Jo VanEvery 0:02
Hello. This is Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide of JoVanEvery.co.uk. Welcome to Creating A Satisfying Academic Career. I’m Jo VanEvery, and today I’m going to be talking to Anna Law. Anna, do you want to just introduce yourself? Tell people a little bit about who you are and what you do.

Anna Law 0:30
Sure. Thanks for having me on. I am a professor of political science at the City of, er, University of New York Brooklyn College, and I do research in immigration policy and legal history.

Jo VanEvery 0:48
Right, fantastic! I’ve been following you on BlueSky and possibly somewhere else before that. I can’t remember how I came across you, but I’ve been following you for a while. And one of the things that I found really interesting is you talking about this research, being really open about how long it took you to do this, and some of the challenges that you faced. So, there are a lot of different challenges academics face in creating a satisfying career, and from what I know about you, it’s that, it might be, you might have interesting – I thought you might have interesting things to say about some of those challenges. So, I’m a bit like – I can be a bit like, I don’t know, not too structured in this. This is kind of semi-structured. So, I was thinking I might start with one of the persistent myths about what you need to have a satisfying academic career that I see a lot in the higher education press and on social media and other places where people talk about the profession and especially where newer members of the profession talk about it. It’s often assumed that in order to do good research, you need to get a tenure track or equivalent position at a high status research focused institution where you’ll have a lower teaching load, and that’s not the job you have.

Anna Law 2:10
It was not the job I started with. It is the job I have now. Look, where does the myth come from? It comes from our graduate programmes. So all of our PhD training departments. I mean, I don’t know about all, but definitely mine. We were told the gold standard is to land a tenure track job at our R1 research university. They didn’t even talk about ending up at a teaching school, which is supremely bizarre in that because most of the graduates of the University of Texas, Austin, didn’t land R1 jobs. Most of us landed at a teaching college. So I felt completely unprepared going into this. Like, “Oh, oh, oh, did I fail? What, what, what, what happened?” So, my first job… Look, I mean, I don’t want to discount a tenure track position because even though I was at a teaching school where I started at DePaul University, I started in a tenure track position. I started with seven courses a year on a quarter system.

Jo VanEvery 3:31
Yeah.

Anna Law 3:31
That’s still fewer classes than people teach as adjuncts.

Jo VanEvery 3:37
Absolutely.

Anna Law 3:39
So there’s, there’s something to be said about a still a tenure track position at a teaching college, like DePaul, and then someone trying to string together enough jobs to to make a living as an adjunct and a contingent faculty member. So I started with a seven course teaching load. It got dropped to six in my third year, but then they – it’s never free – t hey upped the service requirements on us. So I got tenure at DePaul University, published my first book there, and then I had this opportunity to move to Brooklyn College, which was a named endowed chair.

Jo VanEvery 4:22
Right.

Anna Law 4:23
So that dropped my teaching load to a two-two on a semester system. And full disclosure, it came with a research budget, which most positions do not have.

Jo VanEvery 4:35
Yeah.

Anna Law 4:36
So I had both tenure, a lower teaching load, and a research budget.

Jo VanEvery 4:42
But you managed to get that first book written with that seven course, six course load, a lot of service, in a really teaching focused place. But that was presumably a book based on your on research [that] you’d already done for the PhD. Was that correct? So, so the challenge was really being able to start a second project.

Anna Law 5:05
The first book, I mean, so the first book is easier. It doesn’t feel that way for people to write it.

Jo VanEvery 5:11
No. [Laughter.]

Anna Law 5:11
It feels like it’s trying to kill you. The first book is easier because it’s based on my dissertation, so I’m not working from scratch. The hard part about the first book is trying to juggle. When I got to that DePaul job, I was teaching six classes the first year. I had no classes prepped. The first three years of me teaching at that school was me prepping classes. Zero research got done. It wasn’t happening, and so I took the advice of one of my undergraduate mentors, who said, “You know what? At a high teaching level school, you have to prioritise quality over quantity. If you can get out one strong article a year – that’s good. People will forgive you if you produce one solid article a year, because they see your teaching load. They will not forgive you if you turn out a bunch of schlock just to say you published something.” And you know, my my undergrad professor said, “Don’t do it. Prioritise quality over quantity, especially at a high teaching load school.”

Jo VanEvery 6:32
That was excellent advice. But it’s interesting in relation to what you said earlier because you were saying, you know, one of the reasons this myth persists that you have to be at an R1 with low teaching load is because that’s what the people who train PhD students are telling PhD students, most of whom are working in, I mean, a lot of PhDs are being trained in you know more research intensive institutions. W hen it came to getting good mentoring for this career that you actually had, you ended up going back to somebody who you knew from when you were an undergrad, who had a better perspective on what could be possible and seemed to be more encouraging of: “Yeah, you’re good. You can do good work in this job.”

Anna Law 7:24
He… So my undergrad mentor from Brandeis University was Sid Milkis, and Sid told me, “Look, kid, I started at a high teaching load school, so I know what it’s like, and you should not try to write a book and articles at the same time. You should choose one and go with it and commit to it.” What I did, which is put all my eggs in one basket, was with the book was highly risky. I wouldn’t advise doing that to people who like their jobs and want to stay where they’re at. That is, writing a book is not easier than writing five articles. Neither one is easier, but the book is especially risky because, look, I knew by the second year at DePaul, I didn’t love the teaching load. I wasn’t trying to get tenure. I was trying to move.

Jo VanEvery 8:27
Aha. Yeah.

Anna Law 8:28
I knew that a bunch of articles from journals that are not the top ones in my field weren’t going to get it done. So I went for a big giant monograph, which is a risky move, and again, I would not advise that for people who are actually happy at their jobs.

Jo VanEvery 8:48
Right, right, yeah. Get the tenure and then finish the book, if you like where you are. Right? B ecause you’ve got a bit more flexibility once you’ve got over that first hurdle. Right, but then you move. So, what kind of a college is Brooklyn, is Brooklyn College?

Anna Law 9:06
So, the City University of New York has 20-three campuses. It is a urban public college. It is extremely diverse in terms of race and income, but it is deeply and chronically underfunded. So, we, we have a lot of first generation college students, and a lot of first generation immigrant students, and so they’re great fun to teach. But we are, have been underfunded for a very long time.

Jo VanEvery 9:40
So is your, is your workload typical of other people in that kind of college, or is the name chair, which came with some funding, just a kind of anomaly in that context?

Anna Law 9:55
It’s an anomaly. The City University of New York, Brooklyn College, my campus, there are only three or four permanent named endowed chairs. I have the second one. Everyone else is at a three-three or a four-four. You can get your teaching load reduced based on administrative duties, but I have a permanently lower teaching load than the rest of my colleagues, so it’s, it’s an anomalous position.

Jo VanEvery 10:27
Right? But it still took you 16 years to, like, do the research and write this book.

Anna Law 10:33
That’s right. [Laughter.]

Jo VanEvery 10:34
So, like, so like, one of the things… Because one of the things I’ve been doing, is I run like a 12-week small group coaching programme for people writing scholarly books, and I was meeting with those people this week, and you know, one of the things that comes up is just how long it’s taking, right? Like even if you’re working on it regularly, it takes a really long time, and it just feels like: “Oh.” You know? Like: “How do I, how do I keep going?” And some of those people are in a a situation like your first sort of job. Some of them are on- in other, you know, in research intensive institutions. But no matter what they’re doing, it’s like writing a book is like a huge undertaking. So you were in the relatively privileged position of having this two-two load and some research funds, but it still took you a long time to write. So, how did you organise that? How did you kind of keep that as a priority for you so that you could produce this kind of work? Like, what what sort of strategies do you use to kind of keep it going?

Anna Law 11:40
Okay, so the glib answer is: I wish I could tell you it was the pursuit of knowledge and creation of groundbreaking research. Okay, I know I should be saying that, but the truth was, a lot of it was pig-headed stubbornness , and just the idea, and the realisation that this is a sunk cost. Okay, you’re seven years in. I mean, are you..? Am I gonna finish this thing, or is the thing gonna finish me? I mean, but look, the second book, I have the protection of tenure, and so I didn’t have the the tenure clock ticking where I would be fired from my job.

