Ep. 82 - A Better Way to Think About Summer Writing Goals

In this re-released episode, I explore a radically different way to think about time and procrastination—one that offers more freedom, not less. Inspired by Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, this episode dives into why most time management advice fails us, and what to do instead.

You’ll learn how to “procrastinate better” by focusing on what truly matters, how to avoid falling into the Planning Fallacy trap, and why saying “no” to good opportunities might be the key to real progress. 

Whether you’re heading into summer with big writing goals or just trying to get through your to-do list without burning out, this episode offers thoughtful, practical strategies to help you do less—and accomplish more.

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Transcript

Hi there, writers! 

Today I am re-releasing an episode I did on time management a couple of years ago.

Now that summer has finally arrived, I think it’s an opportune moment to think about how we deal with the open-ended months ahead.

The last episode of Your Words Unleashed featured an interview I did with sabbatical coach Dr. Bethany Wilinski. 

If you haven’t yet, please tune in to our conversation. 

Bethany offers many great suggestions for how to think about using open, unstructured time in ways that are very applicable to summer.

One of the most important points she makes is that if you take a real break and fully rest, you will be able to get back into your work and potentially be even more productive.

Over the next three months, you can truly rejuvenate yourself while still meeting your own writing goals. 

But, in my experience, this can only happen if your goals are realistic and well-thought out.

Way too many academics see the time stretching out ahead of them and then set outrageous goals for themselves that they will invariably not be able to meet.

Then they get disappointed in themselves and feel a sense of regret and personal failure, when really it was that their goals were too big to start with! 

For example, one of my clients is currently on sabbatical in another country. They run their own research lab back home and don’t think they’ll be able to get any writing done once they return to their faculty position.

When we started working together, initially thought they would not only complete a solid book proposal, but also write their entire book from start-to-finish in a four-month span. 

I want to encourage all of you at this point in early summer when the months seem to spread out leisurely ahead of you to not fall prey to the Planning Fallacy. 

You know what I’m talking about. It’s the universal tendency to underestimate how much time it will actually take to accomplish something—especially a large writing goal that involves many different tasks.

Literally each and every one of us underestimates how long things take to accomplish. Just this past month, at least five of my coaching clients have had to push back their sessions because they weren’t able to meet their goals.

And, we often don’t factor in other life situations that will take up our time and energy like teaching or getting sick or taking care of our families or traveling that will extend the amount of time you actually need. 

Kerry Ann Rockquemore, founder of the National Center for Faculty Diversity and Development, has written that you should take whatever time you think something will take and multiply it by 2.5 X to come up with a more reasonable expectation.

It seems like every academic year is harder than the last, but this past one has really taken the cake.

Numerous clients of mine are grappling with the loss of important, meaningful grants that have forced their research and careers onto a completely different course. 

A good friend of mine works as a department administrator at Harvard and the chaos, uncertainty and stress that people are feeling there is beyond measure.

Hopefully things are not quite as chaotic on your campus. With summer getting into full swing, I truly encourage you to take some real time off.

The full transcript of this episode can be found at YourWordsUnleashed.com/82.

Hi writers! How are you doing this week?

If you’re like me, you’re constantly try to find ways to get more efficient at things so you can cram more into your day and feel some sense of control over your life!

It’s so easy to lose momentum with your writing when things gets too hectic.

And trust me, it’s not just you that’s feeling like you’re falling behind. It’s everyone.

On today’s episode I’m going to be talking about a different, and potentially better way to think about time and how we can release ourselves from fixating on efficiency and productivity.

It’s inspired by a beautifully-written, thought-provoking book by Oliver Burkeman called Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals.

You can find the full transcript of this episode at YourWordsUnleashed.com/29.

Embracing a Finite Life

Let me start by saying that I absolutely love trying to figure out the best ways to utilize limited time and energy.

I do this for my own sake as well as for that of my clients.

My philosophy is that book writing happens best when you schedule it, commit to it, and prioritize it as you would a doctor’s appointment.

And even with that philosophy in place, I’ve had a hard time fitting everything in.

So let me talk a bit about why Burkeman’s book has completely turned my notion of time management on its head.

His title derives from the amount of time that most humans spend on earth, which is only 4000 weeks.

