The vast majority of writing productivity advice out there imagines that you have a fairly consistent schedule each week. It often assumes that you can, in fact, carve out the exact same time each day to sit down with your cup of joe and write.
Perhaps there are some jobs out there that are beautifully suited for this type of advice, but I don’t think academia is one.
The semester you’re chairing a search committee could look really different from a semester you’ve got a course release. The week you have family in town is going to look really different than the week you have student consults all week on their final papers. The Tuesday you have six meetings, teach two classes, and have to pick your kids up at 4 o’clock looks really different from that Friday afternoon with the free schedule.
The variety of work we do as academics shifts weekly, but we often feel like failures when we don’t meet the same weekly word count on the manuscript or complete our thrice-weekly hour-long sessions like planned.
One solution to this quandary is to think about rhythms rather than routines. You think ahead to the capacity you will actually have for a given stretch rather than assuming that each week can produce the same amount of work.
Here’s what this might look like:
Align your rhythm with the week that’s actually scheduled.
Instead of having goals for your writing that look the same week to week, calibrate according to what’s on the calendar for that particular week. I divide these into maintenance weeks, standard weeks, and intensive weeks.
Maintenance weeks are weeks that allow you to touch your writing but not much else. Let’s say you have a lot of class prep to do this week, more meetings than usual, or more family obligations than a typical week. So your targets adjust accordingly. Your maintenance writing schedule might be two or three 30-minute sessions.
Standard weeks are weeks when you get an average amount of writing work done. Your classes are running fairly smoothly at this point, you only have a few standing meetings, and you don’t have several one-off time commitments eating at your capacity. Perhaps standard week writing targets are two two-hour sessions.
Intensive weeks are the weeks that we actually have space in our calendars for more writing than usual. Obviously, these most often come along during school breaks, but they can also crop up during a teaching week where you have no grading but your students are busy with project work or some other regular work or life obligation is removed from your to-do list for any other reason. Perhaps intensive weeks might aim for two hours per day on your writing work.
In Sum
To be clear, the targets I’m suggesting should not be read as universal. Every academic is juggling different things and may have more or less time in maintenance, standard, or intensive writing weeks to actually work on their projects. Also, you may find that one semester’s rhythm is very different from the next. The goal is always to adapt to the actual workload you have.
I say this all the time here in PNP, but it bears repeating if this is the first time you can hear it: A sustainable writing practice is one that adapts to the conditions of your actual life. It balances flexibility, so it can adapt to the fact that no two weeks look exactly the same, with consistency, so you can keep moving your writing work forward.