Jo VanEvery 12:28
Right.

Anna Law 12:28
There are still professional consequences of taking 16 years to write a book, which is I got stuck at the top of the associate professor pay scale, and I couldn’t go any higher because it took me that long to get to full professor. But you’re… For the purposes of other people, you really have to believe in your project. Don’t try to game it out, thinking: “Okay, this this area of research is hot, so I’m going to do this.” I mean, you really better be into, and believe in your research project. That is the only thing that drives you forward. It can’t be about: “I think this area is hot, so I’m going into it.” I didn’t write consistently. There was an entire year in there where I stopped research altogether because I’m an only child and I had elder care in Hawaii. So, many trips home, many phone calls, arguing with insurance companies. I ended up with clinically diagnosed PTSD because of an elder care emergency, and so no research got done for an entire year. I mean, life is going to intervene. You’re just gonna have to go with it. I mean, I- the book didn’t get done in the time, in the length of time I wished. It took much longer, but I’d rather get it done right, than… I mean, I was also switching academic fields, so I wanted to be accurate. You can be accurate, or you can be fast. Rarely can you be both.

Jo VanEvery 14:10
Yeah. So maybe talk a bit about the book, because like you didn’t go into this… You went into it because this was something you were interested in, and you wanted to find out more about what went on with it. It has turned out post- publication to be [a] way more hot topic than you probably ever wished. But maybe tell people a little bit about how you got started on it, and what that switching feels [like], because you’re [in] political science, b ut this book is very historical, but also, as I understand it, you work at that kind of boundary between political science and law. Like, you’re interested in how the law works. So, politics, some of what politics does is to legislate, and then you’re interested, I guess, in how that plays out. Like how did we end up l egislating this thing, and then how did that work out in- in practice? And you’ve, in this book, taken quite a historical approach to that. So maybe talk a little bit just about what the project is for people that don’t know, and how you got interested in it.

Anna Law 15:15
So I got interested in this topic because my background is U.S. immigration policy and legal history. I I know U.S. immigration law very well, and the policy history behind it. And what always was nagging at the back of my mind was, you know, what this this nation always – they had slavery. I wonder if slavery had any effect on voluntary migration, so I’m not calling enslaved migration ‘ immigration’, which implies consent, but I wonder if the existence of slavery had anything to do with voluntary migration, any effect at all. And so, after the 1619 project essays came out, I’ve had a much less hard time explaining what I’m doing, but I started before that, and people are like, “Oh!” So, that was the initial impetus of me getting into this area. My training as a political scientist – I’m in a subfield called American political development, so we study U.S. history a lot like historians, but we periodize differently from them. And I figured out that this question I want to answer, I can’t just use political science methods alone. I can’t use doctrinal analysis and case law, like law professors use, and I can’t just do historical research like historians. And I needed all three, so I needed all of those methods together, which will take you longer.

Jo VanEvery 16:57
It will. Okay, so the book – I’ve lost the title. Where the heck have I put the title of your book? Maybe tell people the title of your book and where you ended up.

Anna Law 17:06
The book is called “Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants.”

Jo VanEvery 17:14
Right. So, so it has become very topical because we’re apparently relitigating all of that, [Laughter.] but, and one of the things was you were also… Like, I mean, America is a federal system. I’m Canadian, so I’m sort of vaguely familiar with that. I’m a sociologist, though I don’t know like detailed things, but I’m not a an expert on politics or political development. But one of the things about studying politics in a federal system is the whole thing about, you know, which level is responsible and whatever. And one of the things I’ve seen you talk about a lot is the fact that right now immigration is a federal jurisdiction, but it wasn’t always that way. And this book is partly about pulling that together, right? Like, how did we get from…? I don’t know, as a country, I mean, if you’re starting back in 1619, you weren’t even a country then, right? So, it’s like, you’re a bunch of colonies. You’ve got a whole lot of different things, and then it comes together to become a country, and then you you get a lot more changes, and the slavery, and Native Americans are really crucial to all of that, right? And so you were kind of really interested in, y ou started with: did slavery have impact on voluntary migration? Where did that question lead you?

Anna Law 18:35
So I ended up with a research question that is about federalism. And it is… The research question was so deceptively simple. The question I was trying to answer was in a federal system of government where the federal, the U.S. national government shares control of policy and laws with states and local governments, w here the, where’s the location of the dividing line on migration and citizenship? And it turns out the location of that line keeps moving. It’s not in one place, and it depends on on what part of U.S. history you’re asking about. So, I was trying to keep straight: ” Okay, wait, wait, wait. What? No, wait. It moved.” And so the bottom line of the research is one concrete effect of slavery’s influence on voluntary migration policy is that it delays transition of migration controls over internal and international borders from the local level to the federal level by over 100 years.

Jo VanEvery 19:55
Ah, right. So it kind of links w ith all that kind of common knowledge we have about the Civil War, and the, the, you know, who can…? A nd the the end of slavery and people being able to be returned to states, and all that kind of thing, gets tied up with international migration, and all of that kind of thing,

Anna Law 20:17
Right. Because states and the local government from the colonial period, the colonies, not the metropole in London, had control over internal and international borders, and the states did too, not the federal government until after the Civil War, and the reason is because of slavery. Because slave states are not going to… They’re freaking out at the prospect of the federal government having deportation power. They could deport all the enslaved people. That cannot be. So it had to be held at the state level.

Jo VanEvery 20:55
And how did the Native Americans get into it? Because you started with this question about slavery. Native Americans are already living on this land. How did that get into a question about migration and control of migration, and especially international borders?

Anna Law 21:11
So I knew going into the project I would have to learn African American history and slavery. I did not anticipate until halfway through the book: if you’re going to tackle a question of federalism in the early republic and in the antebellum period, you have to try to learn federal Indian law and Native history. A nd how that becomes related is, listeners are probably thinking: “What do Native Americans have to do with voluntary migration?” I knew they were tied together when I read federal cases where Native Americans, where, where slavery and Native Americans are mentioned in terms [of], and citizenship cases. And so the people that… It was an indication to me that the people of those earlier eras saw the ability of one group to stay where they wanted, and another group to go into that same area as relational, not just relational but zero sum. So, as an example, in the 1830s, in the southeastern states that were slave states, the price of cotton was going through the roof internationally, and so the enslavers, the planters, greedily eyed Native American land, and they they goaded the federal government into carrying out a deportation of 80,000 people for the purposes of extending the cotton crop and slavery. So here you have an example of a group of people, 80,000 Native Americans, whose ability to stay on their ancestral lands was viewed by the legislators of the time of those states, and the federal government, as zero sum. nd so the ability of one group to go into an area and another to stay there are linked, which is why Native Americans are in this study.

Jo VanEvery 23:23
This is all super fascinating, and that sounds like a really fascinating book. But I can also see why this took 16 years to write, because – this is something that comes up with a lot of my clients as well – w hich is, you start writing one book, you think, you think you’re writing a book about this question of how does slavery and, like, the involuntary migration of slavery relate to voluntary migration, and the control of voluntary migration, a nd as you’re investigating that – you’re in archives, you’re reading case law, you’re doing all this to investigate this question – your your question gets more nuanced. You get a better understanding of what’s going on, and then all of a sudden, you’re like: “Oh, wait a second! There’s this whole other area that I hadn’t even thought would be relevant that is really crucial to understanding how this whole thing works”, and that: “My bigger question is actually really about federalism and how does, (if I’ve understood you correctly), how does my the control over migration and citizenship become a federal responsibility as opposed to a state or like a national responsibility opposed to a state one, and that actually has an effect like that, so it became a bigger. So part of the reason it took you 16 years, and, and why even people with those mythically wonderful “this will help you have a good research career” jobs might find it hard to publish as much as they want, as quickly as they want, is because it isn’t always about how much time you have, and how good of a researcher you are! It… Sometimes being a really good researcher means that, you know, you’re following all these threads, and these questions raise other questions, and the book kind of develops into something else as you’re going, and it just becomes a bigger project. Is that part of why it took you as long as it did?

