line is, not in a crisis, but in whatever fragile calm you can find.

What conditions would cause you to seek employment elsewhere?

What circumstances would prompt you to consider life in a different country, a different sector, a different relationship to your intellectual work?

You do not have to act on this. You may never need to.

But defining the line in the sand for yourself transforms a shapeless dread into something you can hold and examine, and that alone can quiet a nervous system that has been running on alarm for months.

People at the conference wanted to know what my transition was like, so let me be transparent, as I always try to be here at PNP.

For three years before I finally decided, I carried an anxiety about leaving that I could not put down. I cycled through the same questions endlessly, never arriving anywhere.

But once I made the decision — once it was actually made — a clarity settled over me that surprised me. That is just my experience, and I am not suggesting it will be yours. But I think the uncertainty before a major decision is often worse than the decision itself, and that is worth knowing if you are living in that uncertainty right now.

But here is what I want you to hear: dramatic life changes are endurable. They can even be great. The intellectual life I have now — coaching scholars, writing this newsletter, building something on my own terms — is more sustainable than what I had before, and I say that as someone who genuinely loved being a professor. Leaving did not mean losing the life of the mind or my community. It meant reorganizing them.

If you are sitting with this paralysis, I am not going to tell you to quit your job or buy a plane ticket.

But I am going to suggest one small, concrete thing: talk to someone who has already made the leap. Find a scholar who left academia and ask them what the first six months looked like. Find someone who relocated abroad and ask them what they wish they had known.

These conversations will not make your decisions for you, but they will crack open the sealed chamber of your imagination just enough to let some air in. The fear that there is nothing out there for you beyond what you are doing right now—that fear is louder than it is accurate, and other people's stories are the fastest way to turn down the volume.

When I left the U.S. this time, I felt understood and validated by the people I spoke with—they saw my choices and reflected back that those choices made sense.

But I also carried a deep concern for friends and colleagues who feel this stress on the daily, who do not have the distance I have, who are waking up every morning inside the thing I got to leave. I cannot fix that for you.

But I can tell you what I saw at the conference: a community of scholars who are deeply concerned for their futures, yes, but who are also thinking clearly, asking hard questions, and refusing to let fear be the last word.

That gave me hope. As do all those who ultimately chose to stay and fight the good fight.

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Greetings, dear readers! The podcast remains on hiatus this week, as I just returned from 10 days in the US, conferencing and seeing family, and I came home to the delightful chaos of house hunting in the Netherlands. Thank you all for your patience and understanding as I navigate a particularly full stretch of life.

If nothing else, let my overstuffed calendar serve as your gentle reminder to extend some grace to your own work selves when life pulls you in twelve directions at once. We so rarely give ourselves the same compassion we'd offer a colleague in the same situation, and I'm practicing that right alongside you this week.

I’ve been thinking about how we set ourselves up for writing, particularly when it feels precarious or stuck. Most of us rely on goals: finish a section, complete a draft, hit submit. Goals have their place, certainly, but they’re not always the tool we need when writing feels brittle or when we’re trying to rebuild our relationship with the work itself.

Sometimes what’s called for is not a goal at all, but an experiment.

The difference matters because experiments shift the emphasis from success to discovery. Instead of asking Did I hit the target? you ask What did I notice? That subtle reframing can dramatically reduce the pressure we place on ourselves and open up space for curiosity rather than judgment.

Experiments are important because you need to figure out what works for you, your brain, and your circumstances. So often, writing strategies fail for us because they weren’t built for us. Experiments allow you to learn what works for you. And placing the emphasis on discovery instead of success allows you to learn without the self-judgment that hinders true progress forward.

Here’s a simple one-week experiment you might try.

For one week, write at the same time each day—not necessarily for the same length of time, and without any requirement about output or word count. The only commitment is to show up during that window and engage with your writing in some way.

That engagement might look like drafting, revising, rereading, outlining, or even writing notes about what you plan to do next. The point is not productivity but observation.

You’re gathering data about your own process, your energy patterns, and the conditions that support your attention.

Pay attention to what shifts. Do some days feel easier to enter than others? Does your energy differ depending on what happened earlier in the day or how you slept the night before? Do you find yourself resisting certain kinds of tasks more than others—and if so, what does that resistance feel like in your body, in your mind?

At the end of the week, focus on assessing the conditions rather than evaluating yourself. Ask what supported your attention and what undermined it. Ask what felt sustainable and what felt draining. Consider what surprised you, what confirmed your suspicions, and what you’d like to explore further.

This kind of experiment works because it treats writing as a practice rather than a performance or a test.

You are not trying to prove anything about your worth or capability as a writer. You are gathering information about how you work, what you need, and how your particular mind and body move through the act of writing.

Over time, these small experiments accumulate because they replace guesswork with self-knowledge. They help you design a writing practice that actually fits you, rather than forcing yourself into someone else’s idea of how writing should happen.

Remember to stay curious long enough to learn something useful about yourself.

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Greetings, dear readers! Today I’m rewinding an older post, as it’s always a good day to remind ourselves that the “right” writing routine is the one that works for you!