When you count time in this way, our lives seem so short and so limited, don’t they? And that’s exactly his point!

You see, Burkeman used to be a productivity guru who wrote about efficiency and life hacks, which actually made him deeply anxious.

He came to realize that nearly all time management advice is just geared towards trying to pack MORE into your schedule rather than prioritizing what you actually care about.

The book’s main point is that time is a finite resource. 

And because it’s finite, we definitely won’t be able to accomplish everything we want to in a day or even in our lives.

Ironically, accepting this fact actually frees you up to pursue the things that ARE most important to you.

In his words, “a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. 

Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all.” Unquote (p. 32)

Now that is a harsh message, but very liberating at the same time. At least it is to me!

Because the goal then is not about making sure we cross everything off of our to-do-lists, since that’s literally impossible.

It’s about taking a more mindful and intentional approach to managing our time so that we can lead more purposeful and fulfilling lives.

How to Procrastinate Better

So now that I’ve set it all up, I want to talk specifically about the points he makes in Chapter 4, which is entitled “Becoming a Better Procrastinator.”

Don’t you love that? The basic premise of this chapter is that because our time is finite, we are inevitably going to procrastinate on some things.

He writes, “the point isn’t to eradicate procrastination, but to choose more wisely what you’re going to procrastinate on, in order to focus on what matters most. The real measure of any time management technique is whether it helps you neglect the right things.”

In other words, the goal is not to stop procrastinating, but to figure out the best ways to do it.

Doesn’t that in itself make you breathe a sigh of relief? It’s like being given permission to not have to try to do everything.

So let’s talk about the three main suggestions that the book gives for procrastinating better.

1) Pay Yourself First

Number one is to pay yourself first! This essentially means putting your own long-range goals and priorities first very proactively.

You may have heard this phrase used in other realms, particularly with finances.

When it comes to money, it’s like when you get paid you immediately take some of your paycheck and put it towards things like a retirement account or paying off debt. 

The point is that you’re doing this regularly BEFORE you run out of funds. And if you plan to do this from the outset, you don’t even miss the money.

The same logic applies to time.

Burkeman writes, “If you try to find time for your most valued activities by first dealing with all the other important demands on your time, in the hope that there’ll be some left over at the end, you’ll be disappointed.”

Many academics choose to pursue a scholarly path due to the flexibility this job offers around time and the ability to set your own schedule.

The problem with this flexibility is that the work never ends. 

People have flexibility to pick up their kids from school or make medical appointments during the week but they often end up working at night or on weekends to make up for it.

And once you become a faculty member, there are so many demands on your time and pressing deadlines that come from teaching and from service and committee work.

This means that the projects you find personally meaningful but feel less urgent—including things like book writing and hobbies or creative endeavors—often end up falling off your to-do list.

When you pay yourself first, you intentionally devote some amount of time each day to the activity you value KNOWING this means you won’t get to something else.

Maybe you don’t answer student emails right away or you prep for teaching an hour or two before class instead of the day before.

But if you’re not intentional about putting your writing first, it’s very likely not going to happen until it does start to feel urgent.

And that can bring about a lot of fear and panic instead of satisfaction.

This is why I encourage my clients to talk about their writing time in proactive terms as something they’re CHOOSING to do over other things.

My clients often say things like, “I’m going to carve out some time or find some time for writing this week.”

This is not paying yourself first! 

Instead, I encourage them to intentionally reframe this thought to, “I’m going to treat my writing time as non-negotiable this week because it’s important to me.”

2) Limit Your Works in Progress

So now we get to Burkeman’s second principle for procrastinating better, which is “limiting your works in progress.”

This essentially refers to not committing to too many different projects at the same time.

People do this so to create the sense that they’re making progress on a number of different things.

Scholars often commit to too many different projects because they are constantly being evaluated on incredibly vaguely defined standards for research, teaching and service.

There is a constant need to have things in the publication pipeline and to show that you’re a good colleague. 

Plus, it can be flattering to be asked to join a research collaboration or take part in conference panels or workshops, especially if they’re offering some funding, right?

These opportunities can easily lead to other obligations like being asked to submit a chapter to an edited volume (which is never a great usage of your time, in my opinion). 

