I’ve gotten the advice that you should write the kind of thing you’d like to read. Presumably, the world is vast enough that if you like it, others will too.1
I like reading the kinds of essays I normally feature here! But if I’m being honest I don’t always have the brainpower to get through continuous prose that builds a complex argument. (I spend enough time doing that in my day job.) What I will always read, no matter my mental state, are a) lists of culture recommendations, and b) behind-the-scenes looks at how other people spend their time, money, and energy.
My obsession with the latter is partly a function of extreme nosiness. Sometimes, it’s also about insecurity: Is everyone else working more than I am? At least I’m not spending hundreds of dollars a week on a juice cleanse! But beneath those more petty motivations, I’m also genuinely curious about questions like how creative work happens, what more productive people know about time management that I don’t, and what our decisions about how to spend limited resources say about who we are and what we value.
I’m going to take the leap and assume that at least a few of you share my fascination with what other people do all day. So, here’s a recent week-in-my-academic-life. Follow along as I take my first tentative steps toward a new research project, use reality TV to teach my students about marriage, and, well, do a lot of reading.
It’s far from comprehensive—I promise I did more work this week than I wrote about below!—but it hits the highlights without (I hope) getting too repetitive. Nor was this week in any way “typical,” but that’s largely because no two weeks look all that similar for me – a feature of professor life I very much enjoy.
If you’d like to see more of this kind of thing, let me know via the “like” button! Feedback is always welcome, but especially so when I’m experimenting with something new. I’ll return to “regular” programming soon.
Monday
8:30am – First things first: mapping out the day. I made a loose plan during my weekly planning session last Friday afternoon, but inevitably things have shifted. Case in point – I was scheduled to visit a lunchtime colloquium for sociology majors today, but it’s been canceled. Gotta figure out what to do with the extra hour that just opened up.
8:45am – Struggling to pick which journal article from a long-and-growing list to read first. While I wait for feedback from colleagues on my book manuscript, I’m trying to get a jump on planning my next research project. Right now, that mostly means reading. I just placed a big book order, but while I wait for those to come in, I’m working through articles I’ve saved to Zotero. Unfortunately, the rate at which I’m adding articles to my TBR queue is currently far outpacing my actual reading.
After I finish reading and typing up notes on a few articles, I take a crack at drafting a mock grant application – essentially, a one-page overview of what this (still hypothetical) study is about, why it matters, and what specific research questions I’m trying to answer. I wouldn’t normally attempt something like this at such an early stage in a qualitative project, but it’s the homework for a working group I’m part of. By the end of an hour, I have a 350-word draft – not an especially good one, but the barrier between “nothing” and “something” is always much harder for me to jump than the one between “something” and “something better.”
1:00pm – I give the conference application I’ve been working on over the last couple weeks one more read-through before hitting submit. It’s just a short abstract, and the conference organizers have explicitly said they plan to accept just about everyone who applies, so I’m not too nervous.
1:30pm – Time to dig through my Dropbox to find the slides for a talk I last delivered about a year ago. I’ve got a virtual talk coming up next week, and my plan is to present an updated version of this one. Scrolling through the deck, I’m pleasantly surprised to see that I’ll need to make fewer changes than I’d feared. Preparing for speeches – making slides, coming up with talking points – is among my least favorite tasks. I don’t mind the actual speaking part, believe it or not. It’s just the preparation that tends to trigger my worst procrastinatory impulses.
Tuesday
9:00am – Off to a later start than usual, as I was on dog-walking duty this morning. I’m also going to need to pare down my ambitions for today to make room for an unexpected trip to the vet.2 I decide to focus on revising and expanding that mock grant proposal I started yesterday. When I reread the draft, I reluctantly notice that the whole first paragraph needs to go – it’s pointing me in the wrong direction. Because I can’t bear to kill it entirely, I move it into my “scrap text” file. More often than not I won’t end up using the verbal detritus that ends up there, but it feels better than just throwing wasted effort straight into the metaphorical bin.
10:30am – Now it’s time to explore the U.W. student jobs board. I’m hoping to hire someone to make the tables and graphics for my book look more professional – my design skills are limited to moving shapes around in Powerpoint and getting Excel to generate me some charts.3 I could take the time to learn Canva or some such, but this feels like a task ripe for outsourcing. I’ve heard that this jobs board is a good way to find local students. I put together a post, making a few wild guesses as to what a reasonable wage is and how many hours the project will take, and hope for the best.
