I have a confession to make: I seriously, seriously considered skipping AcWriMo this year.
Let me back up for a minute, for those of you new to the rodeo: AcWriMo is a month-long academic writing extravaganza! AcWriMo is the academic’s equivalent of NaNoWriMo, or National Novel Writing Month. Basically, you as an academic pledge to set some writing/research goals for the month (ideally, that stretch you a bit), sign up so that you’re publicly accountable for those goals, track those goals, get encouragement from the community, and celebrate your accomplishments at the end of the month. I’ve participated the past 3 years (2012, 2013, and 2014), and have found it tremendously beneficial each time.
So why, if AcWriMo’s been so good to me, would I consider skipping it?
Well, in a nutshell, I’m exhausted and sooooooo very far behind on absolutely everything in my work life. Teaching an overload is kicking my ass in the most serious of ways. The last time I even thought about research was back in September, when I ambitiously and optimistically set out a research plan for the term, as the picture below shows.
Notice the lone checkmark, in week 1. That’s pretty much the extent of my research accomplishments this term. We’re now in Week 7.
In short, my time has seriously gotten away from me this term, and this makes me very, very unhappy. It’s been so very easy to justify ignoring the research blocks I also optimistically scheduled on my calendar way back in September—there’s always grading, or class prep, or some “crisis” to consume my time. So, what could it hurt to take a year off from AcWriMo, right?
But honestly, I’m a much better, more focused, happier teacher when I’m regularly working on my research. And honestly, there’s no good reason why I’m not prioritizing research. And I know that it’s so very hard to pick back up with the research after a long layoff—and that’s especially true at this point in my project, where the problems are hard and the path ahead is not clear (and the paper/grant rejections have been coming in fast and furious—seriously, it was a rough end of the summer in that regard).
So I decided to go for it and sign up for AcWriMo again, but with the compromise that the theme this year for my goals is what I stated in the title of this post: “baby steps back to research productivity”. My only goal for AcWriMo is a time goal: 30 minutes a day, 6 days a week. Any research counts, whether that’s reading one of the many papers that’s found its way to my “to read” pile, or working on the Simulation Code That’s Still Not Done, or outlining my potential next conference paper, or writing imagined hate mail to the reviewers that have rejected my work lately. (OK, maybe that last one doesn’t count.) One activity that I will definitely incorporate into my research time is to draft my own, private research “proposal” for my upcoming sabbatical, to help me solidify my thinking about what I want to accomplish next year (when I have the WHOLE YEAR to devote to research!). I’ll be tracking my progress on Twitter (@drcsiz) and occasionally here as well.
If you’d like to participate, this link has all the details. If you’re a fellow academic, I hope you’ll consider joining me! Let’s be productive together!
This is what a computer scientist looks like 