May 2025 PNP Roundup
Last Month in Review
Greetings, dear readers!
For many of us, May feels like exhaling after holding your breath for months, but this year that exhale feels especially necessary. It's been a challenging academic year for many of us—between defending our research budgets and weathering constant attacks on higher education, we've all been running on fumes longer than we should have.
Now that summer is finally here, I hope you'll give yourself permission to do two things that might feel revolutionary: actually rest and write from a place of curiosity rather than desperation. Your ideas deserve space to breathe, and so do you. The work that matters most often happens when we're not grinding ourselves into the ground!
As always at the end of the month, it’s time for the roundup! Here are some of my favorite media I’ve consumed over the past month on writing, productivity, and managing all the things. Some of this content is new, some of it is old, but all of it has kernels of wisdom for busy academic writers.
1. These are the Publish Not Perish posts from May, in case you missed any:
2. Curious about what it’s like to leave academia and start something new? I recently sat down with Paulina Cossette, PhD, for her podcast Leaving Academia and Becoming a Freelance Editor. We had a lovely conversation about my decision to step away from the ivory tower, what fueled that choice, and how I navigated the transition.
If you’ve ever wondered what life beyond academia could look like—even if starting a business isn’t your cup of tea—I’d love for you to listen in. I share my thought process, the challenges I faced in coming to that decision, and what I’ve learned so far!
3. One of the things I see many writers struggle with is the belief that we need a lot of time each day to make progress with our writing. Somehow, if you aren’t spending at least four hours a day on writing, you’re not progressing. I love how Katelyn E. Knox and Allison Van Deventer of the Dissertation to Book Workbook counter this idea in their blog:
One hour [of writing] per day, maintained consistently through the academic workweek, represents 240 hours of annual writing time. And here’s the liberating truth—not every one of those hours needs to be brilliant. Some days you’ll write fluently; other days you’ll revise three sentences. Both count. Both matter. Both move your work forward.
Just one hour a day can add up to 240 hours annually! That’s the equivalent of six full workweeks spent on writing. And we aren’t talking about your absolute best hours. Those hours don’t have to be perfect or even particularly inspired. The act of showing up, even for small amounts of time, stacks up. One hour may seem small, but 240 hours is transformative once it accumulates.
This one-hour-a-day number isn’t meant to be prescriptive—maybe for you, it’s two hours a week spread over long and short sessions. The point is that consistent, incremental progress adds up in powerful ways. Progress in writing is measured in inches, and over time, those inches eventually add up to miles.
Here’s a gem from the archives that proposes that maybe two hours a week is all you need!
4. I like how this strategy transforms the to-do list into a menu from which you can choose based on what your body and mind require at the time. It's written for people with chronic illnesses, but I believe that others might find benefit as well!
It’s near impossible to plan anything when living with chronic illness — you just don’t know how much energy you have or what kinds of symptoms are rummaging around your body on any given day.
I try to use ‘menus’ instead of to-do lists. A menu has a list of different kinds of activities I can do that require different levels of energy. I can then, in the given moment, choose what suits my body and mind. Or I can choose not to do any of it.
5. I enjoyed reading Brittany M. William's reflection on achieving tenure in an era of rampant racist anti-intellectualism. She writes,
Tenure means so much to me because, as a liberal arts kid, I know that the art of study and inquiry is a job. The devaluation of epistemic inquiry and denigration of learning and exploration to document our realities into the canon are overshadowed by a hyperintense commitment to output-based and production-based values judgment. What the hell does that mean? People who’ve long made a living off thinking for the sake of thinking (even when done poorly), or by exploiting people to become billionaires, are trying to convince a new generation of Americans that their freedom is solely in working in a factory and not also in liberating their minds, bodies, souls, and communities for more than extraction and output. I believe all labor is valuable and all work is meaningful, and because of that, I’m excited to have tenure because I will have the freedom and capacity to be paid to read, write, and think about what is, what can be, and why… Even if others don’t like it or don’t want me to.
You can read her full essay here.
6. And for a bit of levity on the topic of tenure and promotion, here’s Introducing Our University’s New, Totally Reasonable Criteria for Promotion and Tenure.
These guidelines were written by almost-retired professors who never could have met these standards back in the 1980s, when all you needed for tenure was 1.5 publications and a bottle of scotch in your desk.
Jenn, I love this reminder that we can make progress in writing with short bits of time each day (or even each week). I’m still in higher ed (as an administrator, no longer teaching) but I somehow managed to write my second book by devoting an hour each morning to the routine and ritual of making space for ideas. It is possible!!