First Monday of a New Month: What to Write?

 

The first Monday of a new month is a day of possibilities, a day on which all kinds of streaks can start, a day on which… one wants to wind back the clock and have another couple days of weekend.

Monday practices vary by scholar, but one that I’ve found helpful is reviewing the writing-task spreadsheet. I keep a meta-list of all the project ideas I’ve got, and their possible (or actual) venues, and the status of the work involved. It’s not a “to-do” list, more like a “to-consider” list.

I treat this project-mapping like brainstorming. There are no bad writing projects; there are just projects that get assigned priority 1200.

That means I don’t automatically delete the oddities. Some sit at priority 1200 forever, and that’s fine. Others linger on the distant horizon for a year or four and unexpectedly acquire legs. Keeping those possibilities visible contributes to a kind of abundance mentality: the weird idea that pops out as an aside in a class lecture can remain available long enough to become an actual publication.

“Signposting Shakespeare” worked like that: from class observation to “huh, I think that has legs,” to collaborating with students on data collection and bibliography gathering, to writing to submission to publication. The first step in the process is to track the idea to begin with.

Which is why at the moment I have 107 items floating in the “I could consider this” array. Nine of those are in one of the “pending” categories (either waiting on proofs or waiting on publication), three are active, and one is in the “start gathering bibliography” stage.

Unlike my 30-day reading spreadsheets, I don’t actually put down everything I’m writing on my project-tracking spreadsheet. The point of THIS kind of tracking isn’t really to be able to show everything I’ve done – the gigantic CV is where that kind of thing goes. This is tracking-for-planning. Today’s post, for instance, is just the “hey, I need to warm up and get motivated” kind of writing that drops in and makes thinking through another task kind of fun. It never got entered.

But I did look over what last-month-me thought I should be doing. The spreadsheet helps me turn the vague sense that I have seventeen things I ought to be doing into something more concrete, and so more useful: this needs reading, this needs an email, this one is going to take a significant dive into my archival notes, that one can wait.

Plus the spreadsheet is a real blessing in terms of balancing what needs a fresh morning brain and which projects can be assigned to the afternoon me (who is less clever but often more dogged – a good bibliography ferret, but not so much a creative thinker). Putting words on page: morning task. Sending a follow-up email to the editor: afternoon work.

PRACTICAL DETAILS

Since this spreadsheet is for tracking purposes, I have fourteen headers that have been useful for my purposes:

Timeframe	Priority	PROJECT
Venue / scope	Data collection	Bibl
Data analysis	Writing	Submission
Awaiting	Nudge date	Revision
Publish	Thank-Yous

Obviously, project and venue + scope are the most important for purposes of project definition – remembering what it is exactly that I thought this project might become. I find it helpful to enter timeframes for some projects, but mostly that’s just a “panic here” date – an upcoming request for proposals gets a visual signal of “pending deadline,” but a blog post is never going to get a date due. And one doesn’t bother with deadlines for that Revise and resubmit; by its very nature, it just joined this week’s (or next week’s) work stack. Priority is a sorting tool for me, not a strict order-of-operations column. To that end, I reuse a lot of numbers: 1 is this week, and there might be three to five projects that are active. 2 is “keep this in mind” – needing to prep my travel-reading meant that an article which I wasn’t “working on” was sitting in the visible spot for the last three months as my brain-dead filler task; I compiled the full bibliography during late afternoons *before* it became an active project. 9 is a “this has been submitted and needs tracking until its fate is known” category. 1200 is a “probably don’t ever do this” and 1300 is blog posts. The idea of priority numbering is to bunch things into buckets of how much the project needs my attention.

Then there’s the active work: data collection and bibliography-building are two often parallel tasks; they might become yellow and then green simultaneously, or I might do one or the other in completely different months. Likewise, analysis and writing might be intertwined or separate; I just need to be tracking where I am.

Submission is enough of an act of self-flagellation that it gets its own dopamine reward. After all, the things you’re fighting with are fierce. Two-factor authentication across firewall barriers. Footnote formatting by all the weird templates that people use. Writing the abstract or defining the keywords. Deciding whether a cover letter is needed or going with the simple submission. All of this is so involved that I long ago decided that it deserved its visibility in my work-flow.

And then there’s the long afterwards. Awaiting and nudge date sit in the same zone of limbo: not accepted, not rejected, just hanging out in that “under consideration” land. I used to just use “Awaiting” and then “Revision,” but some projects require more interaction and the nudge date lets me actively decide how long I want to wait before putting in a reminder and then (and this is critical) to not do anything about it until that date. I’m in the humanities: the goal is for weeks not to become months and months not to become years.

