Hope everyone is well as we head into July. It is freezing here in the UK compared to the hot weather we had in June. Maybe that's better for intense reading and writing indoors, but not so great if like Susan, you're headed here for a break (unless you're here for research, Susan, in which case, not so bad).
As we head into the second half of the session, a hopefully positive prompt to remind us all that the hard work of writing does pay off: tell us about a piece of writing you are really proud of and/or a time when writing went well, maybe when it flowed easily, or you were able to write without distractions or too much pressure from deadlines. Or maybe there were distractions, but they kept the writing from being overwhelming.
Last week's goals
Daisy
Do finicky difficult lab process
for first time…
Work on joint student paper, naming it CRUNCHY
Figure out what needs to be done for analytical
part of local paper, now named SHINY!
Write promotion review
Finish paper review
Revise and send out association paperwork
Look into costs and options for some help with
landscaping
Do something fun with kid for end of school year
JaneB
1) Self-care: baselines
2) Researcher: Wish-we-never-started project - at least 5 hours of work.
Meeting and any last bits on very overdue paper. Two "small jobs".
Summer list.
3) Teaching: progress meeting for Junior grad student. Make a summer list.
Remind MSc students I'm on leave soon. Set resits, contact my advisee students
who have work to make up over the summer.
4) Fun. Play D&D or do some D&D planning. Read something. Start the
next blanket. Draw something. Make a summer wish list for non- work days.
Julie
1. Finish one interlibrary loan,
read at least one other.
2. More archive searches.
3. Spend a day writing.
4. Exercise
5. Small to medium house job.
6. Financial stuff.
Heumihi
This week:
--Is the only week that my son will be at camp, so
I need to Get Stuff Done.
1. Finish AW and take notes on it; start BM; start
TB; read LMS
2. Finish and send promotion letter
3. Freewrite and/or 1000-1500 words on ch. 4
4. Bind text block
5. Journal proofs to co-editor
6. Finish processing journal article
Susan
(Very limited, as there's a
conference and I need to get ready to fly to London for 5 1/2 weeks. My
"To Do" list is VERY long.) The conference is one that happens every
3 years in my thematic specialization, and I kind of wish I wasn't going, but
it's less than a 2 hour drive away, and I'll see people, and if I need to leave
early, I will. Breathe.
1. Read last 3 books of which I have physical
copies (There are 2 that I only have as ebooks)
2. Organize all the things for travel
3. Last bits of Admin (jobs, spring schedule)
4. Actually read program for Big Conference
5. Enjoy time at Big Conference/visit with friends
6. Get on plane in one piece on Sunday afternoon.
7. Breathe.
Dame Eleanor
expand Alms chapter
- dead languages 3x each or as possible
- finish reading book for tenure review
- read at least 1000 lines of Relevant Romance
- process at least 1 grad apps
- at least 2 things from Huge Summer List (pick
things I can knock off quickly!)
I'm hoping that the article I'm currently working on will become the piece I'm most proud of, since I'm trying to say something more ambitious than I previously have and planning to try what is possibly the top history journal in the UK. I am probably shooting for the moon, but while it's still work in progress, I'll dream. Writing it is very, very hard work, with a lot more to do, but it's been very satisfying to feel bits of it slowly falling into place. In the meantime, I'm proudest of an article I published about six years ago now, with a co-author (but she isn't a native speaker of English, so the writing was all me). It's the first proper publication from this current research project, and I think it combined some solid empirical work with some big-ish questions. Again, it was hard to write, and the referees made us do a lot (rightly) but getting to the final draft felt great.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, my easiest writing experience was the week before my son was born. I went 10 days over the due date, and got so bored, I got my laptop out and sat on the sofa drafting an article I'd been asked to contribute for a special issue. It was the least pressured writing I'd ever done, as I was only doing it for distraction, and I remember the words coming much more easily than normal. I've never been that detached from the process again!
