Having a To-Do List, and a schedule of activities, is KEY.

“What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time. A schedule is a mock-up of reason and order-willed, faked, and so brought into being; it is a peace and a haven set into the wreck of time; it is a lifeboat on which you find yourself, decades later, still living. Each day is the same, so you remember the series afterward as a blurred and powerful pattern.”

– Annie Dillard, The Writing Life, p. 32.

I have witnessed first-hand the havok that NOT having a To-Do List, a list of the items I need to work on and the things I have to do, wreaks on my life. Last year, I found it very difficult to keep track of all the things I was doing. Despite still keeping the discipline of writing in my Everything Notebook and having a broad range of planning strategies, I still struggled.

I realized that having everything scheduled on my Google Calendar was still VERY important, but even more so, maintaining a reasonably short, doable To-Do List was key to maintaining my sanity. The calendar gives me a visual overview of what I am supposed to be doing and when I’m supposed to be doing it. The To-Do List I always write it in my Everything Notebook, but also I make a point of ensuring that I have a digital version in case I don’t have my Everything Notebook with me.

Different people plan and maintain a work schedule in contrasting ways. I’ve tried several approaches, including a weekly To-Do List that is visually displayed, preferably on a whiteboard. This method used to be my preferred one, even if it required triple synchronization (Everything Notebook -> Google Calendar -> Office whiteboard). Unfortunately, I no longer have access to a whiteboard, neither at my office at FLACSO Mexico nor at home, so I’ve had to set aside this method for now.

Those of you who have followed me on Twitter/X for a long while or who have read my blog extensively over the years probably know my Everything Notebook-based planning technique. The goal of an Everything Notebook, as I’ve written elsewhere here on my blog, is to keep EVERYTHING in ONE single notebook, rather than having notes here and there and everywhere. It does work wonders for someone like me, who needs to have everything available and at the ready in one single place.

“One of the secrets of getting more done is to make a TO-DO List every day, keep it visible, and use it as a guide to action as you go through the day.”
— Jean de La Fontaine

I always reserve one tab of the Everything Notebook for my Weekly To-Do List.

There are a few lessons that I’ve learned over the course of the years regarding planning, scheduling and developint To-Do Lists. I am listing a few of these here even though I’ve written about them elsewhere on my blog for your easy access and perusal.

1. A To-Do List app (or similar analog system) will not work unless you add ALL your activities to it.

You are a full person (and so am I). This means that the things we have to do for our personal life ALSO take time and need to be considered and accounted for. I used to only schedule my work items in my To-Do List. Big mistake. I can’t plan properly for the future if there are other activities that take up my time, that are absolutely vital and essential for my own survival, and that I am not listing in my To-Do List. And yes, even self-care and rest need to be put in your To-Do List. As weird as this sounds, but making time for myself has been an absolute life saver.

I always include my personal life items in my To-Do List. This includes dentist appointments, doctors’ appointments, and care work. It’s always easy to think that you’ve done nothing when you only get two work-related items in a day because the rest of your day has been taken up by personal life maintenance items. But those are work, too! They are just not paid.

2. Synchronize your To-Do Lists across devices and analog/digital platforms

This is something that a lot of people ask me about when discussing my Everything Notebook strategy. Paper notebooks can feel cumbersome to carry around, and we may forget them at home. So, I always synchronize my To-Do List, including writing commitments, meetings, and other responsibilities.

3. Make your To-Do Lists realistic.

I’ve written about this like a bazillion time here on my blog, but it is really true. I am the king of extra-long To-Do Lists. I want to get EVERYTHING done. And yes, I am single, no kids, able-bodied, with a permanent, tenured job (I’m a Full Professor), so I get that I have a lot of privilege. BUT I also have a natural tendency to overbook myself and think that I can do a lot more than I physically am able to, within the limits of my body.

Whether you use my Granular Planning and the Rule of Threes strategy, or the Accomplish Two Things #2ThingsADay, or your own set of rules, I can certify that it is better to have a manageable To-Do List than an endless array of items that you’ll never get crossed off your list.

4. Actually get through your To-Do List (a Done List is AMAZING):

This sounds a bit weird, I know, but seriously, if you want your To-Do List to work, you actually need to do the things. Every few weeks, I post on all my social media platforms a meme with Peter Parker explaining that to avoid stressing about the things we have in our To Do List, we need to do the things.

“I’ve always made lists of things I want to achieve — it helps me track my progress. But to-do lists are only useful if you do the things on your list.”
— Richard Branson

So yes, as weird as this tip sounds, you’ll feel better about your To-Do List if you actually DO the things. I have always told my students to keep a Done List (the list of what you’ve accomplished, a tip I learned from Dr. Katherine Firth), and a list of Quick Wins. Quick Wins are things you can cross off your To-Do List quickly, that require little effort, and that will help you in the end feel more accomplished.

And at the end of the month, I write a list of everything I accomplished that month.

EVERYTHING.