Anna Law 25:21
It was part of it. I mean, so what you’re referring to is the framing of the book took a long time to come into focus.

Jo VanEvery 25:30
Yeah.

Anna Law 25:31
Because this could be three to five books in here, right? So I chose to do a synthesis, which is me not going to archives, and except for one chapter, not consulting primary sources, because I am trying to braid together my own readings of these laws, these local laws, and the monographs of other scholars instead of reinventing the wheel, right?

Jo VanEvery 26:02
Okay.

Anna Law 26:02
So the thing that took the longest time is – and I don’t, I, I think someone at an R1 with the same resources as me would have taken equally long – is because I’m going into subject areas I don’t know, so I’m learning slavery for the first time. I’m learning African American history and Native American history because I was not taught those things in political science at all. If you’re going to go wandering into another area, you need to read deeply to understand. I mean, so historians like to say, going to a different time period, the 18th century and the 19th century are foreign countries.

Anna Law 26:47
Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 26:48
You really don’t know what’s going on there until you read a tonne. So to give you an example, the book starts in the colonial period. The colonial chapter took me three years. That was two years of reading for me to understand and get myself up to speed about what- what is happening in this time period, before I was comfortable putting pen to paper. So that’s what took so long because I’m going into a time period I don’t know, going into multiple time periods, I don’t know, and I’m going into subject matter areas I have no training in. If you don’t spend the time reading, you come off as a dilettante and you make mistakes that other people are going to easily see. People from those fields will easily poke holes in and say, “She didn’t do her homework.”

Jo VanEvery 27:42
This can happen to anybody, right? Because you ended up going into those time periods and into those other things, like needing to learn about Native American history, needing to learn about all these things, because that’s where the question took you.

Anna Law 27:56
That’s where the question took me. But also, my academic training, my master’s degree, is in American Studies, and my PhD is in Political Science. It never occurred to me to read only in one field. That sounds so boring and so constrictive.

Jo VanEvery 28:14
Yeah.

Anna Law 28:15
I think that you can have a really successful publishing career if you stay in your lane. If you, if I had just kept publishing in political science, if I had done a riff on the first book, I think I could have had a very successful publishing career. But that’s not; those are not the questions that motivated me. They were boring.

Jo VanEvery 28:41
And that’s that’s kind of, I mean, I think that’s kind of why I’m focused a little bit on having a satisfying career because sometimes, you know, it’s just, you know, you can get caught up in “Oh I need to publish this much, and what would be the easy way to do this?” and whatever. And there are times when you need to pick that easy route because then it gets you something you need, right? Like you said about your early career, right? Like the advice that your mentor gave you about: “Look, if you publish one good article a year, you will be okay for tenure in this institution.” Like you say, if you liked that job, you could have done that and then been able to like branch out into something, right? You could have taken the safe route, figured out some things, done some good work, still good work, but there would have been a slightly easier route. And sometimes it’s worth taking that. But for you, a satisfying career was: “I really want to be like digging into these questions, and I want to do a particular kind of research there.” And I think there’s a lot of people, like, this raises this question of the sort of a place of interdisciplinary research in the current kind of landscape, because on the one hand, for years now, like decades, we’ve been talking about how important interdisciplinarity is. And when I first left academia, you know, over 20 years ago now, my first post academic job was working for a funding agency. So I was working for a funding agency in Canada at the Social Science and Humanities Research Council, and and I was a policy analyst when they did this huge consultation about their forward direction on their 25th anniversary, you know the way organisations are, right? “Oh, it’s a significant anniversary. Maybe we’ll do a big consultation and do some big strategic thinking about where we’re going.” And you know, in the course of that, you know, there were discussions, there were things that I, you know, read that have been published about interdisciplinarity, and one of the things that came up was like, if you have interdisciplinary PhD programmes or postdocs or whatever, those people really struggle to get jobs, right? Like, because the whole structure is set up in a disciplinary way. And even just before I was talking to you, I was like just taking a moment between things, and I was just scrolling through Bluesky, and somebody that I follow there who does interdisciplinary work and you know has just had a grant rejected and she’s just like “There’s this real struggle if you do interdisciplinary work in terms of the fact the whole structure of funding and everything is set up around disciplines, and and different disciplines have different kind of ways of writing grant proposals, and even if you’re doing an interdisciplinary project, you’re being, you’re often being judged by disciplinary panels” – or you know any of that kind of thing. But what you’re raising is that the other thing is that you end up, you, it takes you longer because you’re learning new methods. You’re reading deeply in new areas because they’re relevant to their question, but you, you know, you haven’t come in contact with them as much before, and there’s just a lot more work to do. But that the reason that it’s worth doing that is not just to produce good research, but because it enables you to answer questions you can’t answer without that. Like what was satisfying for you is actually the questions were super interesting, and that kept you going. And so, on the one hand, you’re saying “You can’t start a book project unless you’re excited enough about it to keep going”, but sometimes the thing that’s exciting enough to keep you going is also kind of making it really hard work. But it’s hard work you want to do because that’s what makes your career satisfying to be able to kind of do all these things. Is is that..? I

Anna Law 32:37
I would… Yeah, I think that’s about right. I mean, I would… So I was oriented toward interdisciplinary research because of my training. My… Because of my MA is in American Studies, which is inherently interdisciplinary. My PhD is in political science. But the second book, I would not have written as my first book. That I needed to get tenure first. So, if you’re early career, don’t go too crazy on the interdisciplinary stuff because, as you just said, it affects your ability to get grants. When your, when your department, if you have a tenure track job, sends your materials for external review, they need to send it to people in your field. So get the tenure, and then… I mean, I… And and then I’m doing this interdisciplinary stuff now because I have the safety and security of tenure. I mean, it is it is really hard to not – to be able to do any research without the guarantee of permanent employment with with a paycheck that you know is coming, and so try to be strategic about [it]. But then you got to balance that, about, “Well, if I’m just interested in interdisciplinary questions…” If, I mean…

Jo VanEvery 34:08
Sometimes if you’re publishing, if you’re publishing articles, sometimes you can, you can be strategic about your publishing, in a way that, that makes sure, you know, that you are at least publishing some things in the field where you’re employed, right? Like, like you need to, and then the interdisciplinary stuff is like, “Ooh, and she’s having an impact even beyond our field”, because there’s no question that if the central question of your book is something about the development of federalism in this particular area of law and policy – that that’s not relevant to political science and the subfield of American political development. You’re just, you just went about it in a very different way, and you’re presumably making the kind of contribution to that disciplinary field that kind of actually shakes things up a bit, right? Like you’re bringing in things from other fields and saying, “Here’s, here’s some, here’s… This actually helps us understand this better as political scientists.” Like that’s at least part of what ends up coming out of what you’re doing.

Anna Law 35:17
I think that one of, one of the lessons I’ve learned now – because it’s the same lesson that I had from book one – you can’t predict who’s going to be interested in your book. I wrote this second book in exile from political science. I kept attending political science conferences and presenting early drafts and people were just not interested. I don’t think they were being rude. I think that political scientists didn’t have the historical background to ask me questions, or to engage in what I was doing.

Jo VanEvery 35:58
Right.

Anna Law 35:58
So three or four times of me presenting on a panel, and I get no questions, and everybody else got the questions, and I stopped attending conferences and started attending history conferences. So, right now, the two groups that are the most interested in my book have been legal historians and early republic historians. There’s a handful of federalism political scientists who are interested, but yeah, the interest in this book did not come from who I thought it would come from.

Jo VanEvery 36:34
[Laughter.] I mean, that’s yeah, that’s interesting. Yeah, yeah.

Anna Law 36:38
So all you can do is put the book out there, and look, it’s still early in the life of this book. My book was published on March 2, so I don’t know if other people will adopt it. I have no idea, and you have no control over who will like it, and who will read it, and who will engage with it.

