Tnis is one of those old-old posts.
ON CERTAIN FALSITIES
Perhaps it is for no reason related to me that people have always gone on at me how to be and work. So this is another piece of my counterargument against those who threw so much unnecessary time management advice at me — at me, a veritable time mechanic.
I like all of my projects, but I have always had warnings about how I should not like them, should not commit, and so on, if I wanted to be professional and remain in the profession. I have always found the opposite to be true, though, and I have always found things easier to do when you commit.
If there is a deadline, you have to stop reading at some point and start writing. I have known this since age ten at least, but I later received all too many warnings about reading and reflecting: one should not read too much, one should not reflect too much, one should write, write anything. Consequently I often feel guilty and anxious about reading. The effort to write without having read makes writing hard, if I try to write when I am still too uninformed and unprepared.
Overlapping with this is my guilt about thinking while I write. If you cannot think while you write, and write deliberately, then why do it? (I can almost hear Gertrude Stein say something like that.)
SOME VERITIES
I have three large research projects in Discipline A, but I mostly teach senior and graduate courses in the Department B and beginning to intermediate courses in Department C. For these reasons I am rather fragmented. My friends in more privileged positions say I should not be able to do research in these conditions.
I also have friends who allege that in these circumstances writing can only happen on vacation. In fact the opposite is true. Especially if what you teach is only obliquely connected your research, it is easy to lose touch with the latter if you wait. If I have not looked at my project for four months and I have occupied my mind entirely with other things during that time, it will take me the better part of one month to remember where I was.
Others say one must take research days. This is not realistic for me since it is so easy to have these ruined by unforeseen events. No amount of “defending one’s boundaries” will work for a whole day, and the project is doomed to failure. At the same time, I can be sure to have some research hours in most days even if they have to be rescheduled in some way (that is one of the reasons I schedule them early).
The other advantage of research hours, as opposed to days, is that they help one keep one’s project in mind all the time. That generates progress all on its own. A day a week (10 hours on a 60 hour week) is of course better than none and better than I have done many times, but half a day (5 hours) twice a week is better, and a quarter of a day (2.5 hours) on four days is better yet.
2.5 hours x 6 is 15 hours. That is how much time I am supposed to spend per week on research according to my contract. Magically, it is also the minimum amount of time I need (although with 30 hours, I could produce more than twice as much — and with more than 30 hours, the law of diminishing returns would set in, I believe).
Finding 2.5 hours six times every week (or 1.25 hours 12 times, or 1.5 hours 10 times, and so on) is a less modest goal than people realize. I am for it.
This semester, my possible/realistic research hours are:
Monday: 9PM-11:30 PM
Tuesday: 9AM-11:30 AM
Wednesday: 8 PM-10:30 PM
Thursday: 3:30 PM-6 PM and/or 7 PM-9:30 PM (Two possible chunks on this day)
Friday: never (This day is all teaching and service, all the time, and the evening must be taken off)
Saturday: 7 PM-12 AM (Morning and afternoon must be taken off, but there are still two possible chunks on this day)
Sunday: 9AM-11:30 AM (Afternoon and evening must go to teaching and service or housework or recreation)
That means there are eight possible chunks, of which one need only choose six.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
So many prescriptions for research seem to be the wildest kind of guesses.
I did my only decent research when I genuinely had some time to devote to it each week, but when I also had other “conflicting” responsibilities.
Maybe take two consecutive days without research time (Thursday or Saturday) so as to give yourself a break? For the record, Silvia (How to Write a Lot) doesn’t believe in breaks. The man’s a writing machine.
I’ve heard a lot of strange things said about writing a thesis. Generally, these are things I’ve read in newspapers or magazines, but somehow there is an idea out there that intellectual writing is like squeezing precious fluid out of one’s mind and body. It’s a kind of magical essence that is unrelated to one’s real identity, so it is imperative to squeeze out the essence when the spirit alights upon you to give you the blessing of the muse, during a small window in time.
I’ve also read by professing intellectuals the idea that at the very point that one sits down to write, one often doesn’t know whether or not one actually has something to say. (This is indicative of the way that the muse’s blessing is conceptually distinguished from one’s real self, one’t thoughts, and one’s identity.)
The muse does not appear, apparently, in relation to the efforts that one puts in, in reading and reflecting (although my experience says that these approaches are the only way to feel “inspired”). Rather, the muse appears on the basis of one’s hidden magical essence and whether one is a genius or not — which one does not know until one has begun the day’s actual writing (apparently).
Jennifer — the underlying belief in magical essences is, I am sure, key in all of this. And I didn’t want to prepare my class, it seemed boring, but then started out of the fear of being unprepared, which is unpleasant, and ended up delighted and inspired.
(Also to Tom) — all the advice I received for so long had that as an underlying supposition, along with the idea that one (or I) couldn’t really do it, or wouldn’t really, or didn’t understand that it was what counted. I think what it comes down to is, nice girls don’t.
Undine — yes. In practice that is what I end up doing, me. I just have this weird preference for studying Saturday nights. Lots of times I dump the Thursday and the Sunday segments, which gets me down to five, and fit the other one in somewhere else — or not. I’m trying to get better about actually fitting it in, because I am fixated on the number 15, it is a threshold.
The other thing is that research and writing are great ways to procrastinate on teaching and service. And they really feeds your head and I don’t know why so many people have spoken, in my life, about how these were the unpleasant things.