Last week's goals:
1. Finish one interlibrary loan, read at least one other - YES, NO
2. More archive searches. - YES
3. Spend a day writing. - YES
4. Exercise - YES (run x 2, pilates x 1)
5. Small to medium house job. - YES (just, this afternoon!)
6. Financial stuff. - NO (need to stop putting this off)
This week:
1. Finish interlibrary loan, start another.
2. Write one day.
3. Archive searches and request scans of documents
4. Finances!
5. Tidy desk
6. Get baby clothes down from attic and wash to take to new niece this weekend.
7. Try not to get too distracted watching Tour de France with son.
Hail, fellow Tour watchers! Who are your favorites? I want Cav to win a stage, and I hope Alaphilippe will do something worth watching (and not the sort of thing that means Bardet needs to keep him company till the medics arrive).
DeleteLove the Tour! And for the extremely geeky ones among us (which basically is all of us...) here is a really cool thing - the geology of the Tour! https://www.geo-sports.org/ is absolutely worth a visit, some excellent summaries and cool stuff! The geologist has been doing it for a few years and is really great at it!
DeleteAwesome! Thank you! We are fans of Jose Been, so it's great to see her involvement on that site.
DeleteThe geology bit is cool... I quite like the Tour, partly because my Dad was a semi-professional racing cyclist in his youth so watches ALL the cycle races, and he's told us enough that I feel like I can watch in a semi-intelligent way (even though high tech gels etc. have replaced my Dad's most memorable "fuel during road race" which was slices of oven-baked rice pudding made by his Mum, the strategy etc, remains similar). But I don't tend to watch (partly because if I start I don't stop...).
DeleteWhat an interesting question. There are a couple of pieces I've written that took on big questions, and one is cited a lot, the other almost never. But I'm really proud of the thinking in them. The easiest writing I've ever done in some ways was my dissertation: I was single, had few outside obligations, and was really living inside the research in a way I can't do anymore. Once I started writing, it just flowed.
ReplyDeleteHow I did:
(Very limited, as there's a conference and I need to get ready to fly to London for 5 1/2 weeks. My "To Do" list is VERY long.) The conference is one that happens every 3 years in my thematic specialization, and I kind of wish I wasn't going, but it's less than a 2 hour drive away, and I'll see people, and if I need to leave early, I will. Breathe.
1. Read last 3 books of which I have physical copies (There are 2 that I only have as ebooks) YES
2. Organize all the things for travel YES (sort of)
3. Last bits of Admin (jobs, spring schedule) NO
4. Actually read program for Big Conference YES
5. Enjoy time at Big Conference/visit with friends YES
6. Get on plane in one piece on Sunday afternoon. YES
7. Breathe. YES
Well, I made it, and more or less in one piece. (I forgot the keys to my flat and my umbrella, and I forgot lots of other stuff when I went to the conference. My holiday is in a few weeks, by which time it will have warmed up. Meanwhile, I'm trying to work, take advantage of real research libraries. (Nothing right now needs archives, alas, but I work so much more efficiently when I have access to books!)
Goals for this week:
1. Read last two prize books
2. Read book for long overdue book review
3. Read through comments on Famous Author and determine what's left to do.
4. Attend two lectures where I hope I will see and meet people.
5. Finish bits of admin that I decided could be done from here.
6. Go to at least one museum and/or one play or concert.
7. Have fun
I'm glad you enjoyed the conference. Usually forgetting things isn't fatal when you travel within civilization---it's not like you're spending six months in the outback. But there is the problem of finding time to go shopping when there are sessions to go to! Best wishes for seeing/meeting people, doing some culturally interesting things, and having fun!
DeleteSo glad the conference was good and that you made it to the UK. Enjoy the change of scene and all the cool cultural and research things!
DeleteI hope the UK weather manages to be cheerful and you get some good museum and/or theatre time!