Jo VanEvery 36:59
No, no. Do you teach on these questions? Like, how does, like…? One of the things that it strikes me is kind of important when you’re, especially if you’re working in a more teaching focused institution, is having some kind of overlap between the things you’re interested in researching, and the things that you’re teaching. Somebody mentioned in my book group just this week, you know that they were starting to look at their autumn courses and they’re teaching some sort of a… And they’re like, “Okay, there’s a bunch of reading I need to do for this book right now, that’s probably relevant to these- this group of students. So I’m gonna, you know, I’m gonna like make it all match up a little bit to mean that it’s not competing for my time.” Did… Is that something that happens with you, or is teaching and research really separate? Like, how do they relate to each other in your career?

Anna Law 37:48
Teaching and research didn’t have much to do with each other for me. I do not teach any classes on immigration. I teach classes on constitutional law, the federal judiciary, and American political, you know, the intro to American government survey course, of which none of it is about immigration. I did teach one graduate class a number of years back at the CUNY Grad Centre, which overlapped with the book I was writing a little bit, but the two have been separate for me. I’m not sure if that’s ideal, but that’s just the way it was, it panned out. CUNY hired me to teach constitutional law, federal courts. They did not hire me to teach immigration, so that’s what they, that’s what I teach [in] – Federal court, federal courts, and constitutional law.

Jo VanEvery 38:44
Cool. So that for you, the the the there’s just that they’re very different spaces. Presumably, you’re keeping up with the scholarship in the areas you teach, even though it’s not directly related to the research you’re doing right now. Or..?

Anna Law 39:00
you know, I’ve heard I’ve heard people say, “Oh, I used my seminar to do more thinking about my book project.” I mean, I can see how that works, but I I don’t I don’t mind that my teaching and research are separate because after spending 16 years on the book, do I really want to teach immigration on top of it? [Laughter.] Enough already! Enough. I mean… Yeah.

Jo VanEvery 39:24
Okay, okay. So, you are managing to do research, satisfying research, even if it takes you a long time while you’re working at Brooklyn College. What what else is satisfying about your career? I mean, you’ve got a named chair that presumably, that also allows you to do some of your… I mean, what what else is, would you say is worth considering for people about different types of institutions? Like, the institutions that you’ve worked in, like, instead of, you know, maybe they’re only getting advice about “Oh the cream is…. Go to an R1.” Right? And then nobody’s really talking about “Well, there [is]… If, if you like this, or if if if you value these things, this might be a good place for you to be.” Like one of the things you said about Brooklyn College and the City University in New York system in general… I mean, obviously, it’s not very satisfying to work in an institution that’s chronically underfunded. Nobody likes that. But one of the things you really pointed out about it is you’ve got this incredibly diverse student body, racially, new immigrants, also like a lot of first generation students, that kind of thing. And and that’s not always what you’re going to get at other kinds of institutions. So like, what would you say? Like, is that part of what you really like about where you are, the kinds of students you get?

Anna Law 40:43
No, I lucked out. Right? I mean, the hard hardest part of academia is you don’t get to pick where you live, and so I really lucked out in my move to Brooklyn College that my student body is racially and income diverse; those are two characteristics that are important to me. It means something to me that I’m teaching at a public-funded institution. Yes, it means we’re underfunded, but it makes me feel like I’m giving back to the community. There is no substitute for meeting my students’ family members and they’re first generation college students, and you realise that you played a role in the trajectory that this family is going to go in now. So CUNY has the statistics from multiple independent sources is that the CUNY system moves more people into the middle class than all the Ivy’s combined. I mean that means something to me. That is payment to my, you know, to what I stand for. I mean it’s not… I mean, I’m not the highest paid professor, or the CUNY professors are not in New York City, but it’s worth something.

Jo VanEvery 42:09
Yeah. Well, and I think that’s you know that’s the thing. And you’re, I mean, you are living a really long way away from where your family are, you know. But it’s but there are other things that are… You know, it’s not just your research that’s satisfying. It’s not just… Right? It’s like working in a public institution, working with particular types of students. That… It’s allowed… You know, I often say to people, like, “You’re allowed to want what you want.” You can’t always get it, but you have to admit, like, sometimes people are giving you advice based on what they wanted, right, which might have been status, or you know, I don’t know, all kinds of things. And it’s not like you don’t have status, right? Like you’ve got a good paying job, you can pay, you know, you’re living in a nice place, and and you’ve got a named chair, which comes with its own kind of thing, right? And recognition for your research, right? You’re getting a lot of, I mean, a lot of people are interested in this book, even if they aren’t the kind of people you thought you were writing for it for to begin with. But like, different people have different values, and it’s okay to kind of prioritise those values when, when you’re looking for work, and not… Like, really paying attention to what some of those options are that align better with your values. I mean, the Ivy’s aren’t really intended to like help increase social mobility. I mean, a lot of those institutions are there to kind of cement current hierarchies, right? They were founded for the privilege to be able to maintain their privilege and network with each other, and you know, the legacy admissions in a lot of those places are part of that system, right? That’s…

Anna Law 43:45
Right. I mean, so the other thing is, I, you know, once again, I lucked out majorly in both my jobs. That my first job was in Chicago, and my second job was in Brooklyn. And as a woman of colour, I need to be somewhere where I see other people of colour.

Jo VanEvery 44:09
Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Anna Law 44:09
But if… But I have no control over where the jobs open up, and I did a very wide job search when I was finishing my PhD. I remember applying for 40 something jobs all across the United States, and I could have ended up anywhere. But your, you know, you… The toughest part about this job is we can’t pick where we go.

Jo VanEvery 44:36
No. No, sometimes that’s, yeah, that’s hard, right? Yeah. So you’ve you’ve got very lucky because yeah, Chicago, Brooklyn, both very diverse. You feel, like, yeah… One of my one of my clients lives in a place that is not very diverse, and she said something about her sister in law says, “I’m not coming to visit you there. You can visit me because I’m not going anywhere where I raise the percentage of black people in the room just by turning up.”

Anna Law 45:03
Oh, I understand. I totally understand.

Jo VanEvery 45:07
You know? So, and, and, you know sometimes people do decide, you know, that they have… You know, like, you you also get to pick your compromise. You don’t get to go where you want to go, but you get to pick your compromise. And sometimes if having an academic career means living somewhere where you never feel safe and where you can’t do the kind of work you really want to be doing, then you can compromise on something else, right? You’re still a smart person. You’re still doing really good things. You could do a lot of other things, right? You’ve been incredibly lucky that you’ve been able to do this really satisfying academic work that really, you know, like you find really interesting. You get to do this work that’s hard, and it takes you a long time, and it’s you know it’s hard to keep going and write that book. But you know you’ve done that because it is so important to you, and you’ve had the resources to be able to do that. You’ve had the job and the, you know, the resources that have enabled you to do that, and you’ve used those to do some really amazing work that hopefully will have some kind of impact on how we think about… I mean, maybe maybe it’ll take a while for the political scientists to understand why they need to think about these questions, right? It’s just… Sometimes that’s the thing about having an impact on the advancement of knowledge. You don’t always know right away, right? Because it’s like it… People have to think about it, right? They’re like, “Why would this question be interesting?” And then they they read your book and they’re like, “Oh, wait a second”, and it starts sparking ideas. But it takes a while before you can notice that they’ve even done that, right?

Anna Law 46:42
The… So Andy Coppleman, who’s a law professor at Northwestern, when my first book came out, he said, “Okay, Anna, look, you you got a really good publisher for your book, and you’ve done all the hard work. You know what? The book is out there. It’s got to make its own way in the world now.” I’m like, “What?” He said, “You have no control over how many people read it, who reads it, how they react to it.” He said, “My strong advice: Next project.”

