2.32 How to plan your academic writing (with special guest Jo VanEvery)

Whether you're a PhD student or an academic, it can be really hard to plan how to fit your writing into your busy schedule. In this episode we're joined by Jo VanEvery, founder of the Academic Writing Studio, to think about how to plan what writing you do when and how to prioritise it when so many things feel important. If you're watching this when it's first released, you'll also see an announcement of our new webinar! 

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You can find out more about Jo VanEvery and her Writing Studio here, including books to help you plan your writing and lots of different sources of support! https://jovanevery.co.uk/


I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends! 

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. My weekly podcast, The PhD Life Coach covers the most common issues experienced in universities, including procrastination, imposter syndrome, and having too much to do. I give inspiring and actionable advice and often have fun expert guests join me on the show. Make sure you subscribe on Apple, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you already listen, please find time to rate, review and tell your friends!

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

#phd #academia #lecturer #professor #university #procrastination #overwhelm #amwriting #writing #impostersyndrome #timemanagement #support #coaching #highereducation #research #teaching #podcast #community

Transcript

Vikki: Before this episode starts, I want to share some exciting news. Today's episode is with Jo VanEvery, who is an expert in academic writing, and we are going to be talking about some stuff that is relevant to all of you about planning your writing. But we also have an announcement to make, which is that Jo and I are going to be running a workshop in the middle of May, 16th of May, for any academic who is taking on a new leadership role.

If that's not you, don't worry, keep listening because you might be able to share this with somebody it is relevant for. The workshop is going to focus on getting ready to start any of these major administrative roles. So anybody taking on head of department, head of education, director of a research centre, director of postgraduate studies, whatever it might be.

Anyone who's starting one of those roles, this webinar will help you to get ready, to figure out what your strengths are and how you bring them. That's the part I'm providing. And how and when you want research and writing to fit within this new administrative load that you have. That's the bit that Jo's providing.

If you think this might be useful for you, make sure you check the show notes, or if you're on my email list, you're going to get this anyway. And you will find out exactly how to sign up. It's a 90 minute webinar, it's 25, it's going to be amazing. Make sure you're there. 

If you're a PhD student or you're an academic who isn't in that position at the moment, who can you send this to? Who do you know that might find this useful? Is your supervisor taking on a new academic role? Do you have colleagues in this position? Please do share this with them so that we can get this out to as many people as possible. As I say, the episode today is more generally for everybody, all about planning your academic writing, so I hope you will find that useful too. 

Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach where we help you get less overwhelmed, stop beating yourself up and start living the life you want. I'm your host Dr Vicki Burns, ex professor and Certified Life Coach. Whether you're a brand new PhD student or an experienced academic, I'm here to show you that thriving in academia can be a whole lot easier than it feels right now.

Let's go.

Hello and welcome to episode 32 of Series 2 of the PhD Life Coach, and we have another guest with us this week.

I am very excited to introduce Jo VanEvery, who is going to be helping us think about how to plan our academic writing. So, hi Jo! 

Jo: Hello, Vikki. Nice to be here. 

Vikki: It's fantastic to have you here. So tell everyone a little bit about yourself, and then we will get thinking about all different aspects of planning your academic writing.

Jo: Right. Yeah. So, I do individual coaching, and I also have a group program called the Academic Writing Studio, which started out with me, running some co working sessions for academic writers. Over 10 years ago I started that. Uh, so it's been going for longer than 10 years and it's now become more than that and we'll probably talk about that a little bit as we go along.

Uh, so, I do some group coaching in there. I do some planning classes and I generally help people, find time for their writing and get their writing done. I started that because previously I had been helping Canadian social science and humanities academics with grant applications to the main government funding agency there.

And I found that especially people from smaller universities with heavier teaching loads were often very frustrated at the fact that your ability to publish from the research you do goes into the kind of adjudication process. And they're like, well, I'm always at a disadvantage because I have this higher teaching load.

I just can't publish enough. There's no time for writing. There's no time for writing in term time. So that was kind of how I started a meeting with your writing, which is the coworking session I run. And it kind of just expanded from there. Uh, so I've got over 10 years experience of helping academics basically juggle their writing with other things that they do, so that they can publish and do the things they really want and need to do as academics.

Vikki: And I always like to get to know our guests a little bit. So what do you do when you're not helping other people write? 

Jo: Oh, so, um, I, I am a knitter, and actually that's part of the origin story of having an online business because I, in about 2003, I joined like an email list. For knitters and I met somebody there that got me blogging from about 2005 and so I used to blog about knitting and then through the blogging , I ended up meeting some other people doing online business, people that were involved with WordPress and that kind of thing. And it just gave me this like, Oh, I could do things this way I could write. And so it just, that was sort of part of how I expanded. So I'm a knitter. I quilt. I do, uh, dressmaking, like sewing. I made this, and I sing in a choir. 

Vikki: I love it. And I love the crossover there. I think so often people can see their work life and their private life as just completely distinct. And I always love hearing when people have had experiences in their private life that have somehow sort of changed directions for them in their careers and things.

Jo: That's really neat. Yeah, yeah. No, yeah. Some of the people I met on that, Nidhi, I mean, they're, I'm still really good friends with them, you know. Uh, 20 years later. And I can see direct links into, you know, what I'm doing now and some of the other choices that we've made. So it's been, it's been good. Yeah. 

Vikki: Perfect. So I guess a good place to start, just so that everyone's clear on the sorts of things that we're going to talk about today is what do you mean by planning your academic writing? Because when we've chatted about this before, there's sort of been different elements to that. 

