How I Published the Semester I Came Back from Maternity Leave

During academic year 2015-2016, I had the longest and most amazing maternity leave with my third (and last!) baby.

When I came back to work in Fall 2017, my two edited volumes and an article in Anthropology and Education Quarterly were published.

Now, because my colleagues didn’t quite understand what *maternity leave* means, I started to hear people saying, “You did all that writing when you were on maternity leave?” And I quickly schooled them, “Of course not! I breastfed and got pooped on and didn’t sleep during maternity leave. I did not work.”

And then they started asking: “How is publishing after maternity leave even possible? How do you do it?”

My answer: I had a publication pipeline planned out and I executed my plan.

Was there luck involved? Absolutely. We were super lucky to get pregnant when we did. But the rest was not luck or accident. It was strategy, focus, and planning.

What babies taught me about academic productivity

I owe everything about what I know about finding time to write and publish in academia to my babies. Baby #1 was particularly demanding. She never wanted to be alone. She dropped naps at 2 years old. She was not that interested in playing with toys. She really just wanted to play with me.

Pre-motherhood I felt like I never had time to write. I was transitioning from PhD student to full-time professor on the tenure track (which nobody really prepares you for). My beautiful dissertation just sat there, getting old, while I tried to learn how to teach ninety first-year students English as a second language and participate in way too many committees and navigate department politics.

How could I possibly find time to write?

Then super-demanding-baby arrived and it was like: WOAH. Time to re-group. If I thought I didn’t have time to write before I REALLY didn’t have time to write now. There was no more grading at home after dinner. In fact, since baby didn’t sleep, I pretty much collapsed every day after she did. All of my work had to get done during the time that baby was in daycare: that is, 8:00-4:00.

And that was it. My academic priorities completely changed, but maybe not in the way that you might think. What happened to me was that I gained clarity about what was really important to move my career forward and what was not.

What super-demanding-baby made me do was hone focus. And using that focus helped me develop the set of skills that I needed to be successful as an academic (and as a caregiver).

I’m not talking about time-saving tricks and hacks. I’m not talking about a bullet journal or the perfect planner. I’m talking about taking control, driving your career, and learning how to say “no” to the unimportant things that will try to stand in your way.

I’m making it sound a little easier than it really was. I took me trial and (lots of) error to figure this out. My passion now is to teach you what I had to teach myself through the work we’re doing at Scholar’s Voice®, so that you don’t have to have a super-demanding-baby in order to figure out how to have the career (and life) you want.

Clearing my publication pipeline

So back to the semester after baby number three. It looked like I had written my tail off during maternity leave and then was seeing the fruits of my writing labors. But of course, what I actually did was plan out a publication pipeline.

Here’s how publishing after maternity leave was possible:

• I had already planned out my publication pipeline so that I had stopped collecting new data about a year before I got pregnant.
• I used the pre-pregnancy year to get projects from the idea stage all the way through to draft and submission.
• I worked with co-editors and co-authors on all the projects. Whenever I could, I contributed more than necessary so that when I was dealing with morning sickness and exhaustion I could ask them to step up (which they did).
• I hired out copyediting because I knew that that wasn’t a job for late-stage pregnancy or early motherhood. 🙂

In sum, I used my pre-pregnancy year to clear my pipeline, and I enlisted help for the late-stage parts of publication (indexing, copyediting, reference-checking) that I knew would spill over into my actual maternity leave. The most awesome thing about this is that I actually took a leave. A real break. I hardly answered emails (or even checked them). I was able to concentrate on recovering from birth and caring for my baby.

Learn how to manage your publication pipeline–and your career

What I’ve learned from academic motherhood is that writing and publishing more is not about time. Time management is one piece, but focus, planning, and mindset are equally important. If you’re going through the semester feeling like you’re on a run-away train, what you need is focus, vision, and drive, not more time.

What you may not know is that the skills necessary to design your career so that you have time to write and publish and feel less stressed are LEARNABLE. I didn’t start out my career with those skills in place. I learned them through trial and (lots of) error. But I truly don’t think YOU should have to learn them that way.

Career Design Support

If you’d like support for designing your career on your own terms as you take control of your writing and publishing process, there are a few ways that we can help:

• • Join our email newsletter, In The Pipeline, where we’ll share academic writing and publishing tips every Monday morning
  • Check out the Navigate program details and get on the waitlist here! Our 12-week program helps tenure-track womxn and nonbinary professors with a disruptive perspective on their field to publish their backlog of papers so that their voice can have the impact they know is possible. 
  • Get my book, Making Time to Write: How to Resist the Patriarchy and Take Control of Your Academic Career Through Writing. Learn how to build your career around your writing practice while shattering the myths of writing every day, accountability, and motivation, doing mindset work that’s going to reshape your writing, and changing academic culture one woman and nonbinary professor at a time. Get your print copy today or order it for a friend here!
  • Listen to my podcast, Academic Writing Amplified, created for womxn and nonbinary professors who want to write and publish more while rejecting the culture of overwork in academia.