Jo VanEvery 47:17
And I think he’s right. Like, you have to let go of the idea [that] you control that. But, I think, with this book you’re also doing a lot of things that are helpful. Like, you can’t control who’s going to read it, but you are making sure that lots of people know it exists, right? You’re talking about it on social media. You are doing interviews with people. You’re coming on different podcasts. Some of those podcasts are more directly related to the topic of your book than this one. You know, we’re talking about how do you be an academic and do satisfying, you know, do satisfying work in in the current context. And some of that is just about luck. But and then taking the opportunities that you get and doing what you can with them, but you’re also taking the time to… You know, and some people shy away from the kind of promoting your book, right? And, and, and the extreme of that is this sense of, “Oh well, you know, people that need to read it will find it. You know, they will do. They will be doing their proper database searches, and it will come up when they do that.” And that’s not necessarily true. You need to, like, you you do need to, like, talk about what you’re doing. Not to force people to read it. Like you can’t force anybody to read it. But they aren’t going to read it if they don’t have… Like, everybody’s busy, right? Everybody’s busy. They can’t even read all the books they know they want to read. So you just need to get it on their radar, right? They need to know it exists, and they need to know what kind of interesting stuff is in there, and then they get to make their own decision about: “Is that interesting to me? And is it interesting enough and related enough to the things I’m trying to do that I’m going to make it a priority right now?” That’s where publishing with a good publisher sometimes helps, right? Because people are like, “Oh, what’s this publisher publishing lately? Like, what what’s good stuff..? They publish good stuff in that I’m usually interested in. What’s coming out in that field?” I did a workshop once with a group of academics where I asked them, like, “How do you decide what to read?” And of course, one person said, and this was a mixed group of mostly social science and humanities people, different, all different disciplines. And one of them immediately was like, “Well, you know, this is my project, and I get a keyword list, and I do a database search, and blah blah blah. And doesn’t everybody do that?” But then we went around the room, and people had all kinds of things, right? Some of them were “When I hear good talks at conferences, I make a note of those names, and I kind of keep an eye out to see if they’ve got anything. You know, sometimes I go and see what they’ve already published, but also I kind of keep an eye out to see if they’ve published anything based on the thing I heard a talk.” Or, you know, some people were like, “Oh, there’s like two or three journals that I always check their table of contents and read interesting things. But then sometimes I find something interesting, and I go off and find other things that person wrote. And that leads me in other directions.” So there’s just so many ways that people find out about what’s going on, and there’s so much, you know, that you know being able to talk about what you’re doing isn’t… You can’t control who’s going to read it, but you can at least make sure that there’s people out there that have heard about what this is and how it fits.

Anna Law 50:20
After the first book was published, I I was naive. I didn’t know any better. I believed in the meritocracy. I thought, “Okay, I’m going to put this book out, and people will read it. They will understand how smart I am and how important the argument is.” Okay, none of that happened. None of that happened. I published the book with the number one press in political science, Cambridge University Press, and these, these all these presses they have limited budgets of of publicity offices. You have to do the promotion yourself. And I know, I I’ve done a lot of promotion of my book on social media on Bluesky to the point where some senior scholars have looked at me funny. I don’t care. I don’t care.

Jo VanEvery 51:11
Well, and I think you know because I follow you on Bluesky. I know what you’ve said about it. It’s not like you’re out there saying: “Buy my book.” You’re just, you know, you’ve been talking, and you started that promotion… I mean, the interesting thing, which people really need to pay attention [to], you really started that before the book came out. And part of that was just about talking about the process, talking about the interesting things you were finding, talking about going to conferences and you know what was happening there, all that kind of thing as you were going along. So the people that followed you were like invested. They were interested. Like, what is it that Anna’s doing? This sounds really interesting, right? And that meant, that meant that when the book did come out, you could just be like, “Oh, the book came out.” And then I remember you saying, “Like, all these people are sending me pictures of getting my book. I didn’t I didn’t know all these people would pre order my book” – but people did because they were like, “Oh, that sounds really interesting. I will, I’ll order that and see.” Right? Now, what, how how long it takes from arriving on your doorstep to actually getting read? I mean, people do have like you know health and safety issues with the piles of books next to their bed. [Laughter.] That’s the part about like making people know that just making people aware that it exists. Right?

Anna Law 52:21
Either you’re gonna hire a $12,000 publicist, which almost nobody has money for, or you have to be prepared to do some promotion yourself. And it is… You’ve, you’ve got to think outside the box. I mean, I knew that to get a… I’m not at a research university. I’m not at a you know quote unquote, gigantic eye roll “elite institution” sarcastic quotes, where they have their networks, and so I knew I was going to have to work a little harder on social media to to use my networks to get the word out about the book.

Jo VanEvery 53:05
Yeah, yeah. So, and I think you’ve done you’ve done a pretty good job about of that. So, one of the other things though is you’re not on you’re not on Bluesky just promoting the book. Like you’re there and you’re engaging with people and talking about things. You are super into cooking. You make some amazing things and do stuff that’s, like… I mean, you like a challenge. That’s what I’ve decided. This is the thing. If you want to say one thing about Anna Law, she likes a challenge. She likes a challenge in her research. She likes a challenge when it comes to cooking dinner for her friends. Like you don’t just slap stuff together. You’re like, “Oh, this is a really interesting. I’m gonna try laminated pastry this week.” Like, I mean, what…? Like, like maybe said, like, what’s that’s that’s kind of seems to be one of your big outside of work interests. Is that is that how did you get into that?

Anna Law 53:54
You can’t be all work all the time. I mean, for people going into academia: please, for the love of God, have hobbies. Your job is not your hobby. Please do not define yourself only by your work product. You have to make friends outside of work, and cooking, and playing tennis, and drinking wine are three ways that I’ve made friends.

Jo VanEvery 54:19
Cool.

Anna Law 54:19
Look, you can’t doom scroll. If if I have a sharp knife in my hands cutting up vegetables. I can’t doom scroll.

Jo VanEvery 54:28
That’s a that’s a good case for “Why cooking?” But you do, yeah, and and you like that’s a thing you like, and clearly it’s a creative outlet for you. You know, you share pictures, and you share recipes and you try some interesting [things]. You were making Madeleines a couple of weeks ago, were you not?

Anna Law 54:43
Right, right.

Jo VanEvery 54:44
Yeah.

Anna Law 54:44
Yeah, I mean, Madeleines are not that hard, believe it or not.

Jo VanEvery 54:50
They just, they just look fancy. See, that’s that’s the other thing.

Anna Law 54:53
They’re not that fancy. You just need the fancy pan.

Jo VanEvery 54:56
Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah. That’s good. Yeah. Yeah, but yes, I think you’re right. Yeah, you can’t just… Maybe it takes you 16 years, but if you didn’t take time off and play tennis…

Anna Law 55:06
Oh, I would have went nuts. If I if I… Also no one is following you on social media if you only post about your research, I can read your CV. Why should I follow you?

Jo VanEvery 55:19
Yeah,

Anna Law 55:19
Are you an interesting person?

Jo VanEvery 55:21
Yeah.

Anna Law 55:22
What else can I learn about you? I can read your CV. I don’t need you to keep posting about your research. Are you posting other else, other people’s research in your field? I mean, if I follow you, will I learn about other people who are doing migration research and legal research, or is it just you, you, you, you, you, and that’s the entire feed?

Jo VanEvery 55:44
Yeah, and I think that’s what people get confused about. The “Oh, I need to be on social media to promote my work”, right? It’s that it’s not a you, you, you just talking about your work. It is about… It’s about building networks, and you know they’re different kinds of networks, but they they are networks of people, and I’ve met some great people on social media that have become really good friends. And then there’s just other people where it’s like, “Oh, these people have interesting things to say”, and and they’re like whole people, like I’m interested in seeing. And then it’s also the fact that when you publish, when you write about the book or whatever it is you’re promoting, it’s not the only thing they see from you. It’s part of this broader thing, right? And and and I think especially when you’re posting about it while you’re working on it, because while you’re working on it is when you’re like, “Oh, I read this really cool article today”, right? It’s not about your own work. It’s about

Anna Law 56:42
It gives people insight into what else is going on in your life, and what are you reading. I mean, you are curating your feed, so what other interesting things have you read, or what else are you doing with your time?

