Making Time for Administration...and Scholarly Publishing

Overview

Balancing administrative responsibilities with scholarly productivity is one of the most challenging aspects of leadership in higher education. This interactive workshop offers practical strategies for writing center directors, department chairs, writing program administrators, and other academic leaders who want to maintain an active research and publishing agenda while managing the demands of their administrative roles.

What You'll Learn

In this one-hour session, participants will explore concrete approaches to sustaining scholarly work amid competing priorities. We'll examine time management techniques specifically designed for administrators who work in fragmented schedules, and discover how to transform your administrative experiences and daily work locations—your office, meeting spaces, even hallway conversations—into rich sites for scholarly observation and writing.

Key topics include:

• Mining your administrative work for scholarly material: How your daily experiences as a director, chair, or WPA can become the foundation for research articles, case studies, and reflective scholarship
• Writing in the spaces you already occupy: Strategies for using your administrative office, campus locations, and professional contexts as generative writing environments rather than barriers to scholarship
• Time management for fragmented schedules: Micro-productivity techniques for making meaningful progress in 15-30 minute increments between meetings and administrative tasks
• Strategic saying "no" and boundary-setting for writing time
• Building accountability systems and writing communities
• Aligning scholarly projects with administrative goals and observations
• Managing the psychological challenges of divided attention
• Practical workflows for moving projects from draft to submission

Who Should Attend

This workshop is designed for writing center directors, department chairs, WPAs, program coordinators, and other faculty in administrative roles who are committed to remaining active scholars. Whether you're struggling to find time for an article revision, planning a book project based on your administrative insights, or simply trying to keep your research agenda alive, this session will provide actionable strategies you can implement immediately.

Format

The workshop combines brief presentation segments with interactive discussion and individual reflection activities. Participants will leave with a personalized action plan for their next scholarly project and connections to others navigating similar challenges.

All registrants will get the link to the workshop 48 hours prior to the date and will receive a recording and resources email upon conclusion.