Planning, but when and how?

After my post “Finish On Time,” I have started to get questions about when and how I actually plan. Briefly answering these questions is quite hard. That’s why I am going to spend this post on talking a little more about how I do things and why. 

The point of departure for all my planning is that academic work is limitless by its very nature. Research and writing projects have no given beginning or endpoint. In practice, nor do teaching and supervision assignments. There will always be an abundance of interesting books and seminars. The same goes for workshops and conferences. 

This intellectual wealth makes academia an incredibly stimulating work environment. There are vast possibilities and a high level of freedom and flexibility. Greater than many academics realize. However, there is also a downside to all these possibilities. As it turns out, it is very easy to feel inadequate and overworked. Far from everyone can or dares talk about this with colleagues and superiors. Far from everyone receives so much affirmation from the people around them that they can – entirely without getting bitter – take the bad with the good. 

For me, planning is a way of managing the limitlessness of academia. The aim is ultimately for me to feel good and do the right things. What works best for me is to determine in advance – long in advance – what constitutes a job well done at a given point in time. Hence, I set aside the last week before the Christmas and summer holidays to plan for the next semester. The purpose of this planning is to create three concrete objectives I am reasonably confident that I will be able to achieve and which I know have a significant long-term value. 

However, in order to set the objectives I then base my work on, I need some form of foundation. This consists of first going through the upcoming semester. I enter deadlines, conferences, workshops, seminars, time off, commitments, etc. I then determine the number of writing days for each workweek. I define a writing day as four 40-minute sessions (units). 

The next step is to write down everything I would like to write or have promised others to write. I then estimate how much time I need to write the different texts. Here, it’s important not to underestimate the writing tasks but rather to overestimate. No one has ever suffered from being ahead in their planning. I usually ask myself: “How much time do I want to calmly write X?” 

When these two steps are completed, the time has come to see whether everything lines up. Typically, this is not the case. You then need to prioritize and choose which things to discard. I then create an order in which I will work on the different projects and schedule weeks for these. Here, it’s important to schedule buffer weeks. Because things will happen. And if the plan is too tight, it means that you will fall behind in your writing schedule. That is not relaxing. Quite the opposite. If, however, you have enough buffer weeks in your planning, it’s perfectly possible to be ahead in your planning. That is relaxing. That is what I want things to look like. That is when I do my best work. But in my world of small children, this is easier said than done, at any rate during this time of the year. Perhaps February 2020 should be one long buffer month? 

The three objectives for this semester are as follows: 1) writing four chapters in the second book; 2) writing and submitting applications for a multi-year project to the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, the Marcus and Amalia Wallenberg Foundation and the Handelsbanken foundations; 3) serving as an external reviewer and writing a dissertation review for Historisk tidskrift. Of these three objectives, I may need to revise the first. Things may come up. The writing process may progress more slowly than I expect. That is why I’ve promised myself not to get too disappointed if I only manage to write three chapters. That’s also OK. In that case, however, my own deadline for the book manuscript would be moved from December 2019 to February 2020. 

This post on planning turned out a little bit longer than I anticipated. That’s why I have to return to my second most important level of planning – four-week planning – in a future post.

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What is the aim of this book? (synopsis part 1)

Following this week’s blog post, Linde Lindkvist asked me how I crafted my synopsis. It turned out that this question required a fairly long answer. In fact, even a two-part answer. My synopsis has in fact emerged over a number of years. There are embryos from 2016 and onwards. However, other commitments have emerged from time to time. I’m happy about that today. My thought and writing process has benefitted from this extra time.

The actual research process, however, has been long and winding. Starting in the fall of 2014, I have studied the breakthrough of environmental issues in various projects. I started with the intense Swedish debate on the future in the spring of 1972, after which I mainly focused on the emergence of environmental concern in the second half of the 1960s, in particular the fall of 1967. This, I would argue, is when the major breakthrough occurred in Swedish society. This is also one of the key points I want to make in my book. 

The bulk of my results are published in peer-reviewed journal articles. Quite a few people have read one or two of these. But I’m reasonably sure that only a handful of people have read them all. I probably know all these readers personally. This is obviously not optimal. If I want my most important findings to reach more people, then the journal article format won’t do. I need a monograph. 

During the course of the research process, I have thought a lot about whether to write in Swedish or English. In terms of my CV and career, the choice is simple. A monograph published by an international publishing house greatly increases your chances of getting permanent positions and receiving future research grants. In light of this, I read the book Thinking Like Your Editor (2003) in the spring of 2017 and started to prepare myself to write a book proposal. One of the things this book highlighted for me was a clearer audience focus. Who do I want to read my book and why? And what do I want the book to do to me? Who do I want to become? 