Jo: Right. So for me. There's two main pieces to planning your academic writing, and I see a lot of people talking about wanting to be able to plan their writing project, right? So they're planning a project and they're trying to estimate how long it's going to take. And what the different phases of writing something are so that they can kind of think about like, when am I going to be finished?

Right? Or am I going fast enough or slow enough? There's a lot of concerns about speed or efficiency or that kind of thing, but I start from a different place, which is planning your time. And as I said in the introduction, this started because I was working with people who were saying, but I can't write and publish more because I don't have time.

My teaching load's too high, or, you know, my workload is too high. And that was, that was 10, 15 years ago. And even, you know, when I was working as an academic and I left academia in 2002, so I was, from 94 to 2002, I was full-time , a sociologist. Uh, and I remember even then, people, you know, that I worked with saying, you know, you couldn't do the job in five days and whatever, and then 20 years since then, it's only gotten worse.

So, I think it's one thing to say, well, looking at this project in isolation, here's what I would do, and here's how long it would take, and here's when I would finish. And then, but the more important thing is, how much time do you actually have to spend on your writing? And if your writing is important to you, for any reason, it could be personally important to you as, you know, this is part of the reason I wanted to do this kind of work.

It can also just be, I have to do this, or I'm not going to have this type of work anymore, or some combination of those things. But if it's important to you, then you do have to find a way to protect time to do it. And if you're not protecting time to do it, it doesn't matter how many plans you make about the project, it's not, it's not gonna work. I mean, there are also some issues about how we plan the project, but my focus, you know, for a lot of my work has been on how we find the time. 

Vikki: Perfect. And as you know, the listeners to this podcast go all the way from beginning PhD students all the way through to senior professors. So often the reasons they think they haven't got time are different from each other, but I hear the same stories amongst my clients. I hear the same thing about not having time, either that their deadlines are too tight and that even though they're working on this full time, there's no way they can get it done by X with PhD students all the way through to, I can't start writing until the summer because you know, when we're in the academic year, it's there's just too much of it from my sort of faculty and academic clients. So I see, I hear this across the board. So I think this is going to be super useful for lots of people. 

Jo: And I do as well, like I have people across, I mean, maybe not so much beginning PhD students, but there's definitely PhD students. I have had a couple times master's students usually at the point where they're writing up their master's dissertation.

But all the way through to full professors I have someone in my group right now is working on her 7th academic book. So it's like, you know, we've got, we've got people at all levels stages of career. I remember one person who I talked to. The first time she came to my, one of my planning classes, which are about planning your time and your next semester, your next three months afterwards. She said to me, she said, it just, as soon as I heard other people talk about what was going on for them, I just felt relieved that it isn't just me.

Right. Because I think it's so easy to feel like, oh, I should be able to do this. And to imagine that other people are managing it better and somehow there's something wrong with you personally, and there's not, there's probably not, there's not, there's nothing wrong with you, you're actually trying to do something incredibly difficult.

The other part of it is, and this came up in the class I ran last week, is that sometimes, and this can happen, especially when you're early in your career, like a PhD student talking to your supervisor or an early career scholar and thinking, talking to some of your senior colleagues, is that sometimes you get directly told that you have to do things a particular way, right? And that you just need to be working more intensely or like people will just tell you, well, you just can't do that other thing. Or, you know, you just can't write during term time.

And it sounds like, oh, this person is further advanced than I am and they know what they're doing and they're telling me the way that I have to proceed in order to be successful and I'm struggling to do that. And if you can't do it the way they do it, you're not broken either. It just might be you need another way.

Vikki: No, definitely. So let's start then with, I guess, planning at a kind of looking ahead and planning what you might get done this term or this year. What timescale do you recommend people start with and how do they go about it? 

Jo: So the longer the timescale, the more likely that you're not going to achieve what you set out to do.

Because, you know, just like, with, forecasting the weather, right? The further away it is, the more likely it is to be wrong because we just can't predict everything that's going to happen and we don't have control. So that the first thing I want to say is that the purpose of a plan is to inspire action, right?

It's to help you get started, help you like, be able to take action and do the things you want to do. And, and then the other purpose of a plan is to make sure that the things that are important to you are in that action plan that you're taking action on the important things, and especially when you're juggling what is objectively an unreasonable workload, which the vast majority of academics are currently doing, planning as a practice is a way of saying, if I can't do all of this, I'm going to be very deliberate about which bits I don't do and which bits I do do, right. And that's really frightening and it's what makes it hard, but the purpose of a plan is not to be like, well, I have to do all of this, time is finite, how do I jam all this in here and then the whole thing falls apart.

The purpose of a plan is also not to give you some sort of whip to beat yourself with at the end of whatever time period you chose for not achieving what you planned. Um, it's perfectly normal not to be able to predict exactly what you can get done or to have ended up doing other things.

Other stuff comes up. Things will come up that you had not planned for, but you do have to address. And sometimes that's something as simple as, you know, you'll get ill and not be able to work, or, you know, somebody might give you an urgent thing you have to do, and you have to rearrange your plans for that, or, uh, you know, the writing won't go the way you expect it, and it'll just take longer to do this particular portion of the project than you thought, and that's okay.

 The point is the plan helps you get started. So in the studio, I do an annual, like, planning your year class to give a big overview of what you'd like to do and what's going on at different points of the year and to really help people kind of look at what their year looks like, because we all have a slightly different 1 and where, you know, what's going to be an issue at different points of the year.

