" title="Notes from an Accidental Scholar"> Notes from an Accidental Scholar

Dis­claimer: Apolo­gies to those of you who are not Doc­tor Who fans. If you have love for British sci­ence fic­tion that runs the gamut of cheesy to OMG!AWESOME! you should check out the lat­est reboot(s) of Doc­tor Who. It’s on Net­flix and at your local pub­lic library.

So my increas­ingly opin­ion­ated, stub­born, and won­der­ful 2.5 year old daugh­ter is sleep­ing errat­i­cally. Some days she takes her reg­u­larly sched­uled “epic nap” of 3.5 hours, and other days she doesn’t nap at all. This, my friends, is a big prob­lem. I do ALL OF MY WORK when she sleeps. Her naps equal time. No time means no work. No work means I don’t fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. Not fin­ish­ing means I wasted the past 7.5 years on a caf­feine– and whiskey-filled dante-esque descent into mad­ness with­out pay­off. So it’s time to shake up my rou­tine and squeeze more time out of my day, which is not easy when writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion, tak­ing care of a tod­dler, and man­ag­ing my brain so I can keep an even keel through all of it.

The only real rem­edy to this new time cri­sis — besides get­ting my own TARDIS — is to chip some time out of the rest of my day. For many of us, this can seem impos­si­ble. So I’ve devel­oped a strat­egy. I’m not sure how it’s going to pan out, but I have to do some­thing and if you have any fur­ther advice, please share.

Here’s my strat­egy so far:

1. I work one week­end day. My work­week, prior to Nap Break­down 2012, was pretty reg­u­lar. Up by 7, at the gym by 9:30, work for a few hours, then spend time with fam­ily. My evenings and week­ends were free from dis­ser­ta­tion work and I felt like I had a pretty good bal­ance. Now that my work time dur­ing the week is out of whack, I feel like I’m cheat­ing on my dis­ser­ta­tion when I’m doing other stuff. This is not good. It makes me anx­ious and irri­ta­ble when I’m not work­ing and hur­ried and dis­ap­pointed when I do finally get to work. So the week is now my col­lect­ing time for my week­end day. I write when I can, read when I can, and col­lect enough stuff so my Sat­ur­day or Sun­day has all of the ingre­di­ents for a pro­duc­tive writ­ing day.

2. YMCA Child­watch. I’ve men­tioned the YMCA before, but let me just extol it’s virtues here again. I was a mem­ber of the Brook­lyn Y and their Child­watch pro­gram was fan­tas­tic. They gave you two hours of free babysit­ting while you worked out, or, like I did some­days, read qui­etly in a cor­ner. The Down­town Berke­ley YMCA unfor­tu­nately charges for their child watch, but it’s still SO worth it! The staff are highly trained, incred­i­bly nice, and there are plenty of them. My kid has a blast every time she goes. Three days a week, I work­out, two days a week, I sit on the sofa in the lobby to work. That’s an extra four hours of work in my week, and if the kid actu­ally naps that day, I’m way ahead of the game.

3. Get­ting up ear­lier. This is the cra­zi­est habit I’m try­ing to form. Wak­ing up two hours early. That’s right, I’ve been wak­ing up at 5am all week. Now there are a few of you who do this and I used to think you had a meta­bolic imbal­ance or you were witches or some­thing. Need­less to say: I get it now. Wak­ing up before the world is the best Cheat Code out there. The only prob­lem? Actu­ally get­ting your ass out of bed. My “Just go back to sleep voice” — who I sus­pect is my lit­tle hater in dis­guise, is a per­sis­tent bas­tard. “You don’t have to do this,” it says, “You’re so tired. Just sleep a lit­tle longer.” So my con­scious voice has to scream, “SIT UP! WASH YOUR FACE! HAVE SOME COFFEE!” and it’s worked so far. I feel accom­plished before the day starts giv­ing me free­dom to not think about my dis­ser­ta­tion when doing all of life’s other stuff.

So how do you squeeze more time out of your day?

A cou­ple of months ago, I wrote a post about writ­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion as a stay-at-home mom. I get the ques­tion a lot: How do you do it? I’m not sure how to answer it, I mean, I just do it. The obvi­ous answer is the Mr.‘s sup­port. He brings home just enough salary for me to stay home and write with the kiddo. I’m incred­i­bly lucky in that I don’t have to teach and it’s a trav­esty that so many of us bur­geon­ing aca­d­e­mics are left shit out of luck when “acad­e­mia” doesn’t allow room for fam­i­lies. But that’s another post.