These are not questions with simple and obvious answers. As I see it, however, it’s important to carefully consider them before starting to craft a synopsis. Because a book is written to be read by others. It also does things – and not just to its readers. Books may result in academics being perceived, and treated, as experts. But in which areas do you want to be an expert? What do you want to do in such a role? And what do you want the finished book to result in? Do you want to continue doing research and writing in the same field? Or do you want to pursue a different path? 

The answers to these questions are key for crafting a synopsis. In addition, it’s obviously necessary to take into account what you can actually say something substantial and reasonably original about. The book must be based on your research, your knowledge and your ability. Otherwise, it will never be written. 

So, what do I want my book to do? Who do I want to read it? Well, first of all, I want the book to put an end to my research on the breakthrough of environmental issues. I have spent more than five years on this theme, and I am now ready to move on to new fields of research. There are 5–6 larger points I want to make. I want to offer these as a comprehensive contribution to the field of environmental history. My hope is that other academics will relate to and build upon these points. As far as I am concerned, I am – at least for the foreseeable future – done. I will have said what I can on this topic. 

Second, I want the book to illustrate the intellectual potential of the new history of knowledge. Simultaneously with my research on the breakthrough of environmental issues, I have tried to establish and develop this field together with a growing group of close colleagues. In my second book, I would like to give a concrete example of how a history of knowledge approach – with a focus on social circulation of knowledge – impacts how we write history. History of knowledge is not just a new name for things historians have done for a long time. Here, I want my second book to constitute a convincing case in point. 

Third, I believe that the topic of my book is not only current but also relevant to society, which, in turn, requires me to write for a wider audience than just my peers. Environmental and climate issues are no less topical today than they were in 1970. However, medium-term temporal perspectives are uncommon in the public and political debate. I find this problematic, as these are the intervals where lives are lived, decisions taken, systems built, policies made and changes occur. May we in fact learn from the historical experiences made during the last fifty years? Not impossible. 

These are the three things I want my book to achieve. The readers I address are thus both the scholarly community – especially environmental historians, historians of knowledge and post-war historians, but also academics in the environmental humanities. In addition, I write for a general public interested in societal issues and caring for the environment, some of whom have personal memories from the years I focus on.

For these reasons, I also write in Swedish. I think this gives me the best opportunity to be read and understood by both of these groups. Eventually, however, I still hope that the book will be translated into English so that it may be read by the international scholarly community. 

This post has already turned out to be quite long, which is why I end it here. In the next part of this series, I discuss how I proceeded from these more overall goals and ambitions to craft a synopsis.

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Introductory chapter and the second book as a genre

I belong to the group of academics writing texts from start to finish. I then typically work on the introduction to ensure that it better corresponds with the text as a whole. However, I’m unable to start anywhere than from the beginning. I need to write a provisional introduction to find my bearings and the right tone. Working on the introduction is an important part of my writing process – even though the actual text itself doesn’t always survive into print.

A few weeks ago, I finished the first version of the introductory chapter for my second book. It ended up being a short text, only nine pages long. I will certainly need to revise it. Perhaps it needs to be expanded. But none of this is possible at this stage. In fact, I don’t yet know exactly what the introductory chapter is an introduction to.

Sure, the structure of my book is there in broad terms. I have crafted a synopsis consisting of eight chapters. I know what these are going to be about and which points I want to make in them. I also know which greater points I want to present in the book as a whole. But exactly how to communicate and underpin everything remains to be seen. To a large extent, this is also a question of in which genre I choose to write and which readers I address. I thus need to make some decisions. 

Second books in the field of history in Sweden can, but don’t have to, be written more or less like a thesis. They may include long sections on theory and methodology, in-depth discussions on sources and extensive reviews of existing research in the field. They may, similar to a German habilitationschrift, be 500 pages long, bursting at the seams with footnotes. The empirical investigation may be thorough, almost total. 

But second books can also be written in a more laid-back fashion. They may focus on the author and a few key arguments. The relationship with previous research and scientific choices can be implicit. This writing style is the ideal in the Anglo-Saxon world. Swedish historians adopting this approach often seek to reach a wider audience. They want to address more people than just their colleagues in the scholarly community. Sometimes, they succeed in doing so. 

I had this kind of ambition already in my PhD thesis. I had been taught an ideal that good scholarship should be able to speak both to the scholarly community and the educated public at the same time. This is an ideal I still support, at least intuitively and emotionally. What else would be the purpose of the discipline of history for society? 

