I had a good first week on the grant. Tuesday ended up being a snow day for LG, so not optimum (I can do some amount of work while she's around, but it's really not the same quality as having the house to myself). Friday was a campus day (I was there 11-4 with nonstop meetings/appointments.) But over the course of the week, I wrote on Shiny New Protect #1 daily. I also sent off an essay revision, which required a fair amount of revision and retooling. I did some domestic work (cleaning and paperwork) though not as much as I'd planned. That is, I think I found a pretty good pace.
I was privy to a conversation the other night--academic women talking about the difficulty of getting work done while mothering (on the one side) and others talking about the usefulness of the NCFDD program and the like (on the other side). And what occurred to me is that (a) neither of those is my narrative and (b) it seems increasingly that having an "ordinary" narrative of balanced work life feels taboo. If we're moving away from the problematic 'you can't get tenure unless you work [fill in the blank of high hours] per week,' I think we've swung far in the other direction of the difficulty of doing work (and by work I mean research, that is the work that we are really paid for and required for promotion). Maybe this isn't broadly true, but it's certainly what I see in my own program.
While I'm not one of those prissy writers I know who requires long expansive time of retreats and hours of silence to get work done--I mean, I did my daily writing on a Whole Foods grocery bag because I'd forgotten my notebook on Friday--I also see that freeing up mental space (by not teaching, by minimizing email checking and service obligations, etc) is unquestionably valuable to beginning a project. This is the first time in years, I think, that I can just read around and see what happens. That is, I can always work on my research, even in those fifteen minutes here and there. But that's unquestionably a different kind of work, more about maintaining skills than it is doing the "deep work" of asking the hard questions. I don't know, honestly, that I've done this since graduate school.
So starting Tuesday, I'm going to build in an hour per day of unstructured reading time (I say reading, but one of my plans here is also to look at art books and maybe even watch experimental films). I'm excited.
I was privy to a conversation the other night--academic women talking about the difficulty of getting work done while mothering (on the one side) and others talking about the usefulness of the NCFDD program and the like (on the other side). And what occurred to me is that (a) neither of those is my narrative and (b) it seems increasingly that having an "ordinary" narrative of balanced work life feels taboo. If we're moving away from the problematic 'you can't get tenure unless you work [fill in the blank of high hours] per week,' I think we've swung far in the other direction of the difficulty of doing work (and by work I mean research, that is the work that we are really paid for and required for promotion). Maybe this isn't broadly true, but it's certainly what I see in my own program.
While I'm not one of those prissy writers I know who requires long expansive time of retreats and hours of silence to get work done--I mean, I did my daily writing on a Whole Foods grocery bag because I'd forgotten my notebook on Friday--I also see that freeing up mental space (by not teaching, by minimizing email checking and service obligations, etc) is unquestionably valuable to beginning a project. This is the first time in years, I think, that I can just read around and see what happens. That is, I can always work on my research, even in those fifteen minutes here and there. But that's unquestionably a different kind of work, more about maintaining skills than it is doing the "deep work" of asking the hard questions. I don't know, honestly, that I've done this since graduate school.
So starting Tuesday, I'm going to build in an hour per day of unstructured reading time (I say reading, but one of my plans here is also to look at art books and maybe even watch experimental films). I'm excited.
That sounds exciting and fun – I'm happy for you to be on this path and interested to hear what percolates up for you in terms of discoveries and areas of inquiry.
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