Resources, Tips, and Tricks
on Academic Productivity & Writing
On Academic Productivity
I often joke that reading about productivity is my favorite form of procrastination. And it's true! As compared to doing academic work (perhaps any work), reading about productivity requires lower effort, is largely immune to guilt (you are reading this book now to work more effectively later!), and is imbued with the boundless optimism (le sorti magnifiche e progressive) that is at the basis of the self-help genre.
And it can be genuinely useful too (especially when you are not a student with infinite work capacity anymore, but a parent with limited time and energy)! Here, I have collected some of my favorite resources (though, of course, I've now forgotten more books and articles than I can remember).
A Few Favorites
Radhika Nagpal, The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life
This article is so good because it touches on so many different aspects of maintaining a good work-life balance (whether you like the term or not) while in an academic career. And these tips are good even when you are a regular postdoc (like myself), and not a tenure-track professor at Harvard (like the author).
Cal Newport, The Study Hacks Blog
This is a great place to learn about fixed-schedule productivity AND the fundamental art of saying no to things (and even kill ongoing projects that are not working) in order to keep efficiency up. Newport has written (several) books on these topics too, but the blog (and this blog post specifically) is a great place to start.
He has a podcast now too (which can be useful, though after a while the most entertaining part is simply listening to him trying to sell you diet cereal during one of the countless ad breaks).
If your institution has a NCFDD membership, you are in luck!
There are so many good resources (videos, slides, transcripts) to support you in every aspect of your academic career (from teaching, to writing book proposals, journal articles, grants, to getting ready foro tenure etc.). Check out their signature webinar "Every Semester Needs a Plan"here.
I've never bought their fancier packages (like the Faculty Bootcamp - I'm not made of money!), but if you have the resources, why not? They offer private yearly memberships too, in case you have 500$ laying around (since I have lot my institutional membership trough UCLA, I confess, I have not been a member).
Robert Boice, Nihil Nimus: Advice for New Faculty Members
As a classicist, the title of this book (nimus? nimus?!) makes my blood curdle (how did this go through several editions and multiple rounds of copy editing?). But the contents are good, and I found the teaching advice particularly effective for avoiding some classic early-career pitfalls (like massively, massively overpreparing while ignoring the needs of the students).
Putting Everything Together!
Everything I've Read
on How to Best Manage your Time in Academia (Slides)
I've compiled a LOT of what I have read/experimented with during the years into this powerpoint presentation (I had originally put this together for some friends). If you want an informal crash-course on everything mentioned so far (and more), this might just be for you.
On Academic Writing
My native language is Italian, and when I first tried to translate my academic prose into English, results were catastrophic. You see, the goal of Italian academic prose, as I understood it, is to build a fortress of subordinate clauses around everything you say, so that your true thoughts remain impossible to grasp (and thus impervious to criticism), and yet your learning comes across as impressive. Academic English, on the other hand, at least ideally, aspires to clarity. Communicating precise facts (ideally) over a nebula of competence. Making an argument (which can be disproven) and all of that. So I spent my doctoral years teaching myself to write again, in English, from scratch, and (perhaps ironically) teaching English academic writing to hundreds of undergraduate students at UCLA (native and non-native speakers alike). Below are some of the resources that helped me, and some that I developed for my students.
Favorites and Resources
Joseph M. Williams, Gregory G. Colomb, Style: Towards Clarity and Grace
I found this book immensely useful, and I based a lot of my teaching off of it. Rather than giving arbitrary prescriptive advice (which, as a linguist, I simply don't believe in), the authors try to explain the expectations and cognitive habits that readers are likely to have when approaching a English text, and suggest strategies to meet them (and thus ensure clear communication). Now I'm not saying you should not buy a hard copy of this extremely useful book, but (in the interest of accessibility) you will see that the pdf gods may be generous to you if you simply google the title.
Style in a Nutshell (Handout)
Joseph M. Williams, Gregory G. Colomb, The Craft of Research
This is a great book to assign if you are supervising a student who is working on a BA or MA thesis for the first time, especially to convey the difference between picking a topic, finding a research question within that topic, and finally settling on a specific problem which they want to tackle in their work.
Joshua Schmiel, Writing Science
As the title indicates, this book is conceived for scientists, and it endeavors to teach them how to convey complex scientific facts in a concrete and vivid fashion (and, most importantly, how to convey to readers how these facts are relevant to them). The advice is useful for all academic writers in general, and since a lot of grant writing in the humanities is pretending that you are writing a hard science grant only your materials are old books and your lab is the library, it can be very valuable for those of us who have to write grant proposals as well.
How to Write an Abstract (Handout)
A really enjoyable and motivating read that will encourage you to form a regular writing habit (even just one or two hours a day), track it obsessively (I never really got on board with this part), and persuade you that more and better ideas will come to you in this fashion than if you sat around waiting for the perfect long, uninterrupted chunks of free time to finally write your book/article/grant proposal.
Florian Schneider, How to do a Peer Review: Do's and Don'ts
Some of the most impactful writing we do as academics is in the form of reviews or feedback to the work of students or other scholars. This is a task that we can either do professionally and constructively, in a way that helps improve the quality of other scholarship and advances the field as a whole, or that we can do grumpily and unprofessionally, dismissing the work of others and making unreasonable requests while hiding behind the anonymity of peer review. Writing constructive and tactful feedback is much harder than being harsh and cutting, and I believe that if you write an unkind and unhelpful review you are simply being bad at your job. This YouTube video by my friend Florian Schneider at Leiden University contains great tips on how to best approach the task of doing a peer review. I particularly love the suggestion that "you should try to be a fan of the work".