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Where I live the temperature just took a major dip and we just got our first snowfall. This change in seasons makes me reflect on my childhood in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains. We were so excited when it would snow, particularly when it was good packing snow. My older brother, Aaron, and I would immediately begin rolling snowballs for a snow fort. After rolling for a while, a particular snowball would become very large and it would get tiresome to continue rolling it. We’d just take a break from the big one for a while and get a new snowball rolling in a different part of the yard and then we’d go back to pushing the big boulder of a snowball until it was as big as we could possibly make it. We often have half a dozen different snowballs going at once, but ultimately they would each contribute to the massive fort.
Just like when building a snow fort, it’s more energy efficient to have several snowballs going at once, it can save time and energy to have multiple manuscript projects going simultaneously. Obviously, this isn’t a good strategy for those who tend to struggle to finish projects. However, if you are a finisher and can handle additional complexity, here are a few reasons why it’s helpful to have more than one iron in the fire at once:
1. Sustain your interest and engagement. Research can get a bit dull and repetitive. I find it extremely refreshing to switch to a different project for a while when I start to get bored.
2. Avoid being delayed. Inevitably there are countless delays in the research process from waiting months to hear back from a journal to waiting around for that slow coauthor to get his part done on the paper. When you have multiple projects going, you have plenty to work on while you wait for others.
3. Reduce the pain of rejection. When your eggs are all in one basket and that basket comes crashing down it can be very difficult emotionally. However, if you’ve got other projects in the works, it doesn’t hurt nearly as much because you’ve got other things you are working on.
4. Double dip. If you are testing several hypotheses in one data collection or writing several articles based on one literature review, you can maximize your efficiency. Of course you need to be careful to reword things so that you don’t self-plagiarize, but it makes a lot of sense to do the work once for several manuscripts.
In a future post on efficiency, I will provide some suggestions for managing multiple projects. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you about any successes or struggles you have had in managing multiple projects.
P.S. This little boy in the moon boots was me nearly 30 years ago when I was 4 years old!
(For more information on this topic, check out my recently published book!)