DeleteI expect I will be proudest of my book when I finally get it done, but for now the piece I'm really proud of is an essay published a few years ago establishing provenance for a romance manuscript. It had 130 footnotes and required reading a batch of Latin wills as well as deciphering marginalia, discussing manuscript context, and drawing a lot of inferences about families and reading habits. It took about ten years to write from the time I first saw the manuscript and started work on the marginalia, and was rejected and substantially re-written twice before it took on its final form. So it's also a monument to persistence and belief in myself/my work. Some things take a long time, but I do finally get them done. Sometimes working on it was incremental and painful, but on the final rewrite I was able to take a hunk of summer and write the whole thing over again---if I moved anything in, I retyped it (except for one paragraph that somehow got garbled and was overlooked till a late stage), so that I smoothed out the style, and there were some wonderful experiences of "flow" that summer.
ReplyDeleteHow I did:
- expand Alms chapter. NO. Revisions to proofs kept coming back!
- dead languages 3x each or as possible. ONE.
- finish reading book for tenure review. YES!
- read at least 1000 lines of Relevant Romance. NO. Picked it up and realized I'd lost track of what was going on. :-(
- process at least 1 grad app. YES (only one, yay!).
- at least 2 things from Huge Summer List (pick things I can knock off quickly!). ONE. Better than none!
Other/commentary: My one "list" thing was making a pair of earrings, so finally I have done something creative! It seems like a lot of time goes to cooking and errands, though I do try to "stack" these tasks. That spelling bee game is very distracting, um, entertaining! I think if I were getting more sleep, I'd get more done/be less distractable, so I'm trying to focus on that.
New goals:
- expand Alms chapter
- dead languages: Latin daily, Greek x3
- write tenure review letter
- start over reading Relevant Romance
- observe work hours and dedicated special-project hours
- at least 2 things from Huge Summer List
- pay bills
- prioritize sleep
That essay sounds amazingly complex and very cool! Definitely something to be proud of...
DeleteYay for something creative in the week, hope the other Summer List projects have some fun attached to them as well.
I try not to obsess over the Spelling Bee... it's dangerous!
DeleteYay for creative, and prioritising sleep is always a good idea (if only my stoopid brain would cooperate...)
DeleteOhhh spelling bee! Once in a while, if I start early, I can get myself to Genius before 8:30 am and then that clears the deck for the day. My mom got me into it, though, and it's a thing for us to stay in daily contact about, which is nice.
DeleteOooh, good reminder of the things we do well!
ReplyDeleteI’m pretty proud of my recent collaborative paper – we had a first draft that was ok but had significant issues, I completely reworked it for a second draft and for the revision after acceptance, and it is a really good paper. I love doing reworking and revisions and dealing with edits, it actually makes me very happy… My most recent first-author paper is also one that turned out much better than I thought it would, it is a pretty solid piece of work and also went through multiple iterations. Clearly that is how I work best… I love getting a million edits from co-authors and figuring out how to make them all work! I even like doing revisions for reviews!
Last week’s goals:
Do finicky difficult lab process for first time… DONE, SUCCESS I THINK
Work on joint student paper, naming it CRUNCHY - WORKED ON DATA FILES
Figure out what needs to be done for analytical part of local paper, now named SHINY! WORKED ON DATA FILES
Write promotion review DONE
Finish paper review DONE
Revise and send out association paperwork DONE
Look into costs and options for some help with landscaping CHICKENED OUT
Do something fun with kid for end of school year DONE
This week’s goals:
Do one thing for SHINY paper
Plan out CRUNCHY paper’s data content
Continue finicky lab process
Start next finicky lab process (I love these, they make me very happy!)
Have difficult student conversation
Move offices
Get daily exercise
reworking and reorganising writing is so satisfying! I just hate the final few rounds of polishing - one reason I continue to work with my former postdoc (FormerPDF, who is now an academic herself) is that she enjoys the polishing and checking but hates the drafting and reworking - we make a good team!
DeleteWhat a nice prompt!
ReplyDeleteAs it happens, I recently read the page proofs for an article in a collection (a festschrift for someone I really don't know well, but whose work was influential in the field and who was very generous with me earlier in my career--she reviewed my first book and then, although we'd never met, agreed to write a letter of recommendation for me when I went back on the market. She sent me the letter, too--it was four pages (!!) long--and I really think that it helped me get my second, current job).
