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Showing posts from August, 2014

Backsliding

We've all been there: things are chugging along fine, until everything grinds to a halt. Your productivity measures aren't working anymore. Your writing goals feel more and more out of reach. Unhelpful or challenging feedback makes you doubt yourself. The emails are piling up, as is the marking. It's even more frustrating when you've devoted energy over the years to building systems for getting to work, getting things done, and keeping yourself accountable, and things are still not progressing. For me, the low point was a few years ago . I was working on a major paper and I'd utterly lost momentum. I hadn't written a thing in days, and I barely had the drive to open a book. The project was so big and unwieldy that I didn't feel like I could make a dent. I realized how bad things were when the most I could muster the energy to do was take out the garbage. On the walk back up the steps, I realized that the pride I had in accomplishing such a minor task