Let Inspiration Guide Your Research

Hopefully the inspiration, research, and resources you gathered at the Annual Meeting will help to reinvigorate and propel your scholarly endeavors through the end of this year and into 2023.

Many of you will continue working on the research you presented at the Annual Meeting, begin new collaborations, and give and receive advice and guidance. As you continue refining your research and writing your papers, we’d like to share an article from Inside Higher Ed that brings together experiences from midcareer faculty who discuss how stressful and challenging "protecting research time" can be, as well as share the strategies they have used to do so effectively.

Tips for Protecting Your Research Time:

• Collaborate with colleagues and set group deadlines for completing work.
• Develop a daily writing habit.
• Exercise and keep reasonable work hours to boost creativity.
• Incorporate grant submission and conference presentation deadlines into your calendar to turn internally imposed deadlines into externally imposed ones.
• Be strategic about how you divide your time across research, teaching, service, and mentoring.
• Protect your research time by making your commitments public and visible.
• Create accountability mechanisms so that research-related tasks become as pressing as those related to service and teaching.
• Work from home to create clear boundaries between research time and other kinds of work.
• Escape through structured writing retreats.