Whew, long parenthesis. Anyway, I'd initially sent it in in 2019, so I wasn't sure how much I'd still like it--but I truly think that it's one of the best articles I've written. I felt very proud!
Last week:
1. Finish AW and take notes on it; start BM; start TB; read LMS
-Yes, mostly, by the skin of my teeth. That was a lot of reading! I actually don't know what TB is. I think that I meant FT? Which I did read.
2. Finish and send promotion letter - Yes; it was already drafted, so this took all of twenty minutes.
3. Freewrite and/or 1000-1500 words on ch. 4 - Yes, but I've kind of stopped writing now.
4. Bind text block - Yes
5. Journal proofs to co-editor - Yes
6. Finish processing journal article - Yes (desk reject)
Huh, it felt like a really unproductive week because I stalled out on writing and started doubting my whole project. Weird.
This week, though--I made a really long list of Things To Do, but then I realized that I don't have much time at all (we had houseguests Monday-Tuesday, and we're visiting my family Friday-Sunday), so I've made the radical decision to...NOT SET GOALS! I will report back, though, and tell you what I've done. That feels safer and more liberating to me than setting myself up for stress and/or failure.
It's really nice when the proofs come out and it's better than you remember! Well done past you!
DeleteAnd sometimes in the summer no goals, no to do list, just a done list, makes a lot of sense. Sometimes we need to be human beings, not humans doing!
I love the idea of no goals. (Since I've largely been "doing what I can do" for the last few months, that shouldn't be surprising. But it seems healthy.
DeleteLast week's goal:
ReplyDelete1) Self-care: baselines more ish than yes, but at least not no!
2) Researcher: Wish-we-never-started project - at least 5 hours of work. Meeting and any last bits on very overdue paper. Two "small jobs". Summer list. two hours, and I'm working on accepting I did a poor job - the last couple of months of depression/burn-out, hot weather and medication changes did a real number on my ability to pull anything out of the hat at the last minute, and the project lead is not willing to ask for an extension (although I certainly have grounds for one), so. It has to be what it is.
meeting on neglected paper - I've done all my bits short of a final read through, it's all on the post-doc's desk now.
Four small jobs. DID write a list! So that's a yay
3) Teaching: progress meeting for Junior grad student. Make a summer list. Remind MSc students I'm on leave soon. Set resits, contact my advisee students who have work to make up over the summer. yes and it went fine. not yet. nope - have not been sent the information I need to do that yet. Supposed to be done by the end of June but I can't do my bit until central admin do their bit.Also spent chunks of time with both grad students and an external post-doc who I mentor discussing their poster presentations for the Massive Conference I am not going to.
4) Fun. Play D&D or do some D&D planning. Read something. Start the next blanket. Draw something. Make a summer wish list for non- work days. played D&D. finished a book which was actually pretty good (and not started the next one because it's an "if I start I need enough hours to finish the same day" book - new Martha Wells, starting a new fantasy series). No crochet, but drew a few things. Began to sidle up on a summer wish list, apparently my brain monkeys are a bit scared of lists...
This week's list - what's left of it!
1) Self-care: baselines, decluttering person is coming Friday I hope.
2) Researcher: Wish-we-never-started project - project report meeting, finish up what I can. Comment on and send back to co-author first draft of consultancy based paper. Get my poster for Massive Meeting I'm Not Attending ready and sent to print. As many "small jobs" as I can before leave starts.
3) Teaching: Make a summer list. If the info I need arrives by Wednesday, set resits and contact my advisee students who have work to make up over the summer. And set out of office!!
4) Fun. Play D&D or do some D&D planning. Read something. Start the next blanket. Draw something. Make a summer wish list for non- work days.
I just looked up that recipe--thanks for the tip! It looks amazing!
ReplyDeleteI hope that you're able to start your leave soon....
We can only do what we can do. Though we want to do our top-of-our-game best, sometimes the best we can manage isn't that. Practice radical self-compassion! (And good luck, b/c I know it's hard, I'm not doing so well at it ATM either.) Wish-we-never-started project will recede into the past and there will be other work to do.
ReplyDelete