It's partly about setting big kind of big picture goals, but also just really getting a sense of what really realistically might be possible. And then we plan on a quarterly basis, so every 3 months. We, I usually we start our year on the 1st of July, and there's a couple reasons for that. One is it's actually 6 months exactly later than the normal calendar beginning of the year, but for most people in North America, Europe, you know, it's not, it doesn't make sense to kind of think about a full year starting in January because you're right in the middle of your institutional year, it doesn't really feel like the beginning and I discourage you from starting it when the kind of students come back, because then it's really driven by what other people need you to do. Whereas July, it's kind of the part of the year where you personally have the most control over your time and what you allocate it to and where you have the least number of scheduled things, right?

So you can, if you like writing for full days, it's a time of year when you can probably do that. At least some of the time, right? So we start in July and we think, you know, 3 months at a time, but each of those 3 month chunks, we look at things like, where are the transitions, right? At what point in here? Because transitions take energy and extra cognitive capacity just to move from 1 thing to the other. 

Where are the crunch points? Where are the places in this quarter where it's going to be really hard to juggle all the things because there's just too much happening and it has hard deadlines, right? Where are the places, on the contrary, that could be more spacious? Where you have more possibility instead of thinking, oh, it's crunch, crunch, crunch all the time. Where could I make more space? How would I do that? So we kind of do that. And then with my newsletter, I send out some prompts every month. So that you can review, because like I said, planning is to help you take action and to make sure the important stuff's getting done.

And so it's perfectly normal to have to revise your plans based on what's actually happening, based on the new information you have all of that kind of thing. So that's kind of where we go. But then it's like, you just need to get through week to week. What am I doing this week? What am I going to do?

Right. And you get to start fresh. You don't have to roll everything over. Sometimes it's like, okay, I didn't get to that. But now there's some new urgent thing that's come in. So I can't just add this thing I didn't do last weekend. I might have to take a pause on that and bring it back later. 

Vikki: I think this is so, so important for people to hear because I have so many clients, and in fact, some of them have been on the podcast in the past. So many clients who avoid planning because they don't trust that they will stick to their plan. And so they see it as a waste of time. They spend their time making this plan, then they don't stick to it. And they quite rapidly decide they haven't stuck to it, whatever that means, and I know I fell foul of this in the past. I'm, I'm getting better now. You know, we decide that it, it hasn't worked and then it solely becomes one more thing we've messed up rather than recognizing that actually that's all part of the process. That realizing that once again, you may be put in a bit too much is fine and we get to readjust and then think about that when we do our next big plan. But this idea that a plan isn't there to be followed perfectly, I just think, frees us up to be a lot more kind of open and willing to try different approaches to planning. 

Jo: Yeah. So the key thing for me is that your plan is partly about identifying priorities, right? Like what are the important things? If you objectively have too much to do instead of just... like, I like, this is why I like this metaphor of juggling. Um, because, you know, balance we use balance a lot and people talk about work life balance and then they talk about the balance within their work between research and teaching.

And part of the problem is balance gives you this kind of mental image of a seesaw, teeter totter, whatever you call it, where there's like two ends, and you're just trying to balance them. So the first problem with that is you've got more than two things you're trying to juggle, right? The second thing is balance doesn't necessarily mean, like, so many people go from there and that mental image to thinking, Oh, I have to spend as much time on each of these things, or they are all equally important. And they, they might not be. And you, so like, like your academic writing, if you think your academic writing is important, and say you're kind of mid career, you're teaching a couple of classes, you're on a couple of committees, you've got, you know, personal tutees or a couple of PhD students you're supervising, you've got a lot going on.

To say that writing is important, you might still be like, well, there's no way that I can give it a lot of time. And so then you can decide either it's not important, or you can be like, well, if I can't give it lots of time, then it just sort of disappears.

And so my approach is really to say, well, if it's a priority, and I actually looked this up in the dictionary once. One of the definitions of priority is that you allocate time and resources to it before you allocate time to other things. So even if you don't have a lot of time for writing, one of the principles that we use is, we're going to allocate time to writing first, even if it's only coming to Meeting With Your Writing once a week. And I have definitely members, there's like one member who writing is very important to her, she has said out loud to the group, I wish I could give more time to this than I can, but I work in an institution where I teach four classes each semester. I'm very busy, but I can make time to come to Meeting With Your Writing, which is my virtual co writing group, once a week, and that makes a difference, right?

So the juggling part really as a metaphor is, you know, most jugglers, a lot of times they're juggling three things. Now they've got a whole bag of tricks, right? And they will switch which things they're juggling,. And sometimes they'll be able to do four, and sometimes they won't. And sometimes it's beanbags, and sometimes it's breakables, and sometimes it's flaming torches.

And so it kind of is a, it's a much richer metaphor that helps you. And so one of the things I think about planning is that you're kind of deciding. Which things are you juggling and which things are you leaving in the box for later? And if things are going to drop instead of trying to juggle too many things and then have just random balls drop, and roll under the sofa where you forget about them and you don't see them for months, right? That you actually are like, I've got too many things. I need to put one of these down. And then you pick which one, right? That's different than, you know, something is going to drop, but you get to decide. 

Vikki: Definitely. And that deciding in advance can be uncomfortable. I think it's why we sometimes put off doing that. You know, my planning process back in the day, before I came across all this coaching stuff, my planning process was always, I have too many things, so how can I make a schedule where these things fit? And inevitably that meant starting too early, not having any breaks, kind of, you know, not allocating enough time to anything.

