Author: NCFDD
In this Summer of Faculty Development blog series, we keep coming back to one plan most faculty have made at some point: using the summer to catch up on research. By the end of the semester, the list is usually long. A manuscript that stalled. A proposal that needs more than a light revision. Smaller projects that never fully wrapped up. New ideas that finally have room to breathe.
Summer feels like the moment all of it can move.
When everything on that list is treated as active, the summer tends to become a season of partial progress. Work gets touched, rotated, and returned to, but rarely finished.
Why the catch-up plan breaks down
When several projects compete for attention at once, the day’s first decision becomes: where do I start? Without a clear answer, most people start somewhere reasonable, make some progress, then shift when something else feels more urgent. By Friday, multiple projects have been touched and none of them feel meaningfully closer to done.
The work doesn’t arrive with a built-in priority order. Decisions about what to work on get made in the moment, repeatedly, without a framework to lean on. That’s cognitively expensive, and it quietly eats into the time that was supposed to feel expansive.
Over weeks, the pattern compounds:
- Writing happens in bursts rather than building across days
- Larger pieces stay perpetually open and take more effort to re-enter each time
- The easier tasks get finished while the work that would most move your research forward stays in progress
The faculty who get out of this pattern usually don’t do it by working harder or longer. They do it by making a few deliberate decisions about how the summer is structured before it begins.
What actually moves research forward over the summer
Faculty who feel good about their summer progress usually aren’t trying to move everything. They’ve made deliberate decisions, before the summer begins, about what stays active and what waits.
That shift tends to show up in three practical ways:
- Fewer projects in rotation. When two or three projects have your attention instead of seven, you spend less time reorienting and more time continuing. The cognitive cost of context-switching drops significantly.
- A concrete definition of “done.” Vague goals like “work on the manuscript” expand to fill whatever time is available and still feel unfinished. Specific targets, “complete the literature review section” or “submit the proposal draft by July 15,” create a clear endpoint to work toward.
- Consistent short sessions rather than waiting for long stretches. Research writing moves forward through regular contact with the material, not through occasional marathon days. Protecting even 60 to 90 minutes most mornings tends to outperform waiting for a free day that rarely arrives on its own terms.
Those three things don’t require more time. They require deciding, before the summer fills up, what the time is actually for.
A more realistic summer planning approach
Before the schedule fills in, it helps to ask one clarifying question: what would you want to point to at the end of the summer and say, that changed?
Not everything on the list. Just the work that matters most right now.
From that answer, a useful summer plan tends to follow naturally. You know what you’re sitting down to do. You know what can wait without guilt. Your time connects from one week to the next rather than restarting each Monday.
Faculty have more unstructured time in the summer than at any other point in the year. The question is whether that time has a clear enough direction to actually use it well.