Jo VanEvery 56:58
Yeah, yeah. Okay, there’s plenty of things we could talk about, but I think we’ve had a pretty interesting conversation about your research, which – and doing interdisciplinary research, and working in a public college with, you know, the kind of students you just feel it’s really satisfying to be able to contribute to society through your work. Like that, you feel like you’re making a contribution there, and you’re doing this really interesting work. I’m sorry that your research on slavery, Native American history, and all of that stuff has become so bloody relevant today. That seems like some things we would like to have left in the past, but you have really important things to say about how the current moment relates to the development of these policies and legal situations over the course of the history of the country. And anybody that’s interested in that should probably check out your book. I will put all of that in the show notes, so that people can find your book and all of that kind of thing. It was great to talk to you. Thank you very much.

Anna Law 58:08
Thanks for having me on today.

[End of Transcript.]

Related Posts & Links:

Anna’s book is available via Oxford University Press here: Migration and the Origins of American Citizenship: African Americans, Native Americans, and Immigrants

Anna’s website: https://www.annaolaw.com/

Anna has written a blog post about why the 2nd book is much harder, including the care duties people have mid-career including eldercare and childcare.
Read ‘Why the SECOND book is so hard and what to do about it‘ here.

The posts that inspired the title of my podcast:

• Creating A Satisfying Academic Career – Part 1
• Creating A Satisfying Academic Career – Part 2

The Spectre of Professionalism: Field, discipline, interdisciplinary

This interview was conducted on 10 July 2026, auto-transcribed by Otter.ai and human-edited for accuracy. It has been published here for ease of reading and was sent to the newsletter on 7 August 2026.

The post Why it took 16 years to write a book with Anna O. Law appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Sometimes you drop a ball.

You didn’t do a thing you were supposed to do at the time you were supposed to do it.

There isn’t really a good reason. Things got away from you. You forgot. You thought you’d assigned that task to someone else and there was a miscommunication. Or the person you assigned it to dropped the ball.

This doesn’t mean you, your assistant, or colleague is incompetent. Sometimes these things happen.

Whether you have an official diagnosis or not, if you are an adult who is neurodivergent in some way (or thinks you might be), this kind of thing might trigger all kinds of terrible feelings.

After all, you’ve probably had a lot of experience of this happening in the past. Even if you’ve developed systems to address the more common issues, sometimes those systems fail.

There is nothing wrong with you!

Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone.

Most of the time, when you’ve calmed down from the initial reaction, you try to figure out what happened and create or update your systems to prevent it happening again.

But sometimes, you look at what happened and you know that your system just failed randomly.

You look back over a longer period of time and realize that it’s been a long time since you’ve dropped this particular ball. Your system does work. It just failed once.

No big deal.

You become a bit more attentive about all the parts of your system for a bit just to make sure.

Random doesn’t look how we think it does

Most people assume that if something similar happens multiple times fairly close together, that it wasn’t random.

If you’ve ever decided to knit a scarf or a sweater with stripes of either random width or random colour changes (or both), you will probably have confronted the fact that sometimes you get blocks of colour that are bigger than you thought. Or one colour is more dominant in the overall garment than you expected. Even when you used a dice or some other random number generator.

Sometimes your systems randomly fail in 3 different ways in one month.

From the outside it looks like you have no systems and you are just incompetent.

But you can see that those were 3 different things, each of which hasn’t happened for a long time, but which all happened in a short span of time.

This is when you invoke mercury retrograde, pixies, or some other supernatural cause that you aren’t even sure you really believe in. It helps.

Self-compassion FTW

As an adult who’s had this kind of brain your whole life, you might also have a long history of being told you are incompetent, lazy, or stupid when these things happen. You now have a gremlin who turns up to repeat some of those things. You might have other physical reactions including pain or nausea.

It sucks.

That physical feeling you get will probably always accompany this kind of dropped ball. It’s okay.

That feeling is a signal. It’s a reminder that you care about this thing. You feel bad that you made this mistake.

Don’t make it worse by berating yourself for feeling how you feel. Or for needing some time to feel those feelings and let them pass.

You can acknowledge the feelings, and give them some time and space, without exaggerating the seriousness of your infraction.

This is hard. You can do hard things. It’s okay to need support to get better at this.

Once the feelings are under control, you can look at the facts and decide how bad this is. There may be consequences for you or for other people.

Forgive yourself first.

Do what you can to repair things…

Apologize to the people affected. Even if there is nothing you can change, you do feel bad that this happened. Acknowledge that you dropped a ball and that affected them. Say sorry.

Keep it short. Don’t overexplain. They are allowed to feel how they feel about it, too.

If there is anything you can do to mitigate the consequences, do it. Sometimes there is nothing that can be done. If you’ve missed a hard deadline, you’ve missed a hard deadline. That thing won’t happen. This also sucks. For everyone involved.

Take the time to look at how this happened and assess the risk of it happening again. Maybe you do need to update your systems. Maybe you don’t. You need to decide based on the facts.

You can never reduce the risk to zero. If you are going to change things, you can briefly explain what you are going to do to prevent this happening again in future.

Most people are understanding. Some people are not.

Sometimes you are going to lose a relationship and/or opportunities because of the person who is not understanding or compassionate. You get to feel grief for that. And, you need to remember that the pressure of working with someone who is not understanding about this kind of thing is probably not worth it.

Carry on.

The most important thing is to not let it derail you.

Let this be a small thing. Limit the impact on everything else.

It’s okay to feel a bit nervous as you do this. You might be extra careful for a while.

Learn what you need to learn and carry on.

You have important work to do. Go do it!

Related Posts:

Treating each day as a new opportunity

You’re coping, until you aren’t.

You are not lazy

The post When your systems fail appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Most of my clients have more than one writing project they are working on. And by “more than one”, it’s not usually 2, either.

They might come to me because they need help “finishing this book” or “getting things published”. And part of the problem is managing the teaching and admin and what do you do when your kids are sick and all that…

But there are usually a lot of other writing projects, too. In various stages of completion.

Between the general pressure to publish more, the tendency of research to produce more interesting questions, and how difficult it is to say no when someone invites you to contribute to a volume they are editing, you can accumulate a lot more projects than you can reasonably work on at one time.

Why limit your active projects?

To summarize what I said in Do you have too many writing projects?, if you have too many active writing projects, you can’t give any of them enough time to make a satisfying amount of progress and the costs of frequent task switching further limit your progress.

You risk being so frustrated that you feel like you can’t do this at all.

You do not necessarily have to limit yourself to just one project. The drawbacks of task switching may be compensated by the benefits of using a different project as a form of rest.

However, it is not advisable to have more than 3 projects active at any given time. Many people find 2 to be demanding enough.

How do you choose which projects?

There are multiple ways to do this.

Your overall goal is to get more things published. A published article is definitely no longer on your to do list.

An interim goal will be to get things off your desk to someone else: a co-author, peer reviewers at a journal, etc.

One criterion for selecting a priority is “closest to done”. A variation on that is closest to ready to hand off to your co-author (even if only as a draft).

Anything that has received a Revise & Resubmit decision after peer review is, by definition, very close to done, in the sense of ‘published’.

I strongly recommend making this your top priority. Use the comments from the journal editor and reviewers to make a revision plan. Then keep this project moving so you can get it back to the journal, and hopefully published and off your desk.

Anything that you’ve submitted is by definition, inactive. It has become impossible to predict how long the review process will take. You don’t want to spend time and energy worrying about stuff you can’t control. It’s better to feel mildly annoyed when you get the decision because you have to reprioritize your active projects.

As I said in Do you have too many writing projects? to get the full benefit of switching between 2 or 3 projects, you want projects that need different kinds of work, so working on one is a rest from the other.

If you haven’t already used the free workbook to get more clarity on

• how much and what kind of work each project needs,
• how you feel about each project
• Whether other people are involved
• The consequences of finishing or delaying

You can do that now. It will help you see which projects might complement each other either cognitively or emotionally.

I am not recommending “finish one thing before you switch to another” except for those things that are very close to finished.

I’m also not saying you need to abandon some of your projects completely.

Your goal is to be able to devote enough time and cognitive resources to a limited number of projects to see real movement and feel like the time you spend is worthwhile.

How long is “for now”?