1:45pm – Arrive at my campus office and check the mailbox, pleased to see it overflowing with books. One of the best parts about being a professor as opposed to a grad student is having a book budget (I’m joking, but only kind of). I placed an order last week for seven books I suspect will be relevant for my next project and take my time unboxing them.
3:50pm – I walk across campus to set up for my 4pm lecture class. It’s Halloween, so I’ve got candy to pass out to the students. Butterfingers are surprisingly popular. This lecture is a fun one, in part because I start by showing a clip from Marriage or Mortgage, the Netflix reality show where a real estate agent and wedding planner compete for a couple’s business. When I poll the students, they predict that most of the couples will choose to put their nest egg toward a down payment rather than a blowout party. They’re wrong, which makes a good segue into our first topic for today: if marriage is no longer seen as “necessary”—for having sex, living together, having children, etc.—why do so many people still aspire to it? And why do they want a big wedding in particular?
7:00pm – Dinner at one of my favorite restaurants downtown with my husband and a visiting couple. My department has made her a job offer, and we’re now in “sell” mode trying to convince her and her partner to accept. I can’t help but think back to the weekend, not so long ago, when I was in her shoes.
Wednesday
8:45am – More reading, this time one of the books I picked up yesterday: Kate Henley Averett’s The Home School Choice, an interview study of homeschooling parents in Texas. Some are conservative Christians, others far on the opposite side of the ideological spectrum, but both groups are motivated to homeschool in part because they disapprove of the way gender and sexuality are handled in public schools. I underline furiously.
10:30am – Back to working on this grant proposal. Fortunately, today I feel like it’s finally coming together. I’ll probably give it one more edit before I circulate it to the working group for feedback, but I’m pleased. There’s a LOT still to figure out, but my vague topic ideas are at least coalescing around specific research questions.
1:15pm – I walk to the public library after lunch, hoping the exercise and time outside will save me from an afternoon energy slump. It mostly works! I spend a few hours working on data analysis for a collaborative project. It’s been on the backburner for a couple of months while a team of RAs worked on coding the interview transcripts, but they’re winding down now. My job is to adjudicating coding disputes (i.e., disagreement among coders). It’s tedious work, but there’s something satisfying about making an executive decision about whether and how to code the data.
5:00pm – Clearing out the email that’s accumulated in the past day, including an update from my RA. Her project management skills are far superior to mine, so it’s easy to quickly tick through the outstanding issues I need to weigh in on. We’ll meet in person tomorrow, but I appreciate the lead time to reflect.
Thursday
8:45am – Today I’m reading Margaret Hagerman’s White Kids. It’s fascinating, and super relevant for the project I’m imagining. Alas, I go down a long rabbit hole trying to guess which “medium-sized midwestern city” Hagerman conducted her research in. I have my suspicions, but no concrete proof.
10:30am – More code adjudicating. The RAs added “flag” codes wherever they weren’t sure about how best to categorize a piece of text, or when two coders disagreed. There were about 300 when I started yesterday, and now we’re down to less than 200. Progress!
12:30pm – Eating a tasty salad while listening to a colleague present her research at a departmental brown-bag.4 Most weeks, the topic is pretty far afield from my own work, but today there’s a fair bit of overlap—it’s on work/family ideology, albeit in South Korea—so I pay extra close attention.
2:30pm – Prepping for this afternoon’s lecture about reproduction and pathways to parenthood. Each time I teach this course (I’m on round 3), my prep time tends to go down a little. I make some tweaks to my slide deck – clarifying ambiguities, making slides look a little less cluttered – but my main objective is just to refresh myself on the topic and review my notes. I don’t script my lectures, in the sense of writing down everything I plan to say, so it’s important that the main points are top of mind. Inspired by the earlier workshop, I decide at the last minute to add some additional content on global fertility trends, including what’s known as “lowest-low” fertility in places like South Korea.
This post is getting long, so I’ll close out here. If you enjoyed this, hit that “like” button, as the Youtubers say, so I know whether to make this kind of thing a recurring feature.
That seems sound, but what happens if truly no one else is interested? That’s gotta do a number on one’s self-image…
Don’t worry, Winston is fine, it was a false alarm.
If you think you might be that person, please reach out!!
Basically, a BYO lunch workshop where faculty and grad students gather to take turns presenting and giving feedback informally on each other’s work-in-progress.