Stop Planning for Time You Don't Actually Have | Ep. 49

A few weeks ago I published an episode about treating your writing plan as a Google Doc and not a PDF. The rationale is that just because you plan to write that chapter draft in four weeks doesn’t mean you can predict everything that can get in the way of that plan.

While I still hold there is no crystal ball for planning writing projects, I do think there's a common planning mistake that I see many academics making: we plan without taking into account what is actually on our plates and instead plan in some sort of ideal void that is free of the rest of our responsibilities. It’s a sort of amnesia that forgets the hiring season, the grading spike, the invited chapter we agreed to months ago, the family visit, and the always, already hectic semester rhythms.

As a result, we often make writing plans without all the data we need, and when those plans collapse, we feel behind and ashamed that we have failed the plan.

In this episode I walk through what it looks like to plan from a fuller view of your responsibilities, starting with your work calendar and the service commitments that look tiny on paper and enormous in the nervous system, then the writing obligations beyond the book that draw from the same intellectual and emotional reserves, and finally the parts of your life outside work that have their own seasons of less quiet, less privacy, and less energy.

Once you can see all of it at once, you can scale the work to the conditions you are actually writing in, which might mean rereading the chapter and revising ten pages rather than finishing the whole thing, or leaving yourself a clear memo so that future you can re-enter the manuscript without having to excavate it.

And if just revising ten pages makes you feel like you’re not being ambitious enough, remember that scaling your writing plans is what actually allows ambition to survive your actual work life and life life.

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