1. I make a routine of writing for four hours a day, every working day, before I do other kinds of work. Answering emails, refereeing papers and books, attending meetings, preparing classes, and the like, require less brain power, so I have them go last. If you let them go first, they tend to eat up time and energy that is better used on research.
2. I stop working no later 5 pm unless I’m away giving a talk. Work is a 9-5 job.
3. I work from home so I cut down commute times.
4. Luckily for me, my fellow band members are also advanced musicians, so we usually rehearse a new song only once (and sometimes not at all) before we play it live. We had maybe twenty gigs last year (and could have done more but for our schedules), but we rehearsed twice.
5. My job requires less teaching work than most others’. In a normal year, I spend only about 90 hours a year (3 undergraduate classes) inside a classroom. So I have more freedom and time to work on publishing than most academics. I literally spent more time last academic year helping a theater teacher friend by playing guitar for her production of Mean Girls than I did teaching in a classroom.
Thanks for asking!
1. I make a routine of writing for four hours a day, every working day, before I do other kinds of work. Answering emails, refereeing papers and books, attending meetings, preparing classes, and the like, require less brain power, so I have them go last. If you let them go first, they tend to eat up time and energy that is better used on research.
2. I stop working no later 5 pm unless I’m away giving a talk. Work is a 9-5 job.
3. I work from home so I cut down commute times.
4. Luckily for me, my fellow band members are also advanced musicians, so we usually rehearse a new song only once (and sometimes not at all) before we play it live. We had maybe twenty gigs last year (and could have done more but for our schedules), but we rehearsed twice.
5. My job requires less teaching work than most others’. In a normal year, I spend only about 90 hours a year (3 undergraduate classes) inside a classroom. So I have more freedom and time to work on publishing than most academics. I literally spent more time last academic year helping a theater teacher friend by playing guitar for her production of Mean Girls than I did teaching in a classroom.