However, my experience from the afterlife of my thesis is that it’s quite hard addressing different audiences at the same time. There is a great risk of misunderstandings, both inside and outside academia. This is why I have also been more careful during my postdoc years in terms of what, and for whom, I have written. I’ve been very careful to first and foremost position myself in the academic contexts to which I want to belong. Through essays, popular history articles and public lectures, I have sometimes sought to reach broader audiences. This, however, has not been a primary goal of mine. 

But now that I have once more started to write a monograph, my old ideals are once again the brightest and offer me the most motivation. I think – once again – that I have something important and interesting to say. Something that more people than just historians may benefit from hearing. For those wanting to read me in the full trappings of an academic, there are now many peer-reviewed journal articles available in both Swedish and English. It doesn’t make sense to compile these into a whole that might be published, but which would be impenetrable and uninspired. No, I need to make a new attempt to address several audiences at the same time.

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Published texts and prewriting

Academic writing is not what it appears to be. This is because we typically encounter it in the form of a published text. We read books and journal articles academics have spent years on writing. These texts have in various stages been commented on by colleagues. They have been criticized by anonymous reviewers and tightened up by editors. Furthermore, these texts have quite commonly been restructured at a late stage. Sometimes, the smart killer point was the very last thing to be added, perhaps based on the advice of an insightful reader. 

In our published texts, this slow and collective process is virtually invisible. Sure, we thank each other in prefaces and acknowledgements. But these short sentences hardly do justice to the actual writing process. Only the author him- or herself fully knows the winding road from research idea to published text. If he or she remembers, that is. Sometimes, you just want to forget and move on. 

Nevertheless, the fact that we are familiar with academic writing through published texts presents a risk for our own writing. It’s a breeding ground for destructive comparisons, not least with ourselves. Our imperfect Word documents are compared to our printed works. Our first project application in a new field is compared to end products from a recently completed project. These types of comparisons represent an effective means of paralyzing a writing process. They offer us good arguments to refrain from even trying. Or to postpone writing to another day, week, semester or year. 

But there are countermeasures. Several of these are presented in Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What (2017), which I discussed last week. A technique that has served me well is so-called “prewriting.” For me, this is a way of separating writing into two phases: planning and execution. The former is about finding structure and content, while the latter is about finding words and effective ways of communicating. 

The first page of the introductory chapter of my second book may here serve as an example. The purpose of this page is to identify the problem in focus in the book – how environmental issues had their great breakthrough in Sweden. In a best-case scenario, this page should arouse interest and clearly demonstrate why my research is important. So, how to make this happen? Well, this is a difficult question with many possible answers. One good way of making it completely impossible to answer is to, at the same time, force myself to write elegant sentences ready to be published. I’m not capable of doing that. 

What I can do, however, is to spend a few 40-minute sessions on prewriting and testing different structures. What I finally ended up with was the following four paragraphs: 

1. Start with the 1972 UN Stockholm Conference. The photograph of Earth from space. The planet and humanity under threat. 

2. Emphasize that this was obvious to many people in 1972. The European Conservation Year in 1970, the term “Gröna vågen” (“the Green Wave”) was coined in the magazine Land in 1971. Knowledge regarding a global environmental crisis was circulating in society 

3. Five years earlier, things looked quite different. In the summer of 1967, the vast majority of people did not think along these lines. Nor did politicians and scientists. Knowledge was found in individuals and small groups, but it didn’t circulate. 

4. Battery of questions: How did the change transpire? When? What made it happen? Who played a role in the change occurring? This book focuses on these issues. I will… 

These four prewritten paragraphs are a far cry from a publishable text. However, I would argue that most of the writing, or at least the most difficult part, is done. This is a structure that may be converted into a logically coherent text about one page long. In addition, there is a natural bridge to the next page. 

Is it the best introduction ever written? No. Am I certain that it will stay the same all the way to the printed book? No. But is it sufficiently good for me to move along in the writing process? Yes. 

And that is all you can ask of yourself at this stage.

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Ventilation file

I’m an avid reader of books about academic work and writing. That is why I will from time to time publish blog posts recommending books in this genre that I have found particularly interesting. For me, this is a reason as good as any to return to classics such as Robert Boice’s Professors as Writers (1990) and Howard S. Becker’s Writing for Social Scientists (1986). However, I want to start by recommending a much more recent book: Joli Jensen’s Write No Matter What (2017). 

Just like most people writing in this genre, Jensen recommends turning academic writing into a daily habit. It’s a myth, she says, that academics need empty desks and vast amounts of time to make progress on their writing projects. Whether it concerns writing applications, articles or books, the key is having short, daily and stress-free writing sessions. But how do you actually achieve this? 

