kfitz

Getting Back to (My Own) Work

One would think, this many years and books and articles into a writing career, that I might have solved the getting-started problem by now. Or if not the getting-started problem, then at least the keeping-going problem. Not so much, though.

When I was a faculty member, writing often got back-burnered during the semester. Not always intentionally: I’d plan time in my schedule to do some bits of reading and writing intended to keep my projects moving forward, but gradually that time would be overcome by teaching work, chairing duties, committee obligations, and the like. I’d find myself at the end of the semester, at last facing open space in my schedule, and I’d think Okay. Where was I? And inevitably the need to get my bearings in the project again took longer than I wanted, heightening the sense that my limited work time was still being sucked away by things beyond my control.

My current situation is only somewhat different. I’m in a 12-month position now, and while my calendar doesn’t ever really reach those points of hiatus at which all the other obligations fall away, I do have the extraordinary luxury of time away during the summer, a combination of vacation and remote working that allows me to turn my focus at least in significant part back to the thing I refer to as “my own work.”

The challenge I’m facing today, however, is trying to remember what my own work is, and this is where I think I’ve completely blown it in my second year in my new position. My running joke, when people ask me about how my transition to the new job has gone, has been to say something about the shock of finding oneself in a 12-month, 9-to-5 gig after 20 years on the academic calendar, but then to point out that, by way of compensation, I’ve discovered this thing called a “weekend.”

It always gets a laugh, especially among academics: the notion of the weekend is a crazy luxury. Two full days to do whatever you want with! And you get them every week! And that doesn’t even take into account the fact that most of my evenings belong to me as well. Very often, in fact, work can be contained within work hours — an amazing concept, that.

During my first year in the new gig, I worked hard to protect my evenings and weekends, and I mostly did a good job of it, primarily because I was so exhausted from the intensity of the 9-to-5 days. In year two, I’ve found myself a little better adjusted to the rhythm of the days, but (perhaps as a result) I feel as though I’ve gotten declining benefits out of my weekends. A good bit of the problem is totally self-induced: I’ve travelled way too much lately, and a lot of that travel has of necessity spilled over into evenings and weekends. And then there’s been the deluge of personal stuff that has taken up out-of-office time: apartment stuff, moving stuff, life stuff.

So there are perfectly understandable reasons for it, and yet I find myself here, facing a small window in which I can focus my attention largely on writing, with zero sense whatsoever of where I am, and what I should be doing.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a list of small writing projects that need to get done in the next few weeks, articles and chapters that I’ve promised people, the obvious stuff to turn to first. The question, though, is about the overall direction of my writing. Back in October, I sketched out two potential Big Projects that I imagined working on — but now, eight months later, I feel so distant from that moment and those sketches that I cannot imagine being able to pick either project up and get going.

I’m sure that over the next several weeks I’ll either remember what it was I wanted to work on or imagine a wholly new project. My challenge to myself for the coming year, however, is to keep that project in sight. I do not want to convert my evenings and weekends wholesale into just more work time, doing away with the benefits of the 9-to-5 schedule without the compensations of the academic life to balance their loss. But on the other hand, if I can make that work more genuinely “my own” — writing that I’m doing entirely for myself, writing that’s energizing rather than draining, writing that’s even fun — I’m hoping that I might be able to find the motivation to keep it moving forward outside of work.

This post is mostly meant to help me jumpstart finding my focus and generating that motivation, but any suggestions or strategies you’d like to share in the comments would be oh-so-gratefully received…

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