Managing your pipeline

Smash those goals like a Halloween pumpkin

Hello darlings!

It was so fucking nice to see so many of you (in person!) at the APSA happy hour. I *think* I at least got to say hi to everyone but if not, please don’t take it personally. Or do, if you are the one person at the event that I intensely dislike.

Let’s talk about managing our research pipelines!

Normal disclaimer: all advice is bad advice / all advice is good advice / this is an aggressive advice column about how to thrive in capitalist, racist, sexist, neoliberal academia and that might not be your jam. Go do something else cool. BUT I want us to fucking succeed in this system so we can bust it open from the inside and this system does not WANT us to do that. So we need to kick some fucking ass. Here’s a way to do that.

Special disclaimer: my approach is only one way of being a badass academics. There are people who are wildly successful and have ideas and records far better than mine that just work on ONE THING AT A TIME. Find the model that works for you.

Prior to tenure, all of us operate in a world with these rules:

1. Getting a job, getting tenure, getting promoted requires that each of us produce a certain amount of research. The amount, placement, and quality of that research varies from place to place, but we each are held to some minimum standard

2. We generally don’t know exactly what that minimum standard is, but often have a pretty good idea as the vicinity that we need to be in

3. While rarely a clear requirement, there is often vague expectation of a level of consistency in publications

So: we need to consistently produce a certain mythical number of publications in certain mythical outlets

Okaaaay. Many of us aren’t even given the secret passcode that will let us know how many fucking articles we need to publish or which journals to target! Let alone how to do it! So how do we actually do it!?!

Today, let’s talk about some strategies of how to actually produce enough work in good journals at a consistent pace.

1. Map out your process

The first step to keeping a full and active pipeline of your research is to have an actual fucking strategy for understanding what you have going on where and how.

Here are some examples! Matt Lebo’s pipeline process; Erin Marie Furtak’s 11-stage pipeline management system; Raul Pacheco-Vega’s Conference-to-Journal-Article process; Sam Lynch’s Trello example and post; and this cool guide on managing your research and publications.

I use a whiteboard and an excel sheet. The whiteboard is pictured below (and here’s mine from a year ago if you want to see how much can change in a year! Happy to answer any questions about it! I also have another book-progress whiteboard that keeps track of my chapter-by-chapter progress on the two books I’m writing.

2. Understand (and confront) the bottlenecks in your process

Once you have a process or map down, actually spend the time to put your projects into it! And keep it updated! When you do that, you can (pretty easily) see where the choke points are in the process – where do you need to focus your energy to keep projects flowing across the pipeline.

3. Write enough / a lot / with the right people / strategically

Write enough: The next step is that you have to actually write some shit so that you can send it out for review and get it published. How much is enough? Well, that really depends on the expectations of your institution, the other demands on your time, and your own ambition. I try really hard to be compliant with the “Munger Rule” – a rule invented by Mike Munger (no, that this Munger, although his rule is good too) that dictates that, if you want to produce enough work to get tenure at most institutions, you should have three articles under review at all time. I have been Munger Rule compliant for all but about 6 months of my tenure track career and it shows – I reliably publish several articles a year with very few breaks.

Write a lot: Someone once gave a friend the advice that the trick to getting tenure at a competitive R1 university is to “write more, better, faster.” This might seem like a cruel joke, but I interpret it as “write more = better faster.” That is, as you write more, you get better at the writing process (although we all have days that are the actual pits) and you are able to more quickly produce high quality work. So – can you create and enforce habits of regularly writing work that will end up under review?

Write with the right people: many of us are working with other people in our pursuit of academic domination. That’s cool. Coauthoring can be awesome. But make sure that your coauthors are on the same page as you as to timing of the project and the amount of work that everyone will put into the project at any given point in time. If you are constantly spinning your thumbs, waiting on your coauthors to do shit, DO NOT WAIT. Work on something else while they do their thing.

Write strategically: Write stuff that will get published in the types of outlets that you need to publish in to get or keep a job. That means: Leverage a single data collection or literature review or method into multiple publications. Know when to give up on a project. Aim high (the APSR won’t publish your work if you don’t send it there! Ask me how I know). Stop dawdling. Get off twitter. Get to work.

So – that’s it! Just write more better faster and put everything on your goddamn pipeline and collect underpants, boom, success.

Let me know how it goes!

XOXO

Mirya