OK, so this is weird. This post has gotten bumped a few times for more time pressing/less depressing/etc. posts… and now I’m in a situation at work where I have a lengthy R&R, a couple new projects, and prior to that I had picked up two of the unfinished work projects and have meetings with people about them and I’m back to having too much to think about to worry about creativity! On the plus side, I did finish my major committee responsibility for the year last week, so hopefully I haven’t actually overcommitted at this point. But I still want your thoughts on creativity! And the blog is now down to 54(!) unfinished drafts.
- We are down to 68 drafts in the blog folder. It will be less once we package up abandoned posts from 2014– we still need to decide which we’re going to completely abandon and which we are going to finish. I’m not sure what we’ll do when we’re completely out.
- I am down to four unfinished work projects for which the data are complete but they need to be written up or rewritten or re-figured out. One has been rejected like 7 times so now I’m trying to figure out what to do with that. One is a bit underpowered so maybe I should abandon it, I dunno. One the results didn’t turn out like our pre-registration plan had assumed so I’ve got to figure out how to deal with that and where to send it (my two co-PI are both deans now so… it’s just me). One is almost done– we’re still rewriting, so that’s what I’ve been focusing on but I can’t touch the restricted data. After that’s done… I need to actually get to work on the pre-registered one because in a couple years that will no longer be interesting.
- I have a grant proposal under review. I don’t have high hopes for it, but you never know.
- I don’t have any new big ideas that I’m working on. For years I’ve had more than I had time for. But once the big project in bullet 2 is done, I won’t really have anything to present places. It is unsettling.
- Many of the ideas I’d had but didn’t have time to work on have since been done by other people. They were good ideas, but I was busy doing other stuff.
- A couple years ago I was giving grad students advice on where to get ideas and now…
- I do have a couple projects where I’m like 4th author out of 7, but I’m not in charge of those. I do stuff when asked.
- I think what I need to do is just spend some time reading. I have 463 emails of abstracts of lists of working papers and published journals in a “to-read” folder. I used to read them weekly and keep up with what was going on, but I got really really busy. And then it just got easy to move stuff into that folder and forget about it. But I also think that had a detriment to being up on what the profession is finding interesting. I still go to conferences and seminars, but…
- And I’m back to doing a ton of service. My department head is overwhelmed with some changes that have been being made and has asked one of the committees I’m on to help out. But just kind of vague disorganized help I don’t know where to start. So my other track head counterpart and I got together and we’re like, how do we frame this problem, what information do we need to know… and it’s just a big mess that includes a ton of moving parts. So that may be where a lot of my organizing etc. mental power is going. This is another one of those cases where we don’t HAVE to be putting in the work we’re putting in, but if we don’t then the whole thing is going to be a disaster because we’ve tried not putting in the work and things exploded (or just didn’t happen).
- (Aside: we actually have 3 track heads, but the other one is overwhelmed with other service.)
- I’m thinking of applying for a mini-dean position (like dean of X, not dean of a college). Don’t want to be department chair, but could possibly be a mini-dean. I dunno. People drain me but if I’m not getting a raise and I can’t leave the state… It’s the unnecessary meetings that kill me.
- Am I becoming less creative?
- Am I just jettisoning bad ideas before putting time in them so I’m more selective? Am I too scared to work on the good ideas that I have because they might not be efficient?
- I feel like it’s easier to work on out-there stuff if you also have like a simple and clean RD project (or DD, though that’s a bit less fashionable) going on at the same time.
- Am I too busy with other stuff? I feel like I was busier when I had small children, so maybe it seemed like I was getting more done in the time I had available?
How do you stay creative?
Grumpy Rumblings (of the formerly untenured) 
April 1, 2024 at 7:29 am
I’m in a similar funk. Things that used to energize me no longer do. I was super burnt out though.
My only strategy is to start knocking down the obvious barriers to whatever goals I’m working on. Less doomscrolling (remove apps from devices, only have kindle in bedroom at night, etc). Allocate 1 hr day to reading/researching about x.
But, I also have to do some soul searching and determine if I’m okay with just living life with the simple stuff. Good food, the outdoors, books, education outreach, gardening. Do I also really need to be working on cutting edge technologies to be fulfilled? I dunno how much of that desire to be working on cool stuff is just my ego. Would I be just as fulfilled if I learned furniture making? It seems to be the case with my retired spouse.
when all else fails, I revert back to the trusty to do list.
April 1, 2024 at 7:38 am
Yeah, I’ve decided that this April I’m not going to read any bluesky, reddit, etc. and I’m going to limit my YouTube consumption. Though this is because I am now way over-committed and have a bunch of deadlines in early May!
I think I’m happiest when I have things to do, but no pressing deadlines. I like making progress and watching things grow. I don’t like spinning my wheels and I don’t like adrenaline. Even if it is ego, that’s still part of who I am.
Disclaimer: I want my free time completely free and unstructured. Work me and taking a break me are not the same.