And that's why I never then stuck to it. I always used to think I was bad at sticking to plans. Turns out I'm not bad at sticking to plans. Turns out I just spent a lot of years making stupid plans. Because I never wanted to concede the point that I couldn't do them all. And so I sort of made that future Vikki's problem.

It's like, okay, this time we will do them all. We will. Of course we never could because it was an unreasonable amount of stuff. And I think one of my most important purposes of planning is confronting that uncomfortableness of accepting which things you're not going to do, which things you're going to do quickly and to a relatively mediocre level just to get them done, and which things you're actually giving time to, in advance, because when we're making that decision on the fly, we almost always pick the things that are easier, the things that are for other people, the things that are imminently urgent. And unless we've got collaborative deadlines, writing rarely comes into one of those things.

Jo: Well, exactly. And I think that's one of the things that is particularly tricky because everybody struggles with planning, no matter what kind of job they do or what kind of life they lead. Everybody's trying to juggle a lot of different things. But some of the special things about academia, one is that you do have a lot of autonomy. And that's actually one of the attractions for many people. But the thing about autonomy is on the one hand, you get to choose right. When you're going to write or whatever and what you're going to write. On the other hand, that means nobody tells you right now, and nobody protects that time for you. You kind of have to do it yourself. Um, so that's kind of the downside to the autonomy. 

The other thing is that the kinds of things you're juggling are different in these really fundamental ways. So it's like if you spend this hour preparing to teach this class in two days or tomorrow or something, and if you don't do that work, you're going to walk into class unprepared and there's going to be an immediate thing.

Whereas if you decided to spend this hour writing and you don't spend it writing, nobody's even going to notice other than you probably for ages and you get to the point where it just keeps going forward and forward until you get to a point which unfortunately happened to a colleague of mine, 25 years ago, and it was not great, where, you know, she needed to have published a certain amount of things in order for her contract to be made permanent, and she didn't.

And the really terrible part about that is she didn't get any support for that. Basically, she got told by the more senior people, you really need to prioritize this and do this, but nobody ever or like, let us help you do that.

And like you say, if you don't make a conscious plan to protect time for the longer term but important stuff, then it's the ball that gets dropped and rolls under the sofa. And then you just feel really bad about it, especially if it really is. Important so that idea of priority is about what's important and allocating resources to what's important before you allocate resources to other things. 

And I think one of the things about academics is many of them are people who were straight A students. You know, there's a lot of conversation about ungrading and the harm that grading does these days. And a lot of that is quite rightly focused on the harm it does to people who are traditionally excluded from higher education, but I have a very strong view that grading has harmed many of our clients. And many of the listeners, because it has given them this idea that you have to do everything at your best and that getting a B is kind of failing and that kind of thing. And it's, and it's not, right. It's okay to just do them and get them off your plate so that you can put. And, and to decide which things are going to get your a effort. 

Vikki: Definite. Empathize with that so hard. 

Jo: So part of it is also about thinking about your own capacity and thinking about what's important and what you want to do well, and how much time because your resources aren't just time. It's also cognitive capacity. And that's really important for writing because that's one of the reasons people say, I need these big chunks of time because parts of the writing process do actually require a certain kind of cognitive capacity that is objectively harder to find when you're busy with a lot of other things. The entire writing process doesn't need that, but certain parts of it absolutely do. And so the other thing we talk about when we talk about planning your writing is, what kind of time do I have for writing?

What can I protect? How could I protect it? What support do I need to protect it? All of that. But then it's like, okay, what kind of time is that? And what kinds of writing related work can I do in the kind of time I have? And that's the other reason to kind of think about the year starting in the summer when you have a lot of control. And then think about your summer plans, not as I need to finish this article or whatever. But really about like, what's the best way I can use that those longer chunks of time and the ability to have a lot of stuff about my writing continually kind of there in the back of my mind and kind of mulling over like, there's more mulling possibility, you know, because sometimes you're thinking through some really difficult intellectual problems, right? And you, you know, it, you just kind of need them to be sort of in your head while you're doing things. And that's easier in the summer or other big, longer chunks of time. And so the real thing is how do I use that effectively to set myself up for the kind of time I might have later in the year?

And so, for example, when we think about, what am I doing during that time? It's like, well, where are you in the process? What kinds of, instead of just like, I need to work on my book. It's like, well, what kind of work does my book really need right now? And some of that might be, I have this really tricky intellectual problem in chapter three, and I don't even really know what the argument is, you're not going to be able to fix that when you're really busy with other things, but that might be true.

Really good focus for your summer, right? Like, what do I need to do to figure that out? Like, do I need to do some reading? Do I need to do some analysis of whatever source material I'm using? Do I need to write whatever? But then you might have another one where you've got a draft, where you've done the analysis, where you're really confident about the argument you could make and that you have the evidence to support it and the work that needs to be done next is really to make sure that you've got the right secondary literature in there, you've got the flow you need, you've got whatever. Well, you can make a little bit more detailed list of specific steps you can take. And then that kind of work can probably be done in like hour and a half sessions, which you can find during term time.

And then there's the kind of stuff that you can probably do... one of my clients at one point she was editing a book, and it was very close to the end. And, you know, so she had everything in but there's all these really fiddly things you have to do at the end before you can submit it to the publisher, and she spent one session just writing this incredibly granular list of all the tiny tasks she needed to do.

But they were very granular and they were the kinds of things where when she did have 15 minutes. She could look at that list and see something on the list that she could do in the time she had available. Now you don't want to use your big long chunks of summertime to do that necessarily if you don't have a strong deadline, because you can do that when you've got 15 minutes here and there.

