In part 2 of his two-part TAA webinar, “A 30-Step Guide to Publishing in Scholarly Journals“, Dr. Anthony J. Onwuegbuzie, a professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Sam Houston State University, and distinguished visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg, shared several strategies for helping authors secure “impactful publications”—those that advance the field.
The following are six of those strategies.
So you’ve done everything right. You’ve cleared time in your busy schedule by identifying the activities that didn’t move you forward. You set long-term goals that were SMART – Specific, Measureable, Achievable, Realistic, and Time-specific. You filled the newly available time slots with productive habits that push you in the direction of your goals. You even found ways to make the most of your time.
But…things don’t always go as planned.
So now what?
525,600 minutes. A fixed amount of time each of us is given to accomplish all that we can in a given year. Time is unstoppable. Time is inevitable. But time is yours. So it’s important to make the most of it.
So far in this series, we have explored ways to prioritize activities and to align the things we choose to do with our time with the goals we have for our lives. In this article, we will examine ways to make minor adjustments to get even more out of the scarce amount of time available while maintaining a balance to life that improves efficiency and increases satisfaction with our writing practices.
In the First Step in Time Management – Having Time to Manage article, we acknowledged the fixed amount of time each of us have to work with in a day, month, or year. We then took inventory of how that time was being used and explored ways to cut costly, less profitable activities from the list to make room for other things that can bring us closer to our goals.
In this article, we will discuss ways to reallocate this newly found time in ways that align with a happier, healthier, and successful life.
Many people look at their busy, cluttered schedule and want for more hours in a day, more days in a week, or more weeks in a year. Unfortunately time is a constant. We each have the same 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour, 24 hours in a day, and 52 weeks in a year. Time exists for all of us, but most of us have given it away and don’t know how to get it back!
So before we talk about how to manage your time, we must first discuss how to free your time.
At the 2017 TAA conference, Robert Barlow shared “10 Tips to Enhance Your Writing & Take the Stress Out of Polishing Your Work”. Among the tips a common theme of planning and preparation provide the key to reducing the stress of the writing process.
Although the tips related to preparing for your audience and the style of your discipline are effective in framing the destination of your manuscript, and the grammatical tips are foundational, the four organization tips (organize, research, scaffold, and review) were the key takeaways for managing stress throughout the writing process.