You get to decide on the timeframe during which you will focus on this limited set of projects.

It needs to be long enough that you will feel like you’ve made progress on it, even if it’s not finished. Perhaps you define that by a specific milestone like “drafted the middle section” or “clarified the argument and outlined a new structure”. But it can also just be “this is what’s getting my limited writing time this month” and you can see how far you get.

Sometimes the work you do on the project will not directly affect the draft document. Perhaps you need to read more before you can draft the next section. Or, you need to go back to your analysis and refine it. Setting a time limit for this kind of activity can prevent necessary background work turning into a way to avoid writing the thing.

I suggest starting with a month.

You might have one “closest to done” project and one “other“.

You can also consider what kind of time and capacity you have this month, given the other things going on. Then choose a project that needs work that is possible in that kind of time.

For example, in summer, or on sabbatical, you probably want to prioritize a project that needs deep intellectual engagement with fewer distractions.

In contrast, in the busiest part of your teaching year, you might prioritize something that requires a lot of relatively straightforward work that can be done effectively in smaller chunks of time even when tired.

At the end of the month, use the Monthly Review prompts I send to summarize what kinds of work you have done on the projects you prioritized, and how much time you spent on each of them.

Clearly articulate how each project has changed because of that work, either in the document or in your head. Clarity about what you are trying to accomplish *is* progress.

Then you can also look at your longer list and decide if these projects are still your priority for the next month, or if you want to change something.

Maybe the kind of time available is different. Maybe something else has become more urgent. Or maybe you just need a change to keep you interested.

Resist the temptation to question your decisions more frequently than this. Changing things too frequently will lead to feeling like you aren’t making enough progress on anything. It’s discouraging.

The one exception is if you receive a decision from a journal about an article that is currently under review. A decision means it’s back on your desk.

A Revise & Resubmit decision (especially if it’s “minor revisions”) is, by definition, your top priority. You need to do enough work on it immediately to determine how much time you need, and ask for an extension on the deadline if necessary. If it’s been rejected you can wait until your next Monthly Review to figure out where this fits in your priority list.

What about the things you are NOT doing (this month)?

Prioritizing a very limited number of projects means actively deciding that another group of projects will be inactive for a while. At least a month. Possibly longer.

The Monthly Review helps ensure that they don’t get forgotten completely. But you kind of do want to forget about them for this month at least. Open loops take up up cognitive resources you’d rather use for your priority projects.

Remember: You will write this. Just not today, this week, this month, this summer.

If you’ve been taking on commitments with the mindset of “How quickly could I do this?”, there will be some emotional adjustment.

You are not lazy.

You are shifting your focus from quantity to quality. You are creating the conditions in which you can do things well. You may even finish more things per year because you are able to do better work in the time you devote to each project.

If one or more of the projects you are not working on right now involves other people, you will need to renegotiate timelines with them. The reflection prompts in the workbook will have resulted in some notes about the importance of this relationship and this project.

You might also want to remind yourself of all the ways in which you and the other person agree, or are aligned in your values.

Don’t assume they will be upset. They may also be overwhelmed and actually welcome your suggestion to put this particular project off for a month or so. That will help them deal with other things, too.

If you agreed to write a chapter for an edited collection or special issue and it is not one of your top 3 priorities, you will need to drop out of that particular publication. That doesn’t mean you are never going to write this thing. It means that after serious reflection, writing this thing in the timeframe required for this particular book or special issue, is not a priority for you.

Trust that you will be able to publish it somewhere else when you do get around to writing it. Show your respect for the editor and other contributors by communicating clearly and not slowing the bigger project down.

Here is some suggested language you can use as a template in this instance:

“I have been reviewing my commitments and have realized that I really do not have the capacity to take on this project right now and do a good job.

I’d like to withdraw now while you still have time to find someone else.

Thank you for inviting me. The project really is interesting. I just don’t have the capacity to do it justice.”

If you cannot renegotiate, then recommit.

Prioritizing is an iterative process.

You made your decisions based on what you learned by reflecting on the prompts in the workbook.

Figuring out how to communicate about a particular project made you realize that there were some factors you did not consider.

You can consider those factors now.

Make it a priority and drop something else.

This is difficult.

Making these decisions, communicating with the people you need to communicate with, making reasonable plans for your writing projects, and feeling confident that you are doing enough is really difficult.

It is made even more difficult by last minute demands from your head of department, opportunities you hadn’t anticipated, and the ways in which your colleagues may spread their own lack of confidence and fear around.

Many academics struggle with this at all stages of career.

There is no magic that will make it possible to do everything you want to do right now.

Be kind to yourself.

You are not a bad person for having started all these things. It’s pretty normal for things to get out of hand. You are excited about your work. You took on those things for good reasons.

The people you have made the commitments with have also been in this situation at least once. They might not like it, but they understand.

Limiting how many projects you are working on enables you to focus better on what you are working on.

You will enjoy your writing more. You will probably get more done.

You are now being realistic about what you can do and adjusting your plans. That’s it.

You can do this, just not all at once.

Subscribe to my newsletter to get the FREE workbook: Finish More by Doing Less and get your projects moving again.

Related Posts:

Do you have too many writing projects?

Starting a new project

Optimizing Focus when your project brings up difficult emotions

What to do about a stalled book project

This post was based on the original June 2019 version sent to my newsletter, but it has now been completely rewritten and split into 2 separate posts. The other new post can be found here: Do you have too many writing projects?.

The post How to choose which project to work on appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Most of my clients have more than one writing project they are working on. And by “more than one”, it’s not usually 2, either.

They might come to me because they need help “finishing this book” or “getting things published”. And part of the problem is managing the teaching and admin and what do you do when your kids are sick and all of that…

But there are usually a lot of other writing projects, too. In various stages of completion.

Between the general pressure to publish more, the tendency of research to produce more interesting questions, and how difficult it is to say no when someone invites you to contribute to a volume they are editing, you can accumulate a lot more projects than you can reasonably work on at one time.

Fragmenting your writing time.

The time you have available for writing is limited.

Dividing your time between multiple projects means that each of them is going to progress more slowly than if you’d given all of the time to one of them.

There is a real danger that the amount of progress you make on each one in any given time period is so small that you begin to wonder if you are doing anything productive at all.

It’s not just the total amount of time, either.

Many people complain, quite rightly, that it is particularly difficult to find the kind of time that allows you to really immerse yourself in a project so you can do the deep intellectual work it requires.

I talk a lot about making good use of smaller chunks of time. But I would never argue that you can do all the writing you need to do in just 15-minutes a day.

When you have long periods of time in which you can make writing a priority, do you really want to divide that time between 6 different projects?

You need to find the sweet spot where your projects move forward at a pace that feels satisfying.

Cognitive capacity is limited.

Your frustration about the kind of time available is a recognition that even when you have time you could devote to writing, you don’t always have the cognitive capacity necessary for the particular kind of work your project needs.

Each of the writing projects you have on the go are complex. All of them need deep intellectual work at some point.

• Reading.
• Thinking.
• Struggling to articulate what you really want to say as a result of all that thinking.

That part of the work can’t be rushed, either.

“Sleeping on it” is an actual cognitive process. Your brain needs time to process what you’ve put in there. That’s happening in the background, but there needs to be capacity for it.

This is also why overwork doesn’t work. Fatigue reduces your cognitive capacity and impairs cognitive function. But that’s a whole other thing.

Task switching is like an extra project.

The act of switching between tasks or projects has its own time and cognitive capacity requirements.

The more frequently you switch tasks, the more often you spend the first part of your writing session “getting back into the project”.

Yes, you can develop practices that make that a bit easier. But the feeling you crave of being in the project and just moving forward without having to consciously think about the next step is not available.

You can only hold so many details in your head at a time. All the extra energy and thinking you spend switching between projects, remembering where you are, and getting back into a project, and panicking about forgetting things, is energy and thinking that you are not devoting to your writing projects.

Second guessing your plans, worrying about being behind and not meeting deadlines, and beating yourself up for not being able to focus take even more cognitive resources away from the projects on your list.