Or if you're doing it in the summer, you don't want to use the best part of your day for that. You want to use the best part of your day for the stuff that really requires heavy intellectual lifting. And then later when you're tired and can't really think anymore about that problem, you can be like, Oh, look here, I have a list of things I don't have to think very hard. Let's see how many I can do in half an hour. 

Vikki: I love that because One of the things I see is people saying that they have to be in a particular mode in order to write, which as you say, for certain elements of it can be absolutely true, but it can also be a form of procrastination in my view. Yeah. Sometimes it's like, Oh, I'll be in a better state of mind to do this next week, next month, in the summer, that magic summer. And then what happens is we get there and we're more tired than we thought we were going to be. And actually it's been a really long time since we've thought about this project.

And we've got a lot of, you know, a lot of pressure on now it's the time for the heavy intellectual stuff. And it can be really easy to then get a bit intimidated. What I love about this notion of like breaking it up so that you think about the different types of work is that I think if you can use the time where you've got less cognitive capacity to do some of the smaller jobs, it does keep it more mulling over in your head for more of the time, so that when you get to a time period where you've got a bit longer, It's easier to jump into it because you can kind of remember the structure of it. You can remember the things you've been working on. Yes. And it's all been sort of percolating a little bit. 

Jo: And I like to think of that in terms of like when you're cooking. Um, so I don't know, Not everybody knows how to make risotto, and even those of us that do know how to make it, we often cheat a little bit, but the official way to make risotto is that you have stock, simmering, and you add it very gradually to the rice in the pan, and you stir continuously the whole time, and that's what gives it the sort of texture that you would expect from a really good risotto.

And so you've got it sitting there, you brought it to the boil, and then you put it on this really low temperature so that it stays hot. And then when you add the hot broth into your rice, it doesn't cool down and then have to heat up again. It's just it stays at the same temperature. And I like that as a sort of analogy for what you can do with 15 minutes.

It's not necessarily that you are going to accomplish a lot in 15 minutes. It is precisely that it is going to keep the project alive in your head. So that when you have an hour and a half, or when you have a full day, you are not having to bring it to the boil from cold.

You are actually starting with warm and making it. And so it just means that you can be more effective and you're less frustrated about it. And I'm not saying don't give writing make writing the big thing for your summer, what I'm normally saying is how do you make that part of a practice that continues through the year and how does doing writing in other kinds of time in the rest of the year, make the summer writing more, dare I say it enjoyable, because that's the other thing we talk a lot about efficiency and effectiveness, but I really like to think about, you know, this is a thing you can enjoy, and and yes, it feels a bit weird. But, the fact is that you wouldn't have done a PhD and become an academic if you didn't find really ricky intellectual problems enjoyable, right? Like that challenge itself is part of what's enjoyable. So it's not fun in the way some other things you do are fun, but it is an enjoyable challenge. But it's not an enjoyable challenge if you feel like you're like under the gun all the time and if you're under pressure. So it's really about relieving enough pressure that you actually feel like you remember why you wanted to do this as for a living in the first place. 

Vikki: I love that. And I love, so one of the things as well that I think comes out from having to work out what are manageable chunks to do when you're busy with other things, is it can help us to develop a practice where we break everything into manageable chunks. Because the other thing I see people doing, is giving very large, you know, figure out structure of introduction or something as their to do list item.

And it's really easy to pass over and be like, Oh, I haven't got brain space to think about that yet. When it's so big and fluffy, for want of a better word, as to exactly what you need to do. I have this theory that even the difficult bits, even the figuring out what the intellectual argument bit is, we need to work out what are the steps I need to go through that give me the best chance of being able to figure this out.

Jo: They do. And I think one of the things I often say to people is you don't have to be able to break the whole thing down into those granular tasks, but your to do list always has to have two or three very concrete things that when you look at them, you immediately know what they involve, right? You don't want everything on your to do list to require you to do some kind of thinking before you can even really get started. And sometimes you can do that at the end of a previous session. Like when you finish, just take a moment to just give yourself some clues.

You can say, uh, like, Oh, okay. I have to stop now cause I have to go do something else. But I was thinking this is what I would do next. And you can just write that. You can just write it right in the bloody document cause you can delete it when you get back there.

You can also be like, Oh, I was thinking about this that I want to go read. And, and instead of trying to keep it in your head, write it down. So that is one thing, but also sometimes it's useful to know that sitting there and using your writing time to plan your writing project is something that will advance your project, right, deciding what would be the next thing to do, or what would be the most effective or what kinds of writing does this need. 

I was having a conversation with somebody the other day, who's an editor. And she said she thinks one of the real issues is that a lot of us, we don't really know much about what we mean by revision. And I think a lot of academics are actually trying to avoid revision. We're sort of like, Oh, we should be good enough to be able to write the whole thing and only need to do a little bit of copy editing before we submit it. And that's not true. That's not even a reasonable goal because you are always setting yourself new challenges. You're always learning new things. And also because it's too big, even an article is too big to hold everything in your head.

And so one of the things that I talk about is how the first draft or you can call it a zero draft if you like at this point, but when you start writing, you are writing for yourself. Don't start by thinking about what you need to communicate to other people. Think about like that first draft is really about becoming confident in the argument, like figuring out the argument you can make. Figuring out the argument you want to make, making sure those things fit, like what evidence do I have can I say the thing I really want to say do I need to write, but really focused on the research you've done and the thing you can say, and not worrying so much about what other people will think about it when they read it. You're writing initially for that.

