Question: I have a book chapter that is in desperate need of revision, but I don’t even know where to start. There is so much it needs that every time I start working on it (which, let’s be honest, is less and less, because I’m so daunted), I’m immediately overwhelmed. I’ve already tried your advice (“How to Stop Writing From the Weeds”) to read through the chapter as if I were an editor and make notes to myself on things to fix later, but there are just so many issues that it’s taking forever, and I don’t even want to look at the thing right now. How do I get this monster under control?

Signed,
Academic Whack-A-Mole

Dear Ac-A-Mole,

This is a glaring flaw in my read-it-through-like-an-editor theory, for sure. If you’re already overwhelmed by a troublesome chapter, giving yourself yet another overwhelming first task is a one-way ticket to Procrastination Station. That’s why I’ve recently developed a workaround for my clients that might also work for you and anyone else who shares this conundrum.

The bad news: You’ll still have to read all the way through the thing you wrote and are dreading reading through. There’s truly no way around that — well, aside from paying someone else to do it for you, but that won’t end well. (And anyway, if you had money to pay a ghostwriter, you’d probably be in a different line of work.) So, yes, you still have to read through your writing and behold all of its multitudinous flaws, and for that I apologize.

Here’s the good news: As you’re reading through, you get to identify 10 — and only 10 — absolute must-fix dealbreakers in the manuscript. They should be the 10 things that, if you resolved them and then someone snuck into your computer in the dead of night and stealth-published the chapter under your name without your permission, you’d still be mortified … but — and here’s the key — you wouldn’t literally die of shame. The piece would still be a mess; however, with these 10 dealbreakers fixed, readers would be able to see what you’re getting at and what the finished piece would accomplish.

In short, with these 10 issues sorted out, your chapter would stop being deadweight holding you back and would become a working draft.

More good news: In taking this initial 10-emergencies-only step, you may inadvertently disappear some of the other problems in the process. Notice I said “initial.” Because of course, you have to do it again. But the absolute best news here is that once you repeat this same process — find the next 10 biggest problems; resolve — a few more times, you may be just about done, without ever really embarking (or feeling as if you were embarking) upon the “major” revision that you were dreading in the first place.

Question: Every time I have a grant application due or a conference talk coming up, my other projects seem to fall off. How do I keep up on my long-term research while still making my short-term deadlines, which never seem to end?

Kindly,
Grant Blinders

Dear General Grant,

Ah yes. Grants, conferences — things with real deadlines attached (and, in the former case, real money) are always going to supersede long-slog projects like journal papers and monographs. The realness and finiteness of said deadlines will trip the adrenaline/dopamine response in your brain, and that will result in a burst of reward-coming-soon productivity. (Disclaimer: I get most of my scientific knowledge from a podcast my daughter listens to, Brains On!, for “kids and curious adults.” If I were a neuroscientist, I’d be too busy writing my $1.5-million grant to answer this question.)

The key in this situation is not to fall into the old trap of thinking, I’ll just set aside my book for now and work on it over winter break. That rarely works, unless you define “success” as devoting the only vacation time you get to work, making yourself exhausted and miserable, and producing exactly the kind of dashed-off writing you bemoan from students.

If you respect the time and intelligence of future readers of your long-term project (and of course you do!), then you want to offer them your best possible work, which means you need to spend a great deal of thought on it over a long period of time. Sure, your brain will usually gravitate toward the short-term reward/fear. But your grant proposals and conference papers — not unlike your course prep and grading — will get done, because they have to.

What you want to avoid is the inverse: never finishing your book because it has no immediate deadline.

Regular readers of this column already know that I recommend working on your research and writing in 25-minute bursts. So here’s what I suggest for those devoting too much time to short-term deadlines at the expense of progress on a big project.

Every workday, devote time to your long-form project first — before you allow yourself to do literally anything else work- or procrastination-related. That means before you check email, before you doom-scroll the news, and even, for those of you who have super-wandering minds, before you drink that first cup of coffee (write while the coffee brews, she said, definitely not from experience).

Literally nobody else on the planet is now prioritizing, or will ever prioritize, your monograph. You are the only one who can (or, to be fair, should). If you repeatedly waste your first-of-the-day energy on tasks that will absolutely get done anyway, you increase the odds that your monograph will never see the light of day.