Any­way, I thought I’d open the door to a day in the life of a writ­ing mama. I keep a pretty reg­u­lar sched­ule which, for me, is the only way I accom­plish any­thing. This is just what I do and I would love to hear what all you dis­ser­tat­ing mamas do as well.

Daily sched­ule:

5:45–6:45AM: HELLO MOMMY! HELLO DADDY!

6:45AM: Get out of bed

7:01–8:15AM: Cof­fee, Rachel Mad­dow Show, hang out with the Mr., catch up on emails, read daily news, blogs, tweets

8:16–8:45AM: Get dressed for gym, pack snacks for Althea

8:46-11AM: Walk to the Y and drop Althea at child­care (SO AWESOME!), Kill myself on the tread­mill for 40 min­utes, then take Althea to open gym or the playground.

11:01–11:30AM: Head home and shower. Althea gets a snack and watches an episode or two of Maisy.

11:31–3:00PM (give or take 30 min­utes): Althea naps, I work.

3:01–4:00PM: snacks, sto­ry­time, draw­ing, etc. She’s start­ing to play a lot by her­self which buys me another half an hour of writ­ing time.

4:01–5:00PM: Do dishes from the day, tidy, spo­rad­i­cally check email

5:01–6:30PM: Pre­pare and eat din­ner or get take­out. The Mr. comes home.

6:31–7:30PM: Bath­time or play­time (depend­ing on night)

7:31–8:00PM: Bed­time for Althea. It takes this long for dia­per changes, find­ing favorite stuffed ani­mals, and read­ing a bed­time story.

8:01PM-10:00PM: Have a beer and flop down on sofa. This involves lots of sigh­ing. I usu­ally spend a few min­utes of this time orga­niz­ing my work sched­ule for the next day.

10:01–11:30PM: Go to bed and read aca­d­e­mic blogs or Red­dit.

I do this with­out fail Mon­day through Fri­day. It’s pretty fan­tas­tic because I get time with my kid and time with my hus­band. Work hap­pens slowly but reli­ably so I keep a really nice momen­tum. For me, the key is rou­tine rou­tine rou­tine. The much younger me would have hated this life, I thought in order to keep things inter­est­ing I had to be spon­ta­neous. But I have a 30 pound per­pet­ual motion machine of spon­tane­ity, I don’t think I need to insert any more chaos into the equation.

The big secret lies in that 3.5 hour win­dow of writ­ing time. You might think that’s not enough. You might think that the only way to plan to write is to set aside entire 8–10 hour work days. But I learned that I really only have 3–4 hours of solid crit­i­cal think­ing time in a day. Some folks have a bit more, oth­ers less, but in talk­ing with col­leagues and from my own expe­ri­ence, I don’t think any­one can sit and gen­er­ate new con­nec­tions and ideas for 8 solid hours. I work in 25 minute bursts, take 5 minute breaks, and I man­age to get remark­able amounts of work done when I focus my atten­tion that way.

Before hav­ing my kid, I never had this kind of focus. I would spend days doing other stuff and bank my time for long 10–12 hour work days. 10 hours is a lot of time in the­ory, and I had fan­tasies about all of the amaz­ing read­ing and writ­ing I could get done if I just blocked out an entire day. But they were just that, fan­tasies. I can only crit­i­cally think for up to 4 hours, the remain­ing 6–8 hours would inevitably fill with pro­cras­ti­na­tion and guilt. So I guess when peo­ple ask how I write my dis­ser­ta­tion with a kid, I should say, I don’t know how I ever wrote with­out her.

I don’t have much time, so here’s what I’ve been up to:

1. I had an incred­i­ble 90-minute meet­ing with one my com­mit­tee mem­bers about my recent chap­ter sub­mis­sion and I feel like a real, honest-to-god scholar. His feed­back was sup­port­ive, spe­cific, and crit­i­cal — I left his office invigorated.

2. I’m fin­ished with Chap­ter 2 for now. I’ve done all I can is put it on the back-burner and let it sim­mer while I prep for my next chapter.

3. I just fin­ished Caleb McDaniel’s excel­lent post, “The Dig­i­tal Early Repub­lic” on the research data­base meth­ods for find­ing trends in pri­mary sources.

4. Cleaned out my diss drawer in my desk and found a ton of arti­cles I planned to read, but never got to. I have a cold today so I’m going to track them down elec­tron­i­cally so I can read them on my iPad (see above).

