Figure out how you work. One of us, for instance, writes best in the morning and maintains a 9-5 approach (or at the most productive worked 6-6 with lunch at the desk) but isn’t much good by late afternoon, which is therefore when to schedule student meetings, grade papers, course prep, and the other stuff that doesn’t require deep thought. Once you know when you work best, protect it vigilantly from all intruders. Others can work in coffee shops, burn the midnight oil, etc. If what you are doing isn’t working, audit your time, see where you are losing opportunity, and try something new. And may we recommend firm rules regarding checking and responding to email and other social media. Remember, many people get no more than 2 weeks vacation a year and don’t get paid for time off. The most straightforward answer to how we have been so productive is that we each maintained about a 50-60 hour work week (not counting evening viewing or any non work-relevant computer use) and took very few hours or days off in the first decade of our careers.

Related to this, procrastinate by doing other work. There are times when your head’s just not into what you’re doing. But if you’re struggling with writing, read, assemble your bibliography or something wholly mechanical like that, compile data, watch and take notes on something, read the trade press, etc.

Be strategic about what you choose to write and where you send it. As you start a project, think about what journal or press you could see it ending up at, and make sure there’s more than just one option there, so it doesn’t get caught in publication limbo. Think carefully about the fit of your article to the journal; many rejections come simply from being a poor match, but this can set publication of your work back by 6 months to a year. Double or triple up by making your big conference presentation this year feed into and inform that article you’re working on, which in turn forms the basis of a chapter for a book. When people ask if you’ll contribute to a special issue or a book they’re editing, think about whether this will help your research profile, or whether it’s time away from it (the latter may well be worth doing, to be clear: but you should go into it knowing that’s what it is).

Always meet your deadlines. On one hand, the more that you miss, the more that you’re required to be late with other things. On the other hand, meeting deadlines gives you capital with presses and journals. Precisely because so many academics are late, when you meet your deadlines, you win editors’ love and respect, which in turn  may lead to them treating your work with more care, trying harder to find reviewers who will be as serious about a deadline as are you, and siding in your favor if you’re in a grey area.

We’re probably writing to an undercurrent of anxiety we witness that holds up R1 jobs as the highest pursuit. This often happens because graduate training only takes place in R1 institutions. R1 jobs aren’t right for everyone and people in R1 jobs aren’t the smartest or best around, even if your advisor suggests that’s the case. R1 jobs are a good fit for people who feel that half of their job performance should be based on their scholarly productivity. But real success is a curious thing. Although we rarely talk about it, if we want to be honest, we’re not curing cancer here. At the end of the day, having a shelf of authored books is only one form of gratification, and not one that keeps you all that warm at night. Though our universities may never acknowledge it, the most significant work most all of us will do is in the classroom, by touching lives and opening up new ways of thinking and understanding the world. Think on these things and make your peace with them in thinking about the version of this career and level of productivity that’s right for you.

Questions? We’d be happy to field them. Or your own suggestions? Please share.

[This post marks the beginning of a new column at Antenna in which a range of authors will discuss issues related to the profession of being an academic – publishing, parenting, pedagogy, “para-academic” professions, prestige, productivity, and many other topics, not all beginning with “p.” We also invite you to pose topics for us, either that you wish to write, or that you’d like to see covered but can’t write yourself. As always, just contact us at antenna@commarts.wisc.edu]

The two of us are often asked how we’ve been so productive and published so much. It’s cute sometimes when people expect a single answer—eat a bunch of cauliflower, sleep with your head on your laptop, write with vetiver incense burning—but below, we’ll offer a few tips, and we encourage others to post their own tips to continue the discussion.

First, figure out what you want this job to be for you and come to terms with the varied expectations. The day-to-day and the measurement of performance in academic careers vary widely. One of us started at a small liberal arts school, where the provost said that the job was half teaching, half service, and that an active publication profile was required (and indeed it was a job whose expectations seemed to add up to more than 100%). A recent memo from one of our Research 1 Dean’s, related to “buying” oneself out of teaching (for those privileged to have grants) catalogued the university’s expectation as 50% research, 40% teaching, 10% service. While the actual make up varies over a career (10% service would be a dream), recognize that jobs at different places require very different levels and types of publishing.

