Hello! Been a fan for ages, and its been so wonderful to see you move into Amazing Professor life!
That said, how in the world do you continue your research? When I got my MFA (printmaking) I was absolutely grinding re:thesis. I love digging in deep, combing through texts etc. But now that I'm out of the academic setting I'm not sure how to continue with research. It's like an invisible wall slapped itself up right in front of my face lol
How do I trick myself into assigning myself a research paper?? For the yearning is Strong!
!!! thanks so much for hanging out for so long !! re: keeping up with research--in some ways, i'm lucky, because i've had the threat of losing my job hanging overhead since i got it :) as you probably know, many (though not all!) tenure lines at research institutions prioritize publication over things like teaching or service--that's where we get "publish or perish." so in some ways i've been very incentivized to keep up with my own work!
in other ways, though, the entire structure of western academia does the exact opposite. just about every form of immediate accountability is tied to the "unimportant" work--if i don't prep for class, class doesn't go well. if i don't grade in a timely way, students complain in their evals. if i drop the ball on a committee or advisory board, there are immediate consequences, etc. if i don't work on my book? literally nobody will know until i fail to deliver it at the end of my 5-7 year tenure clock. in my field, the book is the thing that matters; articles and solicited chapters for edited collections "count" for less (and so naturally have more built-in accountability than a book, because they have external deadlines imposed by the editor and the press). so it's very, very, very easy to let the book slide to the bottom of the to-do list.
all of which is to say!! i think as a general rule, we tend to do what we're held accountable for, and if that accountability is not organic to your job or your life, you have to come up with a way to impose it. obviously in a dream world we'd just work on the things we actually want to work on, but it so rarely works that way for me. there's always, always something else more pressing, or i feel so wiped from doing those more pressing things that i have no gas left in the tank for the stuff that comes after. so you have to find a way to make that thing you want to do just as pressing as the rest of it. strategies:
get on the hook. this is my #1 strategy. if i promise an editor i'll get something to them by a particular deadline, i will do my best to do it. if i propose a conference paper that gets accepted, i will have to write it by the time that conference happens. getting on the hook for the work takes way less time/energy than actually doing it, and then once you're on it, you're on it.
set up designated, non-negotiable time for the thing! my best writing group experiences have been the ones where we've collectively said, i don't care if the grading pile is due tomorrow. for the 3 hours we're here, we're only working on our "actual" work. sometimes you have to kinda be a hardass about it.
make the thing fun. this is the one i'm worst at right now. there are moments of fun, but they're not happening as often as i'd like. but i am of course imagining other big projects beyond this one, and it's been a completely exciting and freeing exercise to imagine how i'd approach a project without the hourglass running down in the background and the pressure to produce a traditional monograph in order to best-present a tenure case. how i might approach the research, the writing, the organization, etc, without that pressure? this is actually advice that i give my grad students when they're drafting their prospectus documents--what's the coolest, sexiest, most exciting version of this project you can imagine? if you have a question you want to ask... how do you want to answer it? do you want to write a straightforward academic diss, or do you want to do something more unique? a mix of both? etc etc etc. especially if you're not constrained by needing to produce a particular kind of product--what kind of project will make you jazzed to work on it?? what will activate your hyperfixation muscles, or your tunnel vision? i don't just mean the topic, but all the other stuff that goes into a research project--how will you take your notes, what objects will you consider, how will you be looking at them, on and on.