Don’t forget that a certain amount of task switching is inevitable: between teaching and writing, or life stuff and writing, or whatever. Adding more switching between your writing projects compounds the problem.

If you spend a significant amount of your writing time engaged in task switching, it will feel like you need even more time. Time you are already struggling to find and dividing between too many projects.

That’s not motivating.

You must reduce the number of active projects.

Note the word “active”.

It will be helpful in the short term to declare a moratorium on accepting new projects.

However, you don’t have to give up on anything on your list completely.

You need to set some things aside for now to free up time and cognitive capacity for the one(s) you will be working on.

You have to make some difficult decisions and you may need to engage in some tricky negotiations about deadlines.

You cannot do your best work with too many things on the active list. You need to make a more realistic plan.

I propose you think like a (successful) circus juggler and limit how many things you are trying to pay attention to at once.

This reduces the amount of energy and cognitive capacity you devote to switching, so you can focus more effectively.

You don’t have to go down to one.

I’m not expecting you to become a different person.

If you know you work most effectively if you can do One Thing At A Time, consider this post permission to organize yourself so you are actually only working on one thing at a time. This section will probably help you figure out how to combine ONE writing project, with the necessary non-writing projects you also need to keep going.

For the rest of you, focusing on only one project at a time can also have drawbacks. Sometimes a change is exactly what you need to help you optimize your focus.

Given the time and cognitive capacity available to you for writing (which varies over the year), you need to limit how many projects you can switch between.

The general consensus is that 3 is the maximum. A lot of my clients tell me that they struggle even with 2.

I want you to think carefully about the specific projects you are combining. Ideally they require different kinds of work.

For example, if one of your projects is at a stage that benefits from time to ruminate and allow your brain to process things in the background, you want tasks you can do while that happens. Another project that is further advanced, and needs you to implement decisions already made, line edit or copy edit a fairly complete draft, or some of the more tedious tasks required before submission would pair well. Especially if you find it hard to focus on those tasks for long periods.

This is also helpful if you are trying to keep that thinky project going when you don’t have a lot of time.

Feeding your brain with things to ruminate on before spending most of your day in meetings or teaching, can make the one morning you can protect for writing more satisfying.

The same thing applies if your main project is emotionally demanding. Allowing yourself to switch to a more straightforward project when you’ve reached your emotional capacity has several benefits. It means you are less likely to avoid the emotionally difficult project. Not exceeding your emotional capacity also reduces the recovery time necessary. And another project is getting attention, so you aren’t falling behind on everything.

The trick is to ensure that the type of work required is sufficiently different that switching counts as a rest from the other project.

For example, the intellectual heavy lifting of one project may be creative rest from the tedium of formatting tables and checking references.

This is also why you need to strictly limit yourself to only 2 or 3 projects. If you have more than 2 or 3 projects in rotation, the restful element of switching will be counteracted by the effort required to keep track of what’s going on.

The benefits of being able to switch to something else when stuck compensate for some of that. You are spending a higher proportion of your writing time moving projects forward and less of it staring at a screen pulling your hair out.

Free resources to help with all of this!

This is difficult.

I’ve created a free workbook to help you make these decisions. You’ll start by making a list of everything currently in progress. (Ideas that you haven’t started working on yet don’t count.)

Then I encourage you to consider a range of factors, including:

• How much and what kind of work each project needs
• How you feel about each project
• Whether other people are involved
• The consequences of finishing or delaying

I’ve written another post helping you choose once you’ve done that reflecting, and what to do about the stuff you are putting on the back burner for now.

You will occasionally panic that you’ve dropped one of the balls you were supposed to be juggling and it’s rolled under the sofa. Keep breathing.

• Panic is not the best state to write in.
• Panicking about a project that isn’t the one you are trying to focus on right now is even less helpful.

The Monthly Review email I send at the end of every month will help prevent the panic.

I remind you to review what you’ve accomplished and adjust your plans for the month ahead. I share specific prompts that focus on your writing, and include a nudge to check whether your priorities have changed.

Subscribe to the newsletter to get the FREE workbook, Finish More by Doing Less, and the Monthly Review emails.

Related Posts:

Overcommitted? Declaring a moratorium

What to do about a stalled book project

Optimizing Focus: 3 elements to consider

Juggling 101: Elements of a good plan

Communication vs Validation: why are you publishing?

You need a writing practice

The power of 15 minutes a day

This post was rewritten and updated from an earlier 2019 version that was sent to my newsletter and included in the October 2021 Optimizing Focus Spotlight. It was then split into 2 new posts and republished in May/June 2026, the 2nd can be found here: How to choose which project to work on.

The post Do you have too many writing projects? appeared first on Jo VanEvery.

Many years ago he came to terms with his workaholism and took serious steps to change his behaviour for the sake of his health. I know he still looked like someone who worked too hard. But those of us who have known him a long time know how much he had changed.

Yes, he got up at 4:30 am to write. But he also went to bed very early. And once shared a photo of the couch in his office on which he took a 90 minute nap each day at mid-day.

He also came very close to dying of COVID and complications of that disease, something he spoke about occasionally.

And yet we were all surprised to see that on 1 June 2026, he had left us. I do not know how. It doesn’t really matter. He is gone.

He has left behind a considerable legacy.

Raul was a very intense person. He worked hard. He frequently had 2 or 3 research projects on the go. He wrote and published many things. I’m sure his scholarly colleagues will write about that work.

He was also a committed teacher, especially of research methodologies and research practices. Raul’s commitment to teaching and supporting other researchers extended well beyond his job and is how I met him and what we shared.

Even as a graduate student, Raul was sharing techniques and practices on his blog for the benefit of others. He was active on Twitter, which is where I met him; I don’t know how long ago. Back when Twitter was somewhere worth spending time. Close to 20 years ago because I think we met up when I visited Vancouver with my family in 2007.

The more memorable visit was in 2010, I think, when I was in Vancouver for work and stayed a few extra days to hang out with him. He recommended a very nice boutique hotel downtown, around the corner from a button shop. I don’t think he knew about the button shop or how excited I’d be about it.

He showed his Vancouver. It’s a beautiful city. And it was his home. He had recently started using a co-working space, a new thing back then, and was excited to show me all the features. We walked. We went for beer. It was a fabulous day.

He spoke to me once about how hard it was to leave there even though Mexico was also his home. He has had an amazing career at CIDE and FLACSO. He has been able to spend quality time with his parents as they age. It was particularly valuable to him to be able to travel with his mother, with whom he shared intellectual interests as well.

Recently he had spoken of how hard caring work is. I cannot imagine how hard it is for his mother to lose him, her youngest son. My heart goes out to her, his dad, his brothers, and niblings. The tiny glimpses of you that he shared gave us a glimpse into how important you all were to him.

Most of our relationship happened online. We both moved from Twitter to Bluesky. We had in common a desire to help scholars do their best work. Raul’s blog is a treasure trove of practical advice about writing, time management, reading, note taking, publishing, and so much else.

He shared what he knew generously. I sincerely hope he made plans for the preservation of that blog or that someone will take that in hand.

As a scholar from the Global South, Raul was frequently frustrated by how often his work would not be cited, despite having very clearly influenced the scholarship of others. This is a very common problem.

The one thing I encourage all scholars to do in his memory, is to read and engage with scholars from the Global South and engage with their findings and their thinking in your own work. Cite them!

Cite them because they have influenced your thinking and your research. Cite them even when you are told that it is more important to cite “more influential” people.

Teach their work, too. Make sure future generations know that important work is being done by scholars in the Global South.

You cannot do either of those things if you do not read their work. Seek it out. Read journals that are published in other countries (and other languages). Follow them on social media. Go to their talks at conferences.

Allow yourself to learn from them.

Raul was an amazing scholar and an amazing man. He is not the only one. He will be greatly missed by so many. I’m so glad he left so much behind for people to continue to know him and benefit from his knowledge for years to come.

More of Raul’s work and life

Raul’s Bluesky profile

Raul’s website & blog

The post In memoriam: Raul Pacheco-Vega appeared first on Jo VanEvery.