April 1, 2024 at 7:49 am
A question I’ve been wrestling with in the last six months is *should* things feel normal? It is not wrong to worry when people are being mowed down by the thousands every month…
April 1, 2024 at 8:09 am
I haven’t felt right since Trump was elected.
April 5, 2024 at 1:20 am
VERY much same. I can’t place how I continue to exist in a world where a) that happened and b) there’s a very real chance that could happen again.
April 1, 2024 at 11:28 am
The short answer for me is that I haven’t stayed as creative as I once was. At work I will come up with a creative approach every once in awhile, but the main driver for me is feeling that I’m doing good work, not that it’s necessarily creative.
And in my personal life, the lowered creativity is partially down to time, but it’s also because I don’t have the push to do it within me and haven’t for a long time. I used to do a lot of serious sketching– working on a drawing over the course of days or weeks until it was how I wanted it to be. I also used to write poetry and fiction and still sometimes feel like I should… but I don’t have anything I really want to express.
How depressing it sounds, and yet it doesn’t feel depressed. It feels like a blank, not a darkness.
April 1, 2024 at 12:20 pm
Maybe creativity is not the end all and be all?
April 1, 2024 at 11:33 am
Finding good collaborators who share in the process of idea generation has been a game-changer for me. Glad you are in a good level of busyness right now! I am possibly a little over-committed right now but that’s probably better than the alternative.
April 1, 2024 at 1:32 pm
definitely
April 2, 2024 at 9:00 am
Totally unrelated to this post, but we went on a few college tours last week and the whole time I was thinking about your advice not to go on them. They were such a mixed bag in terms of tour guide quality and amount of information! DC1 will probably apply to the one with the worst tour anyway, because DH is an alum and told him the quality of the education there would be good. We were able to cross another off our list because the tour guides, who were very nice, cheerfully described an antisocial campus that they apparently thought was fine (“We have no cafeterias and that’s great because I get to eat alone in my room!” “My housing situation is great because I never see my roommate!”–from two different people). At the third place the tour guide seemed totally overwhelmed and didn’t tell us that much but they had an info session with two professors who did a good job, so DC1 may apply to that school as a backup. Anyway…tours really are a crapshoot. I think visiting campus is a good idea, though, because if you see that there are no people around that tells you something. As someone who studies the built environment I found it interesting to see how the campus layouts foster/inhibit people running into each other and gathering. We have visited a few schools with similarly sized student populations and some of them feel desolate and others lively.
April 2, 2024 at 9:12 am
Interesting. I wonder how the tours correlate with the actual experience.
I do think you’d likely find out about the lack of cafeteria another before committing!
Most campuses I’ve been at (including mine) are very different in terms of how lively they seem depending on the time of year (the weather, exam schedules, etc.). But I do see how structures can generally encourage or discourage gathering. Our uni’s new remodeling and building is trying to encourage more gathering indoors rather than outdoors, but I’m not sure how successful it is. It seems pretty successful in my building (which is a bit irritating because there’s a constant buzz from students in a big open area between the two halls of offices), but when I go to the engineering buildings for whatever reason, even with what seems like the same design, they’re often abandoned. But that could just be time of day I’m going to cross-campus meetings etc.
April 2, 2024 at 9:36 am
We looked at the engineering school in each place and yeah, they aren’t necessarily the liveliest places.
April 3, 2024 at 2:49 pm
I’m very impressed that you keep this blog going!!! You are one of the very very few blogs that started in the hey day & continues now that isn’t a commercial money-making operation.
April 3, 2024 at 3:37 pm
Aww
Yeah we kind of missed the boat on the cash grab
April 4, 2024 at 5:35 pm
I’m having a hard time imbuing my work with creative energy. I can do a lot based on experience and intuition, but the fire in the belly, the real pull to do and uncover and achieve is pretty much gone. If I could retire, I totally would. But I’ve got another decade and change before the last kid is out of college, so maybe then. Until then, writing grants and papers, teaching, advising students, the uzhe.
I pour most of my creative energy into fiction these days, and so far it’s been somewhat rewarding. One novel out, a short-story collection under submission, currently writing second novel. Marketing and promo suck a$$, but are also kind of cool since it’s a new area and I like learning new things.
I wish I could have a real vacation sometimes. We were on spring break (for the first time in years the kids’ spring break and the university’s aligned) and it was very much not restful. 😫
April 5, 2024 at 1:25 am
I’ve always struggled to scrape up even a few molecules of creativity. I am super at rote and routine, or problem solving in a structured way, but being what I think of as creative is beyond me. I’m an executor of other people’s big ideas, I’m not generally able to put any thought into or come up with anything like a big idea. I have to make myself try creative type things like learning to sew because it doesn’t come naturally to me.
i wonder if having creativity bursts or a sustained simmering of creativity is a thing that makes your life feel better? I always assumed that it did, in a greener grass sort of way, and wished I could do that too.