Tips for Protecting Your Research Time 08-24-2022

Tips for Protecting Your Research Time:

• Collaborate with colleagues and set group deadlines for completing work.
• Develop a daily writing habit.
• Exercise and keep reasonable work hours to boost creativity.
• Incorporate grant submission and conference presentation deadlines into your calendar to turn internally imposed deadlines into externally imposed ones.
• Be strategic about how you divide your time across research, teaching, service, and mentoring.
• Protect your research time by making your commitments public and visible.
• Create accountability mechanisms so that research-related tasks become as pressing as those related to service and teaching.
• Work from home to create clear boundaries between research time and other kinds of work.
• Escape through structured writing retreats. 

原文

Making Time for Research

    Joya Misra and Jennifer Lundquist 

• "One common recommendation is for faculty members to block off research time each week, not allowing other forms of work to intrude."
• "Yet deadlines related to teaching, advising and committee meetings are externally imposed, while most research deadlines are internally imposed. Thus, research gets pushed farther and farther back in the queue. One faculty member aptly summarized the situation, commenting that “urgent time-sensitive deadlines (typically totally unrelated to my research) often trump my research time that is not tied to a hard deadline.”

Strategies

• Faculty members suggested to us a number of clear strategies that they use to great success. Key among them is developing a daily writing habit. One person told us: “I write first thing in the morning for about one to three hours after I wake up. This is my peak thinking and writing time. I try to do that at least four to five days a week.” Daily writing is effective because it keeps you habituated and eliminates time lost in regrouping and remembering where you were. As one busy but productive chair noted, “I get an hour of writing in a day if I'm lucky, and reserving entire days or half days for research is a thing of the past!”
• Faculty members also described several key strategic approaches to protecting research time. We characterize these approaches into four types: escape, efficiency, visibility, and accountability.
• Efficiency. One faculty member described her reliance on an online writing group paired with a task management tool reminding her of tasks, including writing and posting to her online writing group. As a result, she said, “Dozens of times at 9 p.m., I’ve gone to write for half an hour.”
• Another approach to efficiency is to outsource. A faculty member commented: “The one thing that does make a difference is having a research assistant. The two times in my life I've had one, even for just five to 10 hours a week for a few months, my productivity soars.” Another faculty member agreed, noting that even in the absence of formal funds, she will “pay graduate students out of pocket for work that is important to moving my work forward but would take precious time away from my writing -- like formatting bibliographies, double-checking manuscript formatting, literature searches, etc.”
• One person with whom we spoke pointed out: “Before I had children, I procrastinated -- cleaning the house, cleaning my desk, before I could write a word. Now, I take any moment I can to write.” Another noted, “I’ve learned to work really, really fast, compress things. There’s not a moment that is not occupied, working very efficiently and multitasking.”
• Another faculty member described to us the importance of maintaining reasonable work hours and enjoying life, commenting that “you could say those are impediments to research time, but they also make it possible for me to achieve what I do achieve, so they're enablers, too.” Faculty members also observed that exercise may be cut during busy times but may actually help boost creativity. That all suggests that efficiency cannot be the only goal.
• “the trouble of protecting time is often about not being clear with everyone about the expectations for your time from your department, college, and national service …. You need to show all that is on your plate.”
• Other faculty members also discussed putting research time into their calendars and trying to keep meetings from intruding on that time.
• Accountability. The final method for protecting research time is to create accountability mechanisms so that research-related tasks become as pressing as those related to service and teaching. That could include setting deadlines that you share with a writing group, which has consistently been associated with greater productivity. As University of Massachusetts doctoral student Travis Grandy has argued, establishing clear goals and communicating timelines to your peers can make a difference.
• Incorporating grant submission deadlines and conference presentation deadlines into their calendars -- and using them as opportunities to turn internally imposed deadlines into externally imposed ones. Conference presentation deadlines, particularly those that require full drafts of papers, can also help faculty members focus on research and get drafts completed in a timely way.
• Another approach to “externalizing” deadlines was to collaborate on scholarship with other people and set group deadlines for completing work.
• Over all, our discussions with faculty members suggest that protecting research time is not impossible, but it is challenging. While faculty members appear to embrace a variety of approaches for dealing with the issue, most described using more than one strategy -- there is no magic pill. But, as one concluded: “People who achieve do so not because they are superhuman or have special gifts or qualities. It’s perseverance.” 是坚持