Sabbaticals and Productivity-Talk

The concept of “productivity porn” is by now a familiar one. (In fact, last week’s “Weekend Reading” linked to both a video and a post about it.) The basic idea is that you can get so caught up in fiddling with your productivity system or gear that you forget to actually, um, do things.

But there’s another kind of productivity porn, as well: the type that insists on measuring everything in easily quantifiable, and thereby easily jukable [YouTube], stats. In higher ed, a standard form this takes is the LPU, or least publishable unit, or the practice of parceling out new knowledge into as many different articles as one can, or, alternatively, of publishing as soon as you have a certain amount of data, rather than working toward a bigger project. (You can see a qualified defense of the LPU here.)

In the current issue of Academe, Max Page argues that this latter notion of productivity porn has begun to infect how we understand sabbaticals. Tapped by his dean to offer some advice for sabbatical-ing colleagues, the results were not what he expected:

They wanted to talk about time-management techniques.
They wanted to know how many pages I wrote each day.
They wanted to know whether I turned off my wireless adapter so I couldn’t get e-mail for the working hours of the day.
They wanted to know if I got up at 5 a.m. to work before the kids awoke, and if the new faculty center at the library would help them write more.
They wanted to know how to be “more productive.”
I was depressed.
Something seemed woefully wrong here. It made me go back to that word that is at the heart of this whole endeavor— sabbatical. As in Sabbath. As in “day of rest.” How did we make “productivity” the key word associated with a term that expressly forbids productivity?

Now, here at ProfHacker we’ve encouraged people to write to a goal, to go offline, to use the first half-hour of the day, to get more than you think out of a semester’s leave, and, in general, to be more productive. You might expect, then, that we’d take exception to Page’s dismay.

But his real point is of course not to be productive; rather, he argues that you shouldn’t take the same approach to a sabbatical that you’d take to research during a regular year: “Do not till the same soil; dare to do things differently for a year. You will be doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing— honoring your profession and the confidence placed in you— when you explore new areas, pursue projects that might fail, expand your mind with art or music or great literature, and generally upset your routine.”

Nels asked recently, “What Will the You of 2020 Say about the You of 2010?,” and I think that question is key to Page’s point: If you are lucky enough to have a sabbatical, then one of the things it should help you do is find a path to that 10-year plan. Will your self of 2020 care that you notched an extra publication, on a topic you kind of hate by now? Or will your self of 2020 be delighted at the new methodologies you absorbed that invigorated your teaching and led to a wholly new conception of your research? That ought to be the goal of a sabbatical.

Page also points out the hard truth that the majority of American academics–that is to say, virtually all contingent faculty, plus many other folks–never get sabbaticals. Left unstated, though, is the connection between this point and his colleagues’ interest in being more productive: It’s hard not to feel a little guilty in the face of such a boon. Faced with the question, “what makes *me* so special?,” it’s tempting to point to an endless list of publications. A better solution is probably to work to improve the working conditions of other faculty, while spending your sabbatical focusing on your next ten years.

If you’ve had a sabbatical, how did *you* handle it? What did you like/not like about it? Looking back at it now, what was most valuable about it?

[Image by Flickr user mamamusings / Creative Commons licensed]