I started my job prior to finishing my PhD and have still been working to publish (possibly) some of the last work I did in that program. Due to the full time job, all of that writing and revising has been pushed to evenings and weekends. When this started, I was concerned that I would be too exhausted or time-constrained to write well enough to accomplish anything. However, after a successfully revised PhD, an article, and hopefully more on the way, I think the opposite may be true.

With so little continuous time to dedicate to writing, I find myself gravitating towards two good habits I sorely missed while I was a full-time student.

First, I am reflecting on what I want to say more than on the words themselves. I no longer feel pressured to put something on the page as quickly as possible since I know I’ll lack days of time to focus on revisions. Rather than jump in, I’m finding myself waiting days or even weeks to let thoughts and feedback develop into an actual direction I can take in my work. When the time comes to actually put words on the page, I find that they are of better quality than I was able to produce before.

Second, I am less “stuck in my head” as an author. Maybe this is not such a common problem, but since I began grad school I struggled to explain what I did and why in a way others can easily understand. My problem was that I kept assuming that my readers would possess the same experiences as me and kept failing to see these myself make these assumptions during the writing process. As a result, many of my drafts end up being perfectly comprehensible to me, but not anyone else. With my current intermittent schedule, my memory of what I intended to write in the last session has faded enough that I can read what I actually wrote. I’m much more able to catch and correct these readability issues than I was before.

I find it sad that while I was in academia I felt so pressured to write papers that I could not discover how well this type of schedule works for me earlier. I wish that there was more space to slow down, but deadlines are relentless and the pressures of “publish or perish” are felt by everyone. Despite now having the time, I recognize that publishing at my own pace outside of the university is also not feasible. The move towards open-access publishing is great for readers, but an absolute nightmare for independent authors. I make better money than I did as a grad student, but not enough to throw away thousands of dollars for the privilege of a publisher putting my writing on their website rather than my own! Maybe there is an alternative here I’m not seeing, but I suppose I will apply this better understanding of how I write to my blog more than anything else.