How to get research done even when you think you have no time

We live in a very bureaucratic world, where productivity is measured by the amount of busywork you are able to complete, even though you may not realize that in doing this, you are actually giving away your time for free. 

 For a busy academic, there are so many things that make demands on your time: teaching, administrative work, community outreach, supervisions, meetings for everything under the sun, building industrial connections, and of course, doing everything else you are supposed to do to keep up with your identity as a scholar/scholar-practitioner.  

Here, I am going to talk a bit about the hacks in getting research and research writing done even when you feel overwhelmed and not quite up to it. This is something I am grappling with as there is now a 500% increase of demand on my time compared to last year. Regardless whether you are teaching two courses or four courses a semester, there are ways to still keep research going, even if you think what you are doing seemed petty or negligible. As someone who never thought she would see the day when she could do 100 strict pushups in a single workout session, I can attest that tiny increments go a long way. Here are some thoughts:

1. Whether it is for 10 minutes or 30 minutes, block out time needed to work on any aspect of a research project you want to get through. Sometimes it may mean working out what your priorities are. If you are new and do not have too many projects beyond your PhD, then look at what you can do with the PhD thesis/dissertation. This is not a theoretical idea as I have myself done this, whether as a PhD student or as a busy lecturer. This trick even allowed me to revise and publish an article (in a respectable journal) when I had to teach up to 12 hours a week (excluding prep and other admin work involved in managing the courses), in addition to other responsibilities. And this was when I was fairly fresh out and relatively inexperienced in both teaching and publishing.

2. As a professor told me (and the others) once, there is no clear sky day, and if you wait for that to happen, you will never get anywhere. A clear day is just an excuse to not get started. Just find the time to write, even if you write nonsense, amid all that interruptions. You can also just refuse to answer to demands on the time you have set aside for yourself to plan out your research, or write up your research. Unless it is a life and death situation, nobody deserves an immediate response. You will feel better returning to these demands after doing what you have set aside time to do what you have to do. You might even feel less stressed out. Feeling resentful of the demands on your time is also a contributory factor to that burnout condition.

3.  When you find yourself overwhelmed by a bunch of administrative work or dealing with students, just take a pause, calm down, and then sit down to think about your research. Read up on something related to your research, and make notes to keep your thoughts moving. You might even find this therapeutic. I did this even on the first week of teaching when prep is heaviest, students the most confused (in my case, it is because I am introducing them to a lot of new things), and every technical problem you can think of is occurring. We actually have a lot more down time than we realize; it is just that we don't bother to pay attention to how we really spend our time. Often, busyness is but a distraction from dealing with another even more challenging and uncomfortable task: working on your research or writing it down.

4. Set a deadline for yourself and strive to meet it - you may fall short but you would be surprised at how much you got done in attempting to meet that deadline (I've done that multiple times myself).

5.Find hacks around other work that you have to do - you might not realize that the way you had been working is inefficient and time consuming (both of which could lead to burnout). Discuss with your colleagues about better ways around doing something. Just because someone has done it that way since before you were born, that does not mean one has to continue on that set path. Most of the time, people choose inefficient ways of doing things over having more time because the former is just more comfortable (humans are not rational creatures). You can also consider time-boxing how much time you are spending on a task (professionals who charge by the hour do this).

See if any of these could help. I am writing this as much for myself as for whoever else that might be reading this. If you develop better empathy for yourself, you will find yourself more empathetic to those around you. If you do not value your own time, or see value in what you do, no one else will.