Jensen highlights three techniques. The first is that each project should have a dedicated project box. This is where plans, goals, drafts and finished text are collected. This box may be digital, but hers is physical. The second is to promise yourself to write fifteen minutes each day related to the project. Even a very busy scholar can free up this amount of time. The third is that each project box should include a “ventilation file.” This document is used on days when you neither want to nor are able to get yourself to write on the project. Instead, you spend your fifteen minutes on writing down why you can’t or don’t want to write today. After ventilating for fifteen minutes, you are free. The writing requirement is completed. 

A ventilation file serves different functions. First, it may play down your daily contact with the project. Because regardless of how miserable you feel – and perhaps in particular on these occasions – it’s perfectly doable to spend fifteen minutes of your day complaining in writing about why you don’t want to write. Second, such a document enables introspection and analysis. This is especially true for projects extending over long periods of time and where writing difficulties tend to reoccur every now and then. By reading through your ventilation file, you may discover patterns in terms of which feelings, thoughts and ideas make you reluctant to write. Does the project fail to live up to your expectations of yourself, language-wise and intellectually? Are you afraid of losing the respect of your colleagues? Does it feel like your project doesn’t contain a single new idea, but simply confirms what everyone already knows? 

My own experience is that almost all writing and research projects are surrounded by fears. This also applies to short texts such as blog posts and book reviews. What I have today – which I didn’t have a few years ago – are techniques for managing this feeling of unease. I’m unable to get rid of that uncomfortable feeling in my stomach, but I can nevertheless choose to write and carry out research. But when it comes to large projects – such as writing a second book – I’m less certain. To be honest, I don’t know whether, and in such a case how, I will deal with the negative feelings bound to manifest themselves sooner or later. 

What I’m going to try this year, however, is to use a ventilation file.

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Finish On Time

A little over a week ago, I was invited to speak at the annual gathering of the National Graduate School in Historical Studies in Höör, Scania. I was part of the section “Perspectives on Life as a PhD Student” and my task was to discuss how the course Finish On Time had played a role in relation to how I work. I attended this course in the winter of 2011/2012, about a year before I defended my thesis. In practical terms, this course has been the most important course I have ever taken. That is why I found it exciting to talk about it in front of and together with a new generation of PhD students. 

Finish On Time was created by philosopher Åsa Burman. During her own PhD studies, she worked out of Berkeley for a longer period of time. Here, everyone attended courses and workshops focusing on practical academic work. This meant that she came into contact with productivity techniques as well as tools used for planning and time management. This world was completely alien to a Swedish PhD student in the field of philosophy. David Allen’s Getting Things Done (2001) and Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (1989) may be common reading for entrepreneurs and business executives. But they don’t constitute typical bedtime reading for academics. Particularly not in the humanities. 

For Åsa, however, this encounter with the unknown ended up being fruitful. She tried the techniques and felt that many of these produced good results. An important aspect was that she felt as if she had more control over her work and that she experienced less stress. She wondered why no one had taught her this stuff. Hence, the idea of starting up something on her own was born. After completing her PhD and working as a consultant at McKinsey in Copenhagen for a couple of years, she took the plunge and launched the company Finish On Time. My PhD colleagues and I in Lund were one of the first groups given the opportunity to take the course.

For me, Finish On Time was an eye-opener. Sure, I had already analyzed the way I worked. When meeting Åsa, however, it became clear that I had lacked a language for thinking and talking about this. Furthermore, my toolbox was limited in scope. During the course, we were encouraged to try out new working methods. I still use some of these, and that is what I talked about at the gathering in Höör. 

On a very fundamental level, I base my work on distinguishing planning from execution. I never come to the office in the morning wondering what to do. No, this has been decided much earlier. This means that my day can be devoted to doing what I’ve set out to do. This may come across as rigid, but I feel that it offers me freedom and control. I don’t experience that someone else is stopping me from doing what I’ve planned to do. The key is identifying the most important task for that particular day. In my case, it is almost always some form of writing. That is where I start. Other things have to be adapted to this. 

In practical terms, I then use the unit method, which means working with great focus during 40-minute sessions. I set the timer on my cellphone, put it out of sight, and when it signals, I take a break and leave the office. I do this regardless of whether or not I experience flow at that particular time. I then drink a glass of water or go out to get some air. If I succeed in achieving four such sessions, I consider the day a really good working day. However, it is typically possible to squeeze in one or two units even on days filled with meetings, seminars, teaching and writing emails. 

This approach takes some time to get used to and also requires continuous planning, both for the short and the long term. At the gathering in Höör, I talked about – and demonstrated – my one-year planning, semester planning, four-week planning, weekly planning and one-day planning. In addition, there is obviously also a five-year plan (which I didn’t show the participants). Nevertheless, all of this requires its own blog post, or perhaps several. To be continued.

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