Well, I’m now officially on research leave. In my school at RMIT this is not quite a sabbatical, as it is competitive and you are expected to make a more or less compelling reason for why you ought to receive such leave (primarily through ‘relevant’ research outcomes), but it is a luxury which I intend to enjoy. The main things I intend to do during this leave are simply to read, and to write. More specifically to finish things, I don’t have a problem writing, but I do have major issues with finishing stuff so I have a pile of conference papers that all deserve to be published essays which I intend to work on. Though, of course, I am also dreaming up a pile of new projects to begin to. The trick for me is not to get hung up on what work I finish, but to make sure the stuff gets finished!
I’ve also been thinking hard about how to approach this work. I could set aside hours each day for the writing, and the reading, and the editing, but in my experience this is very unproductive for me. For example I have realised that I write in bursts, and each burst lasts around 20 minutes or so. In that time I can get out 250 to 500 words, depending on the material. So rather than write for, say 3 hours a day, I’m simply setting 400 words. If it comes in 15 minutes, fine, if it takes an hour, fine. That way I can ‘bank’ words, so if today I write 800 then it might not matter that tomorrow (when I’m supervising students) I don’t get the chance to do any writing. This also makes my activities very easily measurable, and while 400 words doesn’t sound like much if I write 400 words a day, 5 days a week, from now till mid December then that’s a lot of essays. This also means instead of sitting at a desk at home for 8 hours a day I can write, then read, and then feel OK about jumping on my bike for a couple of hours. To some structuring my day like this sounds slack, but I know that if I sit down to write all day then I’ll get, say, a 1000 words but over a lot of hours, and that no matter how I structure the time the writing will happen in bursts (just like now, have written nearly 300 words of essay and it was dying so now a burst in the blog).
The other things I’m hoping to do are to return to my online video practice to make quite a bit of work, and to actually start participating in some online conversations around my key areas. I’ve been deathly quiet all year with teaching, administration, family and sneaking in time on the bike, but now hopefully I’ll have enough space to re-engage.
Tags:
Lifes Little Pieces,
practice,
teaching