And then revision is where you turn that into something that is communicating your argument to someone else. And revision might involve several passes, right? Like, it might actually make sense, not to just say, I need to revise chapter one, you might say, okay, I'm here. The next most important thing that needs to happen is I need to make sure that the structure and the flow of the argument, the evidence is right. And then you might be like, okay, once I've done that, I'm going to go through and think about what secondary literature do I need to discuss in this with my data?

Like, not the introduction part, but the while I'm talking about this, where do I need to like, really say, talk about the theoretical framework or whatever, and put that through, right? And then you might be like, okay, I now know who the reader is. The introduction is really about how do I situate what I'm saying in the set of debates they're already familiar with?

Which of those debates do I need to talk about? How much do I need to say? Whatever. Trying to do all three of those things at once just means you're switching tasks all the time, right? Because you're like, I only want to go through it one more time. No, allow yourself to go through it six, eight, 10 times. But with a very specific focus each time. 

And I think what you'll find is that it is more effective. And absolutely don't start with the pretty words, right? Don't worry about the transition sentences. Make notes, right? Need a transition here or, you know, I'm not sure this is the right word, but you don't want to make them pretty because sometimes what you're going to find is there's whole paragraphs there you don't need.

And if you've already spent a lot of time making them beautiful, it's going to be so much harder to get rid of them. So keep them ugly. And then once you're really clear that, oh, I've got all the content, then you can be like, okay, let's go through really carefully and think about the language. Think about the sentence length and think about, you know, all of those things.

And once I've done that, I'm going to go through and I'm going to copy edit and make sure I spelt everything correctly and all that kind of stuff. But I think that is really like thinking about the process and where you are in it can be really helpful for deciding what needs to be on your list, right?

Like you can't structure a chapter until you really know what the argument is and what evidence you're using to make it. 

Vikki: What do you think gets in the way of people doing what you just said? Because I think most people know in theory that a first draft should be rough, that it didn't be perfect, and da da da. But People still battle with this. So why can't they just go, Oh yes, I'll do what Jo said., 

Jo: There's a couple of things. One is when you feel like you don't have a lot of time, you feel like that in an ideal world, that would be the best way to do it, but I don't have time for that. I need to do it more quickly.

I would like to ban the word efficiency from our discussions of writing because I think trying to be efficient is the fastest route to writer's block that is there. Because you end up, if you want to do it the most efficient way, what you end up doing is spending a lot of your time and cognitive resources trying to work out the best thing to do rather than actually doing things.

And the easiest way to stop doing that is if you catch yourself trying to be efficient, just switch from efficient to effective, right? So I think that's one thing, right? I think the other thing is that we, you know, because we teach these methods to our students and we get frustrated when our students don't do them right in terms of like writing drafts and revising them.

So I think, you know, we know that they're good things, but I think we also feel like as you get better at writing, somehow the need for revision would be less. The other thing I've seen is that because you're constantly leveling up the challenge in what you're writing, You have more optimism about how easy it's going to be because you just did this other thing and it felt really easy and now this one's hard and you feel like, but I thought I was good at this. But what's happened is you have sneakily up up the challenge level as well. Like, you are often doing more challenging things. And, and that's normal. But it does mean that having a process where you allow yourself with the thing to be challenging. So, it's a bit like, um, music practice, right? You know, nobody really enjoys playing scales when they sit down to practice piano, the reason they want to practice piano, even people that are very good, like my kid or my father in law, right? They're very good pianists and they can play some really challenging music, but it does help to warm up by playing scales, right? It loosens up your fingers and your muscles. It reminds you, even just playing the scales of the key that your piece is in. You know, means that you just kind of reactivate some sort of muscle memory about playing in B flat major or whatever the heck you're doing. Right. 

But, you know, both of those people will tell you that they don't always do that and they don't because it's not fun like playing the actual music is the fun part. Um, but also when you're learning, I mean when, when, when my kid was younger and learning, they would sometimes get really frustrated and want to stop practicing all together and this is the other thing that comes into actually using the time you set aside for writing is sometimes when you sit down to write and it doesn't What you have to do is hard, right?

You really are resistant and you start feeling like you can't do it and you end up not doing anything because you just feel like this is too hard. I can't do it. Right. One of the things that I suggested to them when they were younger was I, I reminded them that the pieces they could play that felt easy now were once as hard as the thing they're trying to learn, right? And that this new thing is a challenge. But they overcame challenges before and they will again, and it's difficult. So that's one thing to remind yourself. But the other thing I suggested to her was to alternate between, you know, when you get really frustrated, instead of quitting, go and remind yourself how much you love it, like do a part of the process that's easier. Do something right that's still writing that's still right, but that gives you that feeling that you really are capable and can do this. So you don't always have to do the hardest thing. If some days you're feeling really down on yourself and like you can't, then the thing you should pick for your writing time is the thing that feels easiest the thing that will make you feel competent.

But I think the other thing that stops people from doing that is that what that process of a draft and revision might look like is very different for different people, right? So for some people, I'm, I'm a free write first drafter. I need to just kind of blurt it out and then I can figure out. And so if you, if that's the easiest way for you to get the ideas out of your head and onto paper, then you need a process where you allow yourself to do that and to go around in circles and be repetitive and do whatever you do.

And then you need a process to actually look at your free write possibly use reverse outlining to like find a structure, put things new, whatever, right? There are other people who absolutely do not write like that, and you don't have to write like that. And one of the things, actually, those of us that like to blurt it out might have found that in school we might have been taught, no, no, no, don't do that, you need to outline.