What jobs are available in a given year and the specializations most sought are beyond anyone’s control. If you don’t initially land in a job that fits you, you need to do all that is expected in that job and develop the profile required for the job you want so that you look like you fit when it comes along. In other words, you will need to publish at the rate and the kinds of things that your hoped-for next job will want, not just at the rate and the kinds of things that your current job wants.

Understand that productivity isn’t an abstract requirement and think about why you need to be productive or why you’re publishing. This has a broader level—recognizing publication as participation in a dialogue that advances the field and wanting to participate in that conversation, and recognizing that good research feeds into good teaching—as well as a specific level related to the practicalities of job expectations noted above. If you resent the need to publish, that’s unlikely to help you … and you may need to ask why you’re choosing this career path at all.

Some other tips:

To those in grad school, read a lot. All the time. Many people are slowed down in their progress by having an idea of something they want to write on, then needing to spend several years reading into that topic. If you’re constantly reading, and trying to keep up on a variety of fronts, however, you’ll have more already in the tank. Trust us: you will never have more time to read than you do in grad school, and the more you read now, the faster you can work later.

Similarly, always be writing. Don’t be scared of writing. Start a blog or write for other blogs if you need a little extra help. Or simply write drafts of sections now and then. Commit to it. Don’t ever look at writing as the thing that happens once you’ve finished research: see it as a process of discovery, and hence as a vital stage of ongoing research. And don’t be scared to share this writing, whether with a few others, or in a conference or publication. No writer is happy with everything s/he’s written, and you won’t be an exception, but you can react to that either by never writing or by recognizing that writing is part of a dialogue. Some of the smartest, most highly revered scholars regularly revise earlier statements of theirs, so you can too.

If you started other writing, like blogging, to overcome a block, stop when unblocked, or at least be aware of “what counts” and allocate your time accordingly. Blogs can be a helpful supplement to the dialogue of the field, and may create a public, but peer-reviewed publications are still the coin of the realm in terms of hiring and promotion. If you aren’t where you ultimately want to be, think carefully about what you put out there. You want to contribute your most fully-considered ideas that represent the skill of your thinking to the dialogue.

Part 2 tomorrow …

~ We regard television studies not foremost as a field for the study of a singular medium; rather, we see television studies as an approach to studying media. ~

~ Television is a ubiquitous enough entity that other disciplines would be remiss in their duties if they did not study television at times, and thus other disciplines and approaches frequently inform television studies. Whereas other disciplines may study television with a solitary interest in its texts, its audiences, its producers, or its history and context, television studies sees each of these as integral aspects. As an approach, it is not solipsistic; it is and must be disciplinarily ambidextrous. Granted, individual studies within television studies may analyze only one or two of program, audience, industry, and context out of necessity, but a television studies approach should at the least be mindful of all aspects, and see each intricately interwoven with the others. ~

~ Television studies will not always seek to understand television for the sake of understanding television alone; on the contrary, works of television studies examine the operation of identity, power, authority, meaning, community, politics, education, play, and countless other issues. Television studies, though, starts with the presumption that television is an important prism through which these issues are shared, and hence that a multi-faceted and deliberately contextualized approach to the medium and its programs, audiences, and institutions will always help one understand those issues better. ~

~ As we’ve drafted the book, we’ve loosely referred to the distinction of television studies in our conversations as the “at least two of these” rule, hoping a more refined way to express this classification would emerge. Yet it has not, so we distinguish television studies as an approach to studying television or other media that typically references at least two of these—program, audience, industrial—analyses. Regardless of focus, television studies takes great effort to specify the context of the phenomenon of study in terms of socio-cultural, techno-industrial, and historical conditions. ~

~ We don’t believe that we are path breaking in marking off this distinction for television studies. Indeed, what we describe here is fully consistent with the “circuit of media study” offered by Julie D’Acci in her chapter “Cultural Studies, Television Studies, and the Crisis in the Humanities,” as well as the approach taught to generations of students, several of whom have been central in defining television studies in the last decade. ~

For better or worse, the book will be out this September.