5. Break down the work in smaller pieces and work on ONE thing at a time, just for 30 minutes at a time:

This is a combination of 3 techniques that I’ve used over the course of my career, from grade school to full professorship: I break down every project in smaller, manageable, workable pieces, and I focus on getting ONE thing done. Even if I can’t finish the entirety of the project or the specific task I am working on, I devote at least 30 minutes to working on that task. And at the end of the month, I write a list of accomplishments and things I got done, and yes that includes every personal item, too.

As I’ve grown older and advanced in my career, I’ve come to realize that most of the challenges we face as academics when it comes to workload is that a vast majority of our time is unstructured and we need to manage multiple projects and deal with a broad range of commitments inside and outside of our institutions. And this is only those of us lucky enough to have a full time job or a well-funded scholarship to do a graduate degree. Precarity in all its forms impacts our careers and our lives in ways that are not always manageable or imaginable. But I hope these strategies that have worked for me may be useful to you all.

“The key is to not to prioritize what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”
― Stephen R. Covey

I can’t recall who I heard it from before, but I clearly remember someone (a senior professor, most likely) recommending that I should “pay myself first” by prioritizing my own writing over anything else I have on the docket. This was particularly important as I got my first tenure-track job. While being able to prioritize tasks is important across all career stages, for early-career-scholars it’s even more important, I think. I’ve written quite often on my blog about Organization and Time Management and also on task prioritization (blog posts associated with the latter can be found on my Planning Strategies page).

I first learned about the whole notion of scheduling writing blocks from Dr. Tanya Golash Boza, whose blog was an inspiration for mine. When I was early in my academic career, I really tried to develop a weekly template that would enable me to schedule my life to the very minute. This didn’t work well after a few years, to be perfectly honest.

I have written previously about the importance of building flexibility in your calendar and making sure that you schedule enough time to get your tasks done, but I think it’s just as important to learn how to prioritize, and to be perfectly honest, I understand that prioritizing tasks is a juggling game between what others expect from us and what we need to get done in order to further our careers.

Don’t get me wrong: I am the first one to suggest that service work is very important, even for junior scholars and graduate students. Academia is, for better or worse, a guild founded on the notion of reciprocity, cooperation and collaboration. I review this manuscript for your journal or your press in hopes that other people will review my own manuscripts when I submit them. So this delicate balancing act between being generous and reciprocal and prioritizing yourself and your own work is hard.

As you can see above, I pay myself first by scheduling my writing time BEFORE my teaching. That way, once I enter the classroom, I’ve already spent my writing time focused on my own priorities (my writing commitments, particularly).

I have suggested one strategy to deal with this: the TOTOs vs. TOMs prioritization strategy. TOTOS are Texts the I Owe To Others. TOMs are Texts that I Owe Myself. In this particular post I suggest that as much as possible, and with no detriment to others, you prioritize your TOMs first and work on those at the top of your energy levels and THEN focus on your TOTOs.

This TOTOs vs. TOMs delicate balancing act can be performed every day. For example, I prioritize my own writing every morning. The first two hours of the day are for MY own manuscripts (my TOMs). Work on drafting papers I need to finish writing and submitting, reading material that will forward my own work. Later during the day I do work on the texts that I owe others (TOTOs).

My suggestion is therefore that when you plan your weekly schedule, budget your time, and develop your To-Do List, consider the TOMs vs. TOTOs strategy and pay yourself first by blocking time to focus on your own work. This doesn’t mean that you won’t get to the things you are supposed to be doing for others, but that you put yourself at the top of the priorities list.

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.”
― Annie Proulx

In my courses, on my blog, across all my social media platforms, and everywhere I go, I always insist on the importance of developing a writing practice. Well, as I have also systematically repeated on this blog, in order to write, and particularly write well, you also need to read, therefore it is crucially important that you also develop a READING practice.

In this post I offer four suggestions for you to consider how to reframe the way you see reading as an activity in order to help you develop a reading practice.

1. Reading to generate new ideas:

Reading an article or a paper or a book chapter, or a section of a book can be helpful for you to get your thinking juices flowing. I first got this suggestion from Dr. Theresa (Terre) Satterfield. When I started my PhD I asked Terre for advice on how to become a better graduate student. She described to me her daily practice: she would get to her office, get herself a coffee and start reading an article, a book chapter, or a section of a book, in order to get her creative and thinking juices flowing.

To be perfectly honest, if I give a self-reflective look at how I do things, I pretty much always read before I write. I use reading as a generative activity because it helps me get fresher ideas, or link my own thoughts to those posited by other writers. I always feel like I am carrying a huge weight whenever I face The Dreaded Blank Page. Even writing this blog post out of the blue felt like a huge challenge not having read anything and wanting to crank it out just like that.

So what I did to prepare myself to write this blog post was to search on Google Scholar whether any texts on how to develop a reading practice that might have appeared interesting existed. While my search yielded no good results, what I did was to search my own blog for posts on reading. I re-read those in order to give myself new ideas for this post (I also reflected about what I wanted this post to say while showering, if I’m being honest).