Revisions are where the R&R and copy-edits go, and Publish where proofs live respectively. (An outright rejection gets recorded on the “completed projects” tab – it’s the less happy kind of completion, but it does draw the project to a close. Then I get to decide, and the project either goes back to establish a different possible venue and consider rewriting or gets pushed off the list altogether. In either case, feedback is a gift.)

The last category is also important: when a project reaches its final stage, I like to contact people whose ideas helped me frame my own thoughts and thank them, and to write to archives that supported my research to show what came of it all. So Thank-Yous are part of tidying up at the end of project, a sort of tack-and-tie to my scholarly peers.

And then the spreadsheet is ready for another Monday. Most of those 107 ideas will not become this month’s work, and some of them may never become anything at all. That’s fine. The point isn’t to turn every possible project into a writing obligation. It’s to cultivate a kind of abundance mentality: to keep enough of the possibilities visible that, when Monday asks me what I should write next, I’m not staring at an empty page.

OTHER PRODUCTIVITY POSTS

The Whiteboard Where Big Things Live — another approach to getting the sprawling mass of things-to-do out of your head and into a form where priorities become visible. 

How To Jump-Start a Scholarly Article: The Plan — for what happens when one of those distant-horizon ideas finally acquires legs and needs to become an actual article.

Managing Bibliography by Spreadsheet — my other spreadsheet habit: a 30-day system for turning a prospective bibliography into a reading plan and making progress visible.

Writing is Momentum — on why idea-generating, blogging, listing, and generally keeping in contact with your own thinking all count as part of the writing process.

Sooner or Later It All Gets Done: How History Emerges from Small Details

One of the recurring themes in my scholarly life is “lots of little details.” That’s true of many things in life, of course, but this morning I’m struck with its scholarly application. I’m prone to taking account of a lot of bits-of-evidence, the small details that by themselves are trivial but in the big picture add up to something significant. Assuming I’m lucky, of course.

Historians often inherit sources shaped by earlier editors’ priorities, so part of my work has been learning how to ask new questions of familiar materials. Many of our sources with “lots of details” come from the nineteenth century -- Ludwig Rapp and his mastery of parish clerical details in Topographisch-historische Beschreibung is one of my current faves! Wow, what a collector of detail! So truly, local archives and chronicle accounts were edited by folks excited for what the data can show – about war, about politics, about economics. Their questions, however, did not always extend to other kinds of questions, like those about relationships, and households, and famine, and fear.

Thus, even in a place like Bregenz, where the surviving sources were so negatively impacted by war, and invasion, and the predations of time, I love that there are still questions I can ask, and answers in the little details that come from careful consideration of the sources with new questions in mind. I’ve turned up “new” sources on Thalbach, for instance, not by finding actual new documents, but by reading the extant documents for details that didn’t matter to the indexers of past times – payments to and charity for the devout women of the town. Sometimes the clue is as small as a repeated instruction to light a candle at a grave — something no nineteenth-century editor thought worth indexing, but wonderfully delicious for my argument.

And now, I’m plowing my way through prayerbooks, looking for ways in which spirituality is manifest not as treatise but as practice. We have given preference to the authorial voice, particularly those by named authors and/or those approved by the church, for instance. But what is interesting to me is how those sermon-shaped ideas became fixed in these women’s lives – not so much what they *heard* but what they *did* with that spiritual guidance provided to them.

So yes, I’m reading 15^th century prayerbooks for fun and enlightenment. I think these sources can tell us something important – not so much about what these women actually believed, but about what they did as a matter of practice. Actions speak louder than words; prayers, repeated, and copied, and collected, and shared, tell us a lot about how belief became present as part of daily life.

That’s an awful lot of words, of course. Words words words. Oodles and scads of words. 397 folios of words in one case. 120 pages of words in another.

But little by little by little, and sooner or later it all gets done.

Or, as we also say, “every day a little progress.”

That, in the end, is often how historical knowledge grows: not from dramatic discoveries, but from patient attention to what earlier readers overlooked. And spreadsheets. But that’s another post.

WORKS CITED

Image from Vorarlberger Landesbibliothek, Hs 17: a late 16th-century Thalbach prayerbook, fol. 216, "O junckfrow maria ain künigin der himel," marked with a tab in its left-hand margin.

Ludwig Rapp, Topographisch-historische Beschreibung des Generalvikariates Vorarlberg, 5 vols (Brixen: Weger, 1894-1924). I especially love volumes 2 & 3, the Bregenz volumes.