Time management for associate professors

I posted something about time management for graduate students and assistant professors, and so now I should write something about associate professors, and that means writing about imposter syndrome.

The presumption, not always true, is that associate professors are oriented toward promotion to full. The advice I’m giving here is oriented toward finding a manageable and sustainable career–whether it’s to get promoted, or to remain at the associate level.

My crank theory is that people who developed a sustainable set of work practices (that is, ones not driven by panic or binge writing) as a graduate student or assistant professor just need to keep doing what they were doing once they get tenure. They’ll face many the same decisions—whether to take on a leadership position in the department, college, or discipline, what the next set of scholarly projects should be, how many new courses to develop—but, if they negotiated those shoals well as an assistant professor, things should be okay.

There is a lot of shaming rhetoric about people who remain at the level of associate professor, and that shaming makes me ragey. An awful lot of departments (not my current one, btw—the full profs have heavy service responsibilities) enable full professors to focus on scholarship because the whole department is functioning on the backs of those “stalled” associate professors. There are lots of reasons that people lose the thread of their scholarly life, many of which I’m not talking about here (ranging from bad, such as a family health crisis, to good, such as deciding that promotion isn’t desirable), but one of them is that there are some very toxic narratives about writing and scholarly productivity.

A lot of people say our world is oriented toward extraverts, but it really isn’t; it’s oriented toward narcissists. A lot of narcissists flame out in grad school; a lot of flame out as assistant professors. But, in my experience, narcissists who make it to associate make it to full.

So, this leaves us with non-narcissists, and why so many really good and smart people who have produced enough good writing to get where they are have trouble producing enough to get any further. One common explanation is imposter syndrome, but I don’t think that’s the problem; I think the problem is how people try to get past it.

Every reasonable accomplished person I have met has imposter syndrome—feeling that they have gotten more rewards and praise than their work actually merits, that they only got where they were through luck. The only people I have ever met who don’t have imposter syndrome are narcissistic fucks. So, there is no “getting over” imposter syndrome. In fact, we are always pretending to be more sure than we are; we fling ourselves into new projects when we don’t know what we’re doing; we make claims we aren’t entirely sure are accurate; we decide we can make a contribution to a field even when we haven’t actually read everything in that field. And people who succeed haven’t done so entirely on merit—only narcissists think that—hard work is necessary but not sufficient for success. People with imposter syndrome are honest about the intellectual precarity of our work; narcissists don’t know they’re imposters, but they are. They don’t know they’re imposters because narcissists can never really look at themselves from the position of a reasonably skeptical group of people who know things they don’t; they dismiss those people as fools. People with imposter syndrome know there is that group, although we don’t always know who they are.

One way that people manage imposter syndrome is through perfectionism. Some people refuse to submit anything for publication unless it’s perfect—that way, no one will expose them as an imposter. These are people who spend years working on things that they refuse to submit until perfect—that is, beyond criticism–, and so they don’t submit it. Or they don’t write at all, and just imagine the perfect thing they would write if they weren’t so swamped by obligations that they keep taking on.

Another way that people manage imposter syndrome (and fear of failure, and various other related issues) is by letting panic take the wheel. People who have succeeded in writing through high school, college, and coursework often have a truncated writing process: they are faced with an assignment, and they first decide on their argument, and then they decide on the organization for that argument, and then they write it out. (A lot of writing teachers think they’re teaching “the writing process” by teaching this linear method. They aren’t.) If you’re not a narcissist, and you’re trying to follow the “process” you’ve been taught, then, when you sit down to write, you’re trying to write, critique, and revise all at the same time.

And that’s how you get a writing block.

One of my crank theories is that some people have gotten to associate professor through generating enough sheer panic to make it past the crunch points. But that doesn’t mean the solution for either associate professors or people who want to mentor them is to panic them. (I’ve had full professors tell me that the reason that associates can’t publish is that they aren’t panicked enough—a sweet example of how Strict Father Morality is a pond into which supposedly lefty academics dip their toes from time to time). People who let panic take the wheel seem to think that people should spend their entire career in a panic in order to produce enough.

A lot of “stalled” associate professors are people who have been given that advice, and told that narrative, and have said, “Fuck that shit.”