And not only are they flattering, but junior scholars in particular tend to say yes to everything out of fear that the opportunity won’t arise again (which is also not true).

The obvious downside to taking on too many different projects at once is the high potential of making progress on none of them.

Or, it can become like a game of Whack-a-Mole, where you are constantly just trying to make the next deadline rather than being intentional about how you’re using your time.

One strategy Burkeman recommends is to have no more than THREE on-going projects and that you have to fully complete one before you’re allowed to take on another.

This might mean that you pull out of certain projects you’re doing out of obligation or that you don’t find fulfilling.

Yes, you’re allowed to do this, and no, it will not taint you forever as a flakey person if you do it with grace and compassion for your collaborators.

I myself just made the very difficult decision to end a research collaboration I’ve been part of for the past decade.

Now that I’m no longer in academia, my motivations for doing research have shifted enormously.

Even though I greatly respect my colleagues and fully support their success, I realized that I need to be putting my time and energy towards the things that serve me now.

And I also know that if I continue on with this project, I will eventually become resentful and that’s not fair to other people.

I recently saw a social media post that said, “If we don’t say yes authentically, we say yes resentfully, and that leads to far more problems than if we’d said no in the first place.”

I fully agree with this.

3) Resist the Allure of Middling Priorities

Okay, so now we get to the third principle for procrastinating better, which Burkeman calls “resisting the allure of middling priorities.”

He borrowed this idea from a story attributed to Warren Buffett. 

According to this story, Buffett said that we should make a list of the top 25 things we want out of life and then arrange them from the most important to the least.

The top five are the ones we should be prioritizing. Interestingly, he believed the remaining 20 should NOT be considered second-tier priorities. 

Instead, they’re things we should actively avoid doing at all costs because they will distract you from doing the activities that matter most.

This is another way of thinking about boundaries.

In academia, there’s a lot of seemingly good opportunities that can be easy to say yes to.

We often say yes because we want to be polite or because it makes the most strategic sense in terms of staying on the good side of your department chair or your dean. 

We might say yes out of obligation or because it seems convenient.

In my own case, I once said yes to taking part in an international research collaboration with someone I had certain doubts about.

However, I convinced myself it was a good opportunity because we had overlapping interests and this person brought grant money. Plus, he assured me it wouldn’t be that much work.

What ended up happening was that for more than a year, I served as an unpaid project manager.

I dealt with endless grant-related issues, spending many hours meeting administrators on my campus, hiring RAs, setting up payroll, etc.

And in the end, I never even got a publication out of it.

This is why when you say yes to a commitment, it needs to be something that truly fulfills YOUR needs and priorities.

So here’s an exercise for you. 

Whenever you are asked to do something and your inclination is to just say yes, finish the following sentence: I’m choosing to say yes because _______ (fill in the blank).

Then assess your reason.

If it’s a “should” or comes from a feeling of obligation, those aren’t good enough reasons to spend your precious time on them.

Or if you do say yes, make sure that it’s a “one and done” situation.

Remember that if you don’t say no to good opportunities, you’ll never have the time to pursue the great ones.

Summing It All Up

So let’s sum it all up.

In essence, we need to accept that our time is limited and finite. 

Once we do that, we are free to pursue the things that are most personally meaningful.

When it comes to procrastination, it’s not necessarily a problem that needs to be overcome because we all do it in some form.

Procrastination can actually be a valuable tool for managing time and making better decisions if we do it intentionally.

However, there’s a fine line between healthy procrastination using the principles I gave earlier and avoidance.

It’s important to still have clear deadlines and to recognize when you’re procrastinating out of fear or anxiety, in which case I would suggest you listen to podcast episode #10 on Befriending Your Inner Critic.

The main thing to keep in mind is that trying to pack more stuff into your day causes overwhelm.

So the better thing to do is to put a strict limit on your tasks by making sure they fall in line with the things you value the most.

I hope you’ve found these ideas as helpful as I have. Now go procrastinate better!

And, I always forget to ask people to do this, but I would like to ask you for a favor. 

If you like this podcast, please consider going into your Apple podcast app and giving me a five-star review. It helps people find the podcast and provides more visibility in their recommendations.