Thinking of reading as a generative activity for new ideas gives you a new perspective on things and helps you get started with your writing session. Reading before writing also enables you to avoid seeing the act of reading as a waste of your time or as something you simply do not have the time to do because you have a gazillion other things to do.

2. Reading to remain self-actualized and up-to-date with the literature

A good friend told me recently that it is hard to remain up-to-date with the vast swaths of academic literature that we need to read, for our students, for our own research, for the service work we do like reviewing manuscripts or books or providing feedback to colleagues, postdoctoral researchers and or own students. While he is completely right that there’s too much to read, looking at the activity itself as a way to remain up-to-date can also prove motivating.

Here on my blog I’ve written a metric tonne of blog posts on reading that you may want to check out. Particularly important, I think, is this one on the issue that we face when discussing reading-as-writing: we end up having to legitimise reading as part and parcel of academic writing.

So we can look at the importance of a reading practice through the lenses of self-actualization: we need to systematically involve reading into our writing because that’s how we are going to be able to help our students and colleagues: by remaining up-to-date with the literature. Batch-processing is one strategy we might want to use to catch up with the literature, and in this post I offer a few other strategies that might be of use to those who want to develop a reading practice.

3. Reading as a strategy to overcome Writer’s Block

Every time a colleague of mine emails me and says “I have not been able to write, I am just blocked, help me!” I tell them to stop fighting the urge to write against their current situation and just read. Yes, this may sound counter-intuitive, but if you are facing Writer’s Block and you keep pushing yourself trying to get words out of your brain and fingers, it’s likely that nothing is going to come out and you’ll be all the more frustrated.

Using reading as a tool to help you overcome Writer’s Block enables you to put your mind at ease and do something else. Stop focusing on generating new text and on producing words to put them on paper and start thinking of how what you are reading can nourish your brain and help you focus on what you want to learn. Because writing is a way of learning.

4. Reading as a vehicle to engage in a conversation:

This is perhaps the one that I have tried the hardest to imbue into my students: what you are writing is (or should be) in conversation with the broader literature. Who do you want to be conversing with? Which literatures, which authors, which disciplines?

I always tell my students that in order for them to make a contribution to the literature, they need to map out and discern WHERE they are making a contribution. They can only do that by reading what is out there.

Ok, I have justified why you need to develop a reading practice. So now, how do you go about it? I’m going to share 5 tips that summarize what I’ve learned over the many years I’ve written this blog, taught courses on academic writing and research, and mentored and supervised thesis students. Hopefully some of these strategies will be of help to you.

5 tips to start developing your reading practice:

1. Clarify for yourself WHY you are reading.

Are you reading to catch up with the literature? To better understand a topic? To help a graduate student with their thesis? To learn a new method? Because you are writing a grant proposal and need to engage with and learn about an entirely new topic from scratch? All of these are genuinely valid reasons why you need to read. Just make it clear for yourself.

Side note: I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to read dozens of books and journal articles and book articles just to understand what my graduate students are working on. I supervise students on a very broad range of topics, so I need to delve into entirely new literatures ALL THE TIME.

2. Book time to read, even if it’s just 15-30 minutes.

I completely understand why you might scoff at this one. “Who has time to read (for pleasure/for work) when I have to send 433 emails, prepare 6 classes, deal with stuff at home, etc.”. Absolutely legitimate concerns. Reading (and writing) often get relegated to the very bottom of the To-Do List. But making SOME time to read can be useful as you develop your reading practice. It doesn’t have to be a 2 day reading retreat (though that kind of sounds lovely). It can be just 15 minutes a day. But making reading a systematic, consistent habit can be helpful as you work to develop a reading practice.

3. Read like a writer.

Yes, this one seems also quite obvious but it is true. And the best book to learn how to read as a writer is Francine Prose’s Reading Like a Writer. It’s an amazing book that teaches you how to read with a view to improve your written prose. Read with the intention to learn how other writers craft their sentences, their paragraphs, their pages, their arguments.

4. Prioritize what you need to read.

I tend to look at everything I have to do and sometimes feel overwhelmed because I don’t know what to focus on. But that’s when I look at my To-Do List and my writing commitments, and I prioritize what I need to read according to those. For example, I am finishing a chapter on qualitative methods. I really want to read a lot of stuff on organizational ethnography, a topic where I have published relatively little. But for now, I need to prioritize my reading and focus on the topic of qualitative methods for political science, public policy and public administration. I’ll make time to read other stuff as soon as I am done with this chapter.

5. Do “Active Reading” (take notes as you read)

This one is quite important. I love reading a book as I go, but the truth is, if I want to use what I am reading as fodder for my writing, I need to take notes. I have written blog posts about how to take notes from books when you can’t write on them (I do not write on any books), and other techniques for note-taking, but more generally, I always recommend to my students that they read and take notes as they progress with their reading. You can also use voice notes if that works better for you.

Hopefully this blog post will re-ignite the reading practice you once had, or help you build one if it’s something you’ve always struggled with. OR maybe this post will inspire you to start reading again if you’ve fallen behind.