And so they should. So should we all. It makes sense to reject a toxic narrative about productivity.

If you’ve never developed a long-term sustainable work practice—if your only method of motivating yourself to write is to be in a white-hot panic about your situation (and it appears that the only other method is to be an asshole narcissist) then the decision to remain a permanent associate professor seems not only sensible, but compassionate to the people in your life.

The problem isn’t that associate professors are insufficiently panicked—the problem is that far too many people promote a writing process dependent on panic and valorize a toxic narrative about success.

Once you get tenure, you get committee assignments. It looks different from the challenges of being assistant, but it really isn’t—you still have to figure out what scholarly projects to pursue, what committee assignments to take, what new classes to develop. The difference is one I have a hard time describing. Despite academics’ reputations for being lefty, far too many academics (including several department chairs I’ve known) have thoroughly embraced the neoliberal narrative of what it means to be a good worker—you throw yourself on the pyre of your own career to meet the standards of “good work” of your institution. You live and breathe in a world of panic, 60-hour work weeks, and self-congratulation for having no boundaries about work.

There is another option. It’s about creating a sustainable relationship to work.

And the first step in that creation of a sustainable relationship to work is stepping away from a writing process that relies on panic. A responsible graduate program would ensure that first step happens in graduate school, but we aren’t in that world (although there are many graduate advisors who are trying to do exactly that).

The best way to respond to imposter syndrome is to stop approaching every step in the writing and publication process as the moment we might be exposed to the world, but to be comfortable with writing shitty stuff, submitting things that someone might slam, and to know that we will never reach a point in our career when we are not being told that what we wrote is shitty by someone. And they may be right. So?

That response involves a lot of possible moves— most of them involve abandoning thinking about each publication process as risking everything, and they mean working because you want the outcomes the work will get, you’re interested in the crafting of the work, you want others to know about these insights you have. It also involves breaking the writing process into at least three different kinds of work that don’t happen all at once—creating, critiquing, revising. It involves walking away from perfectionism. It involves rejecting (and getting help rejecting) toxic narratives about how much we should be working; it involves finding allies and mentors. It doesn’t necessitate giving up on scholarship, although that might be a viable and joyful choice (some people decide they really love administration, for instance), and it certainly doesn’t necessitate living life in a state of panic.

Time management for assistant professors

weekly work schedule

In an earlier post, about time management for graduate students, I mentioned that there is a limit as to how much a person can write in a day. I also think that a lot of people get burned out working day after day on the same topic, and, if they don’t get burned out, they lose their ability to think critically about what they’re writing. Some people manage that second problem by working on multiple projects at the same time. When they just can’t work on, they work on that for the next three weeks or so, and then come back. I can’t do that.

In many fields, a graduate student teaches one class (perhaps two), is on very few committees, and has one or two major scholarly obligations (finishing the dissertation and trying to get something published). The kinds of classes that graduate students teach often have fairly established syllabi (or, at least, course requirements).

There’s a post here where I talk some about the challenges. The time management challenges for assistant professors are, I think (and I was an assistant professor for a long time—at three different institutions), very different from either graduate student or full professor, but they are much like the issues for associates (with a big exception I’ll mention).

These challenges are: much more open-ended teaching opportunities, the vagaries of establishing a professional identity, service requirements, multiple scholarly obligations, and (if it wasn’t already a challenge in graduate school) often a family or just very different sorts of living conditions.

Perhaps somewhat paradoxically, one of the challenges of being an assistant professor is the freedom regarding teaching. Often, departments rely on new hires to create new courses, modify curriculum, or in other ways be the innovators. There are good reasons for that reliance—assistant professors are likely to be trained in ways that are very different from the older faculty, simply because they were recently at a very different program. It can be tempting to create too many new courses—a strategic choice is to spend the first year creating a repertoire of courses, and then tinkering with them for a while. It can be intoxicating to teach entirely new ones, to have the chances to work in programs (such as honors or mentoring programs) that are often overload.

There’s a similar problem with service—assistant professors want to make themselves central to the department, and want to be liked. It’s important to make strategic choices about obligations. And, it’s also important to keep in mind that women and POC get a lot more pressure to take on service-heavy responsibilities, for both good (representation) and bad (tokenism) reasons. Learning to say, “I’d love to do that after I have finished my book” (or “enough for tenure” or “have tenure”) in a genuinely enthusiastic way can be very useful.