So there's also this thing about how you've been taught is the right order to do things in. For some of us, free writing to start is absolutely the right thing. For other people, writing an outline is a good thing. For other people, writing some sort of basic outline helps them get started and then they free and they go back and forth.

For some people, if you find that when you look at a set of sentences you've written, you cannot see how you could write them any other way, then you don't want things in sentences until a fairly late revision draft. Like your first draft might not look like, like a draft at all. It might look like this super detailed outline.

I have one client who drafted her entire book, multiple chapters in bullet points. She then did revision still in bullet points around structure around what needs to be here what doesn't all the rest of it.

And then she had to go through really systematically and be like okay I'm giving each chapter a month and I'm turning it from bullet points into sentences right. And that's kind of how that worked for them. And if that's your process, and it works for you, then that's your process. And the difficulty is that you sometimes need to kind of experiment with things and that's where it's like, well, I have so little time to write and I've got so much pressure. I don't have time to experiment. But then what happens is you end up in this vicious circle where you're not writing anything. So sometimes you just have to take a risk. 

Vikki: Definitely. I definitely recognize the, I don't have time to do this badly thing amongst my clients a lot. And sometimes getting them to reflect on how much time they're using worrying about and feeling bad about the fact they're not writing. It's usually far in excess of the amount of time it would take to actually have a go at it. 

I'm a big fan of, you know, people have this notion of, you know, what, I don't know what the right structure is or the right argument. I do it both ways. Write it that way. Write it the other way. See which one you like.

No, I haven't got time for that. It's like, Oh, you've got time to spend three weeks stressing about which one's the right option. Or we could spend two hours having to go at one of each. 

Jo: Absolutely. Like, and that's where the efficiency, right? It's like, that's inefficient. I don't, I don't have time to do that. And that's where it's like, but is what you're doing effective? Yeah. Yeah. Right. And if what you're doing looks inefficient, but is effective and you're getting things finished. then you can keep doing it and stop spending a lot of time looking for the perfect method that would be better for you and just really lean into what already works for you.

And if what you're doing is not effective, then try something, even though you don't know whether that's going to be effective either, but the thing you're doing is not effective. So, you know, there's at least a 50, 50 chance that the thing you try is going to be more effective than what you're doing now, which is nothing. So, right. And, and, and I think it's not just, you know, and it's partly you want it to be effective. And I think we really are bad at understanding how much energy cognitive and emotional labor take, right? We think we have easy jobs, because we're not digging ditches.

But actually, the cognitive labor takes. energy and if you've ever done a really big house move, which many academics have done because of the nature of the labor market, you will know, when you move house, uh, you end up being really, really tired.

And the reason you're tired is that although all of the decisions you have to make feel small and, and trivial, and certainly nothing like the kind of work that you do intellectually, that there are just so many of them that you actually get a thing called decision fatigue, and you can't write like your cognitive capacity, you like, run it all up. All of that thinking and decision making and one of the things about making a plan is that you make all the decisions at once and then you're kind of working your plan and all you need to do is decide about the stuff that came up and the changes. Whereas if you're kind of working on the fly all the time you're just using a lot of cognitive energy.

Weighing up options multiple times a day, right? And the transitions between things, that all takes a lot of cognitive energy because you can't have anything going on in your, like, the nice thing about routines is that things are subconscious and then they take less energy, right? But then the emotional energy, right?

Like emotional work is real work and emotional work is about you managing your own emotions, feeling bad about how you're feeling, you know worrying like what people are going to think about you, all of that stuff Also takes real energy, the kind of energy we measure in calories and all of that kind of thing.

And so just the fact that you're not out digging dishes doesn't mean you're not working hard. And part of the thing about planning is reducing the amount of energy you're spending on stuff that you don't need to be doing. It isn't even making you feel good, right?

So that you have more energy for this stuff that you need and want to do. And for the stuff that makes you feel good, right? Plus leaves you time to be able to actually recharge properly, like sleep well, right? Because how many people are then have all of this spinning in their head and they go to bed and they can't get to sleep because of all the hamsters in their head. And so the people that I'm most angry with are the people that tell some of my, you know, more junior clients, like the PhD students and the junior people, that it's unreasonable for them to expect to sleep well and it's just like, You know, like what the job you just think the job is terrible and it's supposed to be terrible. And I don't know. I just don't believe that. I think you should be able to enjoy it. And you should be able to like, achieve things that you want to achieve. And no, you don't have control over all of that. And the conditions in which you're doing it are deteriorating daily. But pick the stuff that makes it meaningful because otherwise you could have gone to that career fair with all the other really smart final year undergraduates and got a job at a bank or a consulting firm or something and been paid loads more than you're earning now and there was a reason you didn't do that. And you need to remember that reason and you need to be like, this is why I'm still doing this job. And if the, if the big thing that is why you wanted to do this job and is still doing the job is not in your plan, then. I don't know. What's it worth to you?

Vikki: Definitely, definitely. And I think these sorts of tips that you've given today, this advice you've given today, hopefully can help people see how they can take that element that they love and that they do want to be doing and put it in first. I love this notion that a priority doesn't have to be the only thing you're doing, but it's the thing that you put in first when you're structuring your time.

Jo: It doesn't also have to be the thing you spend the most time on. 

Vikki: Yeah. Right? But you put it in first and guard it the most fiercely. I love that. 

