Category Academic Careers

When researchers ask me how to design their ideal day for academic writing, they often expect a recipe:

Find your peak performance time.

Block two or three hours of uninterrupted writing.

Turn off email, close the door, done.

This can help—but only up to a point.

The real problem usually sits one step earlier:
when your calendar says “writing”, you probably don’t actually know what that means for the specific project in front of you.

And if you are unclear, your brain will respond with the familiar mix of resistance, procrastination, and low-grade guilt.

So before you optimise your routine, let’s do something much more fundamental:
clarify what “academic writing” actually includes in your work, and who you need to be for each part of it.

So, you’ve decided to take back some control of your time — and maybe even carve out a little space for focused work.

But how?

If your calendar already feels like a battlefield of back-to-back classes, spontaneous student emails, grading marathons, and unexpected admin “asks,” it’s not easy to just “make time.”

That’s where time blocking comes in. It’s one of the most powerful tools to help teaching-focused faculty actually get deep work done — even in a schedule that feels packed from dawn to dusk.