When Academics Use Managerial Time

In my work as an academic coach and in my hobby of scrolling through academic Twitter, I experience this often enough to see a distinct pattern: Academics say in one breath that they want to be more productive, and then in the next breath confess their deep despair at their lack of productivity. And the common thread running through these confusing contradictions is their notion of time as managerial time.

Managerial time is deeply rooted in the notion of "time is money". It's a managerial ethos, a legacy of Industrialisation and the assembly line, now passed on to us as ideas of "productivity". Make maximum use of time, create work efficiency, produce more, earn more money. "Bigger, better, faster, more" has been, we can say, the slogan of the last 150 years.

In academia, this managerial notion of time is brought to bear on academics through the idea of "publish or perish". As the number of publications required to secure a job and procure tenure increase, so does the pressure to publish, catalysing anxiety and fears about thinking, experimenting and writing against a ticking clock.

This fear manifests itself in many ways: I've seen a junior academic in panic when he realised that the tenure application was not not far off and he wasn't publishing as quickly as he needed to. I've seen a mid-career academic experience deep anxiety because she had stalled - she wasn't able to produce as much as the others, and her very slow output led to crippling feelings of shame, guilt and eventually anger and depression, which further slowed down her productivity.

The race against time leads to an abomination of writing. Academics can't seem to figure out how to fit their writing into managerial time. How do they fit their thinking, experimenting, creating, reading and writing - nebulous and abstract activities - into the 9 to 5 pace, into the productivity targets they have to meet, and into the race against time?

Perhaps you too are asking, in managerial parlance, how can I "publish more"? How can I "write faster"? How can I "meet my targets" for tenure?

Acknowledge That You Are an Artisan

Nothing reduces pain and anxiety as quickly as the realisation that you aren't a manager and therefore don't have to work on managerial time.

This big change, this stepping out of the productivity vortex, can be so simple. Acknowledging that not only are you not a manager, but that you are an artisan.

Because artisans know this:

1. There are good days and bad days. Some days the writing flows, others it doesn't. There isn't always a good explanation for why this happens, but it does.

2. You aren't in the business of mass production. Mass-produced products are made as quickly and efficiently as possible; artisanal goods are handmade and often take longer to produce. The so-called "luxury of time" is exactly the ingredient needed to develop the groundbreaking ideas that lead to publications in prestigious journals.

So, artisanal time has a different value than managerial time. Whereas managerial time is about fitting more activities and actions into each stroke of the second's hand, artisanal time is about producing while recognising states of flow and yielding to forces greater than oneself.

Adopting artisanal time means acknowledging that academics create unique work products. Every piece of work you write, you conceive and compose from scratch. Every theory and model you develop, you must create from scratch, individually or in small groups of co-authors. And this is all done on a trial and error basis, because each paper is new, every single time. You may get better at crafting the deeper structures of your writing, but basically every paper is a brand new piece of work.

In shifting from managerial time to artisanal time, you acknowledge that while time may well mean money, it also means rest, regeneration and space for creativity. And it's in balancing these two things - production and creation - that we begin to activate artisanal time.

Use Artisanal Time to Stay Sane, to Be Creative, and to Work With Confidence

When you take away the pressure of having to produce-produce-produce at all costs and every second, we can take a breath, rethink what we do, and how. We can start to look for the best tools and frameworks adapted to artisanal time, instead of brutishly imposing the tools and frameworks created for mass production.

Artisanal time leaves space for creativity, for reading, for rest and for reflection. It allows artisans the time they need to regenerate and develop new ideas, while helping you to focus and move forward.

Working on artisanal time doesn't mean abandoning goals or plans and spending the day watching paint dry. It means that when goals and plans aren't achieved, we know how to gently correct the course so that we don't go off track.

Artisanal time helps academics stay sane, be creative, and work with confidence, knowing that there is a plan, but also how to deviate from it and get back on track if needed.

I'd love to support you in resetting your clock this year. I'm running a workshop starting on 10 February that does just that, with an experienced academic, Julien Cayla, and a writer, lecturer and painter, Rachel Kyne.

It's a 12-week workshop where you'll learn the tools you need to keep nudging you forward on artisanal time. And the best part? We're doing it in a group, so we all feel supported and energised to work. And what's even better: There is time for writing built into each session, so you can keep advancing your paper each week. It's your own personal space of 2 hours that you carve out of your schedule each week just to write and learn how to thrive on artisanal time.

Find out more and sign up here for The “Finish That Paper!” Workshop.