Jo: And one of the things, so one of the things we do, so yeah, so the planning in the academic writing studio, we plan the year starting in June, or in July, so the planning class will actually be on the 31st of May this year, to think about the year, and then on the 14th of June we'll have one to think about the first quarter, July, August, and September, and get into a bit more detail about, okay, what's possible, what are you going to do, And, by doing that, you can put writing first in your year. You can start your year with writing instead of feeling like you're catching up by the time you get to the summer, right? And just Just that sense of is this the first thing I do like it's a circle right it comes around every year it could be either it is a thing we make up in our heads, but it makes a difference.

The other thing we do is most of the sessions of meeting with your writing, I mean when I started there was only one a week, but we've really built on that are on Monday. Right. And the idea is that if you can manage to, to give a couple of hours to writing on Monday, even if that's the only writing time, it shifts how you feel about the whole week.

So, so many people are like, Oh, Friday, right, I'll be able to write on Friday and then they get to Friday and one, all the things that came up in the week are now leaking into Friday and. feeling like they're more important than doing the writing. Uh, two, you're probably tired, right? And so it's harder. But also you're going through the week kind of thinking, I hope I get to write on Friday, right?

I've planned, I hope I get to preserve that. Because if you write on Monday, even if it's for an hour, an hour and a half, right? On Monday, you are going through the week having already written, right? Even if that's all the writing you do in the week, you did some, you have already done it. You don't have to go through the week feeling like you're going to fail in your goal to write every week, right? Because you've already done it. 

The other thing is a lot of my clients over, I'm telling you more than 10 years have told me that. Having written on Monday, they often find that they can write again later in the week. So instead of it being this thing about how much time can I preserve at the end of the week after I've never done everything else, you do it first and then you realize, oh, I could fit it in here as well.

And you actually do more than you planned, but you can't judge yourself based on how much you can't set a goal of how much can I do. You just need to be really realistic. Of like, how do I protect some time for this activity and how do I make it feel like this important activity is still part of my work, even if I have this really heavy teaching load and even if I'm still kind of worried, I might not meet these weird standards somebody else has set for finishing, publishing, whatever. 

Vikki: Amazing. So, if people want to know more about Studio and all the support mechanisms that you've mentioned, I know there are books as well, where do they find out more?

Jo: So you can find out about me at joevannevery. co. uk and my last name is spelled just like those two everyday words, so it's van like a truck, every like every day. joevannevery. co. uk And that's where I have a, there's a blog on that, which we just call the library. Cause it's, there's over 500 posts in there.

There's some spotlights that pull them together on themes. The current one is about confidence. And, it has links to the books and other things. if you want to join the academic writing studio and come along to the planning classes, we have several membership tiers now. So if you just want planning classes, you can just buy a package of planning classes and you get the annual and each of the 4 quarters and we remind you and you come along and make some plans.

We now have a mid tier. Where you can get that plus all the group coaching we do so, there's sort of general office hours, where you can just get help with whatever you're struggling with, you know, whatever there's some that are specifically writing clinics for or journal article writers or for book writers, there are some PhD clinics and the structure of those is basically we kind of whoever turns up we're responsive. We're like, what are you working on? What's going well? How can we help you? That's basically the structure there. So you can have the planning plus all of that, right. Just for extra support when your plans are falling apart, right? Like if you're feeling like, Oh, but my plans are going to fall apart. It's great. Come to that, come to office hours. We'll help unfold them apart. And then there's the sort of really top membership, which is, which also includes all of that. Plus. A meeting with your writing and we have four sessions every week.

There's two weeks over the Christmas break that we do not run them, but the rest of the year, even on bank holidays, four sessions a week, three of them are on Monday. One is on Thursday. There may not be four that are a sensible time in your time zone, but it's to mean that we can have people in different time zones, people with different teaching loads.

So if you like that kind of coworking support, and it is coworking, um, Right. Silent. You get some prompts to start, whatever. So all of that you get at the academic writing studio. co. uk.

So, um, that's basically it. However, if you only want to spend like a small amount, I've also got these short guides. So these two are really about the things we talked about today. Finding time for your scholarly writing talks about the different kinds of time and what you can do in different kinds of time.

The scholarly writing process talks about that process going from, I'm figuring out what I want to say towards, I'm communicating it to somebody else. And in each of the little stages, there's questions and prompts to help you think about what has got me stuck and how, what could I do to get myself unstuck.

So it's a very kind of coachy kind of book and there is in the ebook version, there is a kind of combined thing that has both of those together. Um, so you can just search on Amazon, wherever you buy books. The paperbacks, you'll have to order, and Amazon might tell you that they're out of stock, but you can still order them.

They'll just take a little longer to come in, but you can also order them from your local bookshop and all of that. There's a page on my jovenevry. co. uk website that has all those details. Um, so, 

Vikki: and you have a free newsletter 

Jo: because I have a free newsletter. So jovenevry. co. uk slash newsletter. So yeah, whatever level of, you know, kind of encouragement and support you want. That's, you know, 

Vikki: you're there. That's perfect. Thank you so much. So much food for thought for everyone. Um, and hopefully lots of inspiration. I loved your point that you made before that planning is a way to inspire action.

And I think that today's podcast will have really inspired action in a lot of people. So Thank you very much. Thank you everyone for listening and I will see you next week. 

Thank you for listening to the PhD life coach podcast. If you liked this episode, please tell your friends, your colleagues, and your universities. I'd appreciate it if you took the time to like, leave a review, give me stars, stickers, and all that general approval as well. If you'd like to find out more about working with me, either for yourself or for people at your university, please check out my website at thephdlifecoach.

com. You can also sign up to hear more about my free group coaching sessions for PhD students and academics. See you next time.