One of the core values of Publish Not Perish is accepting that there are many ways to become a successful writer. We avoid dogma and one-size-fits-all solutions. We don’t drink the Kool-Aid and instead ask you to bring your beverage of choice to the party.

But dogma is alluring, and I’ve discussed my own experience with the religion of daily writing here:

It seems that if a writing coach or prolific scholar tells us that THIS is the way we have to do something, we are more likely to pay for their system because they have THE way. The allure of a single, definitive answer to our writing woes is undeniable—it offers the promise of fixing what we perceive as broken.

Point and case: the majority of expert writing advice suggests that we avoid binge writing at all costs. The stereotype of a binger is that you procrastinate until the last minute, write frantically up until a deadline, and then either sleep for days or do not touch any writing projects for an extended period of time because you are exhausted. Some refer to this as the "binge and bust model," claiming that it does not result in your best work and causes you to collapse for a long period of time afterwards.

And let’s be real: what I’ve just described is a negative experience for many people, which is why so many experts advise against it.

But does that mean no one should ever binge? Certainly not. I think it’s also important to consider why some people prefer writing for longer, more intense periods.

Binge writing or deep work?

I’d argue that binge writing is, at its best, a form of deep work. It involves immersing oneself entirely in the writing process and committing to a focused, uninterrupted session of creative output. A state of deep work allows writers to tap into their most profound cognitive abilities, producing high-quality content and fostering a profound connection with their subject matter.

I discuss deep work more fully here:

While binge writing is often associated with moments of intense pressure and procrastination, it's crucial to recognize that, at its core, it mirrors the principles of deep work—a state highly valued by scholars and other creatives.

Writers may choose to binge because that is when they can focus intensely on a project and put other things aside in the name of meeting a deadline. Perhaps the deadline is the excuse they need to enter a hyper-focused state. They find this form of writing practice just works better for their lives, commitments, and responsibilities. After bingeing, they then return to regularly scheduled programming that normally competes for their time.

People cannot stay in a state of binge or deep work all the time and have to have periods of rest, so it makes perfect sense that if you focus intensely on a project for two weeks, working day and night, that you would need a break after that. When we use the words “deep work,” this rest is considered necessary and natural, and when we use the word “binge writing,” we think this is somehow a counterproductive break.

The wisdom of academic Twitter

I asked folks on Twitter (back before I deleted my account) why they preferred bingeing to more regular writing patterns, and here are some of the reasons they do:

@LBurns66: I'm a binge writer! With other stuff, I can multitask. With writing, I need to be in "research mode," which means concentrating on my project with as few distractions as possible. I usually write in 2 - 3 hour spurts a few times a day. When I'm on a roll, my breaks get shorter. [I write like this for] 2 - 3 weeks. I'm usually done with the project by then. If not, I find it helps to take about a week off before starting up again in order to recharge.

@drjessmaddox I absolutely am a binge writer. I can sit down and crank out like 3-4K words and then I don’t write again for a week or two. The upsides are it gets the thoughts out of my head, gives me a lot to edit, and gets me thinking about what comes next.

@oliviastowell Usually I mentally work through/research for 1-2 months, then have 3-5 marathon days (spread across a week), then I need time away from the draft for fresh eyes. But “time away” from one project often overlaps with early-stage mental processing for another.

@DrCRMatthews I do both forms, at present in a slow and stead, but I have also done moments where I’ve gone bingy. There’s strengths and weaknesses to both and I’m not one for limiting myself because of what others think. The key will be to find what is effective & healthy in the long term.

I would also like to note that many of the people who responded to my question are prolific and award-winning authors. While, of course, this is a small, unscientific sample size, I think we can at least use these experiences as reasons to open our minds to the possibility that bingeing has just gotten a bad wrap.

So, dear reader, binge writing isn't inherently negative for everyone, as it often embodies many characteristics of deep work. (Likewise, deep work is not preferable or possible for everyone, which is why there are other strategies.)

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Is binge writing right for you?

It’s also crucial to recognize that binge writing isn't universally effective; for some, it becomes an involuntary and stressful habit rather than a conscious choice. For example,

1. If the act of binge writing induces intense stress and negative emotions about writing during those intense writing periods, it may be time to seek an alternative approach that feels better to you.

2. If your last-minute binge sessions leave you feeling less than proud of your work, it's worth considering whether this method allows you to put your best work forward.

3. Should binge writing trigger guilt over neglecting other responsibilities, perhaps exploring alternative writing practices would alleviate this burden.

On the flip side, if you consistently embrace binge writing to tackle projects and find satisfaction in these intense work periods, all while maintaining results you can get behind and knowing that you'll be more present for other responsibilities post-binge, then binge your little heart out.

In essence, the key lies in cultivating a writing practice that fosters positive emotions, provides adequate rest intervals—whether it's daily writing, binge sessions, or somewhere in between—and resists any haters who question the legitimacy of your chosen method.

You do you. Your unique writing style is valid as long as it serves your goals and well-being.

What say you? Would you defend binge writing or not? How does it work or not work for you?

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