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.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.