It’s important to go to conferences, since it’s good to network (find other scholars working on similar projects, find out who might be a good co-panelist, co-author, co-editor of a collection), and also good to get a sense of who people are citing a lot, where the field appears to be going.

But it’s often hard to figure out which conferences, how many, and it isn’t a good idea to spend a lot of time writing paper conferences that aren’t candidates for articles or chapters. Conferences used to be good for chatting with editors (to try to figure out if a project has a market), but presses are attending fewer conferences, so it’s hard to say.

Many students (especially ones who took some time between grad and undergrad) have children in graduate school; many don’t until they’re assistant professors. Some people get tired of crappy student apartments and really want a house. Those kinds of choices have some odd consequences—I became much more productive when I reduced my commute, something I hadn’t expected. So, choices to live far from campus (because it’s more affordable, schools are better, or other reasons) can introduce variables.

In short, being an assistant professor is a challenge in terms of time management because, even more than as a graduate student, it involves making decisions without enough information to make good ones.

Being an assistant professor is a challenge in terms of time management because, even more than as a graduate student, it involves making choices without knowing what all the options really are, the relative advantages and disadvantages, the potential consequences. It’s just as much uncertainty as a graduate student, but with more choices.

The most obvious course of action is to get good mentoring, but even that is choosing among several paths in a forest of unknowns. While I feel comfortable giving advice in the abstract, I don’t think I know enough about conditions now for junior scholars to make a lot of specific recommendations. I think it’s useful to have several mentors—someone just one rank above at a different institution, someone high up at your institution, someone just one rank above at your institution.

Because I am none of those things, the advice I’m about to give should be taken with a grain of salt (or more). Regardless of the publication standards for tenure at your institution, publish. I know that isn’t easy, but publication is the scholarly equivalent of “fuck you” money. It gives you the ability to move (which, paradoxically, makes it easier to stay). If you’re at an institution that requires a book for tenure, you have to have a manuscript ready to submit to a publisher by your third year.

A lot of graduate students spend the year or two (or three) that they’re writing their dissertation in a white-hot panic, they develop back problems, they sleep badly. Sometimes there is a six-month period when they are basically alternating between terror and panic. That happens because very few programs prepare students well for that last marathon of dissertation-writing (and an unhappy number of faculty believe that their job is to make sure that last stretch is boot-camp).

As I’ve tried to write about elsewhere, the unfortunate consequence is that people come to rely on a writing process that is driven by panic. That is not sustainable as an assistant professor. But, for some people, that’s the only way they know to write—they only know how to run sprints, and so they spend some amount of time (perhaps the last two years, when it’s publish or get fired) in that same white-hot panic, making everyone around them miserable, but most of all themselves.

That’s an emergency, not a career. The goal during graduate school should be to find a work process that is sustainable for life. But there really isn’t a lot of incentive to do that. Graduate courses inevitably reward treating paper writing as a sprint, and, despite the best efforts of the best advisors, so many documents leading up to the dissertation are written out of panic—because of fear of failure, imposter syndrome, panic-driven writing processes, decisional ambiguity. Good writers, and anyone who gets into graduate school is a good writer, are people accustomed to sit down and produce a product. That they might have to revise, draft, and cut can feel like a failure. Graduate students spend a lot of time trying to reproduce the writing processes that got them into graduate school, even though those processes are no longer working. This problem of remaining committed to panic-driven writing processes isn’t helped by the unpleasant fact that there are advisors who actively work to keep students sprinting (they deliberately work their advisees into panics, they delay reading material, they believe their job is to “toughen up” students, they have panic-driven writing processes and can’t imagine any other).

Since it is so very possible to write a dissertation in a year of sheer panic, as a series of exhausting sprints, a lot of assistant professors treat trying to publish enough to get tenure as the same world of panic and sprinting that got them to finish their dissertation. That is a very bad decision.

Here’s what I wish someone had told me when I got my first job: create the work life you want to have for your entire career; stop treating your work responsibilities as a series of crises.