5. I really need to stick to my diss map, or at least, keep it in front of me as a reminder of what the hell I’m doing.

When I was 8-years old, Berry Gordy’s Bruce Lee homage The Last Dragon was my favorite movie. I was so in love with this movie that I took kung fu classes, I did fly­ing kicks off my sofa, and I watched Bruce Lee movies with my dad so I could get the references.

This bit of Amer­i­can nos­tal­gia is brought to you by the last day of Aca­d­e­mic Book Writ­ing Month. I first read about AcBoW­riMo on Novem­ber 1 and decided right then and there to par­tic­i­pate. I did it because the dis­ser­ta­tion kicked my ass all over like Sho-Nuff and it was time to declare that I was the mas­ter, not my diss. Now if only I could get that sweet glow while sit­ting at my desk.

As you can see on my counter over there, I only made it to about 1/3 of my whack­adoo 30,000 word goal. But the glass half full ver­sion of this story is that in just one incred­i­bly busy month I have nearly two new chap­ters of my dissertation.

Some responses to this past month address­ing some of the AcBoW­riMo guide­lines:

1. To Word Count or Not to Word Count? In AcBoW­riMo, there was some dis­sent regard­ing the word count goal. In jest: Leave it to aca­d­e­mics to find con­tro­versy in any­thing. I decided to do the word count as a loose bench­mark for me to mea­sure my progress. But I had other bench­marks as well. After talk­ing with a friend about dis­ser­ta­tion goals and progress, she sug­gested a con­cept goal. She works until she gets three ideas or expla­na­tions down on paper. Seem vague? Well, I’m a human­i­ties major so yeah, it’s a lit­tle vague, but it’s also highly ada­p­at­able. I also set time for edit­ing, that way I don’t have pages of word diar­rhea at the end of the month.

2. Com­mu­nity Sup­port. It isn’t hyper­bole when I say I would be NOWHERE with­out the amaz­ing Twit­ter and Google Plus com­mu­nity of schol­ars, writ­ers, par­ents, nerds, activists, et al. My morn­ing rou­tine now includes read­ing the (#AcBoW­riMo) hash­tag on Twit­ter over my cof­fee. Know­ing that I’m not alone in what is often an incon­sis­tent, fit­ful writ­ing process is an incred­i­ble moti­va­tor. So to you all, I do hope you keep the posts com­ing under the new hash­tag #acwri. In addi­tion to read­ing oth­ers’ suc­cesses and slumps, I was account­able to the great wide inter­net. I don’t know about you, but promis­ing a giant word count to hun­dreds of strangers was more moti­va­tion that any­thing my com­mit­tee, hus­band, or brain could ever give me. You all made slack­ing impos­si­ble and you should all get a badge or the Medal of Free­dom or something.

3. Plan. Plan. Plan. This doesn’t mean a minute by minute script of what you should do for the next hour/day/week/month/year. But I found it use­ful to end my writ­ing day with some bul­let points of what to do that day and the next. Also, I use the Pomodoro Tech­nique and the Pomodairo app (Mac and PC) which allows me to label my pomodoros, so I always know where to put my focus for that 30 minutes.

4. Pick­ing up where you left off. I had two dif­fer­ent sets of house­guests this month, a week-long trip to Wash­ing­ton, DC, Thanks­giv­ing, protests, and the flu. These are all some legit rea­sons to aban­don #AcBoW­riMo because I fell behind and my per­fect month of work was sud­denly imper­fect. I learned that all months are imper­fect. Hell, min­utes are imper­fect. But you just deal and then pick up where you left off. I made sure to set aside time to write when my house­guests were here, I worked in DC, and I took time to be sick rather than “pow­er­ing through it” and pro­long­ing the ill­ness until the Spring. If you’re deal­ing with the heav­i­est that life can hurl at you, I highly rec­om­mend Char­lotte Frosts post about work­ing through tragedy.

5. Keep the count. Even though there’s only an hour or so left of AcBoW­riMo here on the east coast, I can say hap­pily that it was awe­some. I plan to keep my word counter over there because I do even­tu­ally need to get to 30,000 words if I’m going to fin­ish my dis­ser­ta­tion. And I love com­ing to my blog and adding to the bar, it’s another moti­va­tor when I’m in the writ­ing muck. I’m also pleased that #acbow­rimo is now #acwri because I want to keep this going, I want to check in with you and I want to read how you’re all doing so long as I can lean on you from time to time.

Thank you so much to Char­lotte Frost and every­one who par­tic­i­pated. This was my best writ­ing month ever, now on to the next one.