I can’t be the only person in academia who heads into summer thinking of new year’s resolutions. I’d guess that the lure of making resolutions at multiple points in the calendar year is kind of an occupational hazard for resolution-inclined folks who work in higher education. Our workload and responsibilities can shift fairly dramatically between the regular semesters and the summer (or other intersessions), and in that transition from one to the other it’s tempting to pause and take stock of how things are going and what we might want to change.
I have once again fallen off my almost-daily-writing-practice wagon, and it is time for me to get back on.
I do have a (mostly) consistent habit of taking about 45 minutes each morning as research time at home before I head into work. That length and timeslot aligns well with my family’s schedule for now — my brain works best on research-related tasks in the morning — though that might change in the fall when school starts up again. While 45 minutes is not an enormous amount of time, applied (week)daily it does move my projects forward. I try my best to protect this time for myself, though during particularly busy times in the semester it’s easy to let other work tasks expand to fill this space, easy to let myself be convinced that it’s more important to use this time to catch up on other work than to focus on my research.
The current state of my research and writing projects typically determines how I use that morning time, so even when I’m consistently spending 45 minutes it’s often not 45 minutes of writing. I might be analyzing data for a research project, reading and taking notes on sources, managing citations, or thinking through an IRB application or research questions. That time is still useful, but it’s not the same as time used specifically for writing. Writing is different. Writing is hard. And the more I write, the slightly-more-easily writing comes to me (though full disclosure: it’s still challenging).
Falling off and getting back on the almost-daily-writing wagon is something I’ve done so many times in the decade plus since I’ve been an academic librarian, and in a way it gets easier every time. It’s true that during busy times it’s easy to fall off — when my day is more meetings than not and ends with a to-do list that’s longer than when the day began, taking any time at all for writing can feel like an insurmountable goal. But it’s also true that it’s getting easier to dust myself off without judging myself too harshly for the fall, and to climb on back up. It’s 100% completely normal to fall off the writing wagon, and that wagon will always stop to let me jump back on and begin again.
Scrolling through Twitter this week I noticed a few fellow academics committing to writing for 15 minutes each day, and that feels like an achievable, worthwhile goal to me as I settle back into my seat on this wagon. There are plenty of seats — consider climbing up with me if you’re so inclined.
