I met with academic writing and career coach Dr Cathy Mazak on Zoom and we talked about finding focused time to write, how we can write more by working less, writing in community, and changing the way academic institutions are built.
Cathy is a former professor who now runs her own company and she is the host of the podcast “Academic Writing Amplified”.
Hi, Cathy! Thank you so much for coming on here and talking to us. Who are you and what do you help academics with?
My name is Cathy Mazak, and I am a writing and career coach for academics. I help especially academic women and non-binary folx to centre their writing in their careers and use the things that writing gets you to craft the careers that they want for themselves.
Sounds fantastic! And why do you focus on just writing? Why do you think writing is so important for an academic’s career?
I think that at the very root of it, writing is the way that we express ourselves. It’s the way we get our ideas out in the world as academics. There are other ways, too – such as teaching and research. But in the end, what has currency inside of academia, is our published work. And that’s how we can be the most influential.
That’s why I want to focus there. Focusing on writing means focusing on you. On yourself. And I think a lot of times, especially for people socialised as women who I work with, we’re so used to focusing on our students and doing what other people want. When we turn the focus to writing, we have to focus on our own goals, our own message, what we want.
What usually happens is that people let writing fall to the bottom of the list, because they’re so overcome by the urgency of other things.
And when we do that, we can create a much more satisfying career for ourselves than if we’re always trying to put out other people’s fires and do things for other people.
You’re so right. In academia, in an academic’s career, it often all comes back to writing. Except maybe if you have a teaching position, then obviously it’s less important. But for everyone who’s doing research, how you communicate that research is almost always writing. That’s what gets you promoted, in the end. It’s what gets you the recognition in the field.
And I think a lot of an academic’s work is always divided. Even if you’re in a completely research-only position, you’re still doing more than one thing and one project at once. And for a tenure-track professor or a professor who has teaching, research, and service as their three main areas, you’re being pulled in at least three directions. And none of those says “writing” on it. Research is writing, and sometimes parts of teaching can be writing. But there’s different ways that writing weaves through.
If you put your own writing at the centre of all of it, and let that agenda drive the other pieces, it gives you a way to organize your career. And that’s not what usually happens. What usually happens is that people let writing fall to the bottom of the list, because they’re so overcome by the urgency of other things. Standing up in front of the classroom every time, doing service to make the promotion people happy. So, often the writing doesn’t have that urgency that some other things have. But if we infuse it with that importance, then maybe we can stop feeling like the urgent things are what gets our attention all the time.
There’s always someone knocking on the door, right? Asking, ‘can you do this, can you do that?’ Or maybe there’s this form that you have to fill in. And oh, by the way, ‘can you sit on the committee for this defence?’ Writing is a task that you need a lot of focus and calmness for. That is a state that can be very difficult to achieve when your workday is busy.
You said that you focus mainly on academic women and non-binary people. What are the particular challenges that you see them face?
That’s a great question. Academia is a culture, and it’s nested inside of other cultures that we operate in and there’s also power structures. So, it’s not surprising that inside of academia, you really feel the effects of patriarchy, and racism, and all the other kinds of structures that academia was built inside of. And those structures have traditionally favoured people socialised as men.
Focusing on writing means focusing on you.
The example I use is when you picture a professor. Actually, do this — google the word ‘professor’, and when you look at the images, what you’ll get is an old white man. We have this image of the lone scholar, at his desk late at night, in a tweed jacket, with arm patches.
That person is not a parent, that person is not cooking his own food – my point is, you don’t see who that person is inside, like their family structure or their communities.
There’s that image of what a scholar is, and what it means to be a scholar. We know that isn’t true, but that we are still socialised to believe it to be the standard. So, for people socialised as women or for people who aren’t socialised to be that kind of male person, you end up in a place where you’re working inside of structures that were not designed for you. This gives women and non-binary people (non-men) something in common.
The thing about that socialisation is what I’ve already mentioned — that women take on more service inside of academia than men. It’s that same people-pleasing role or that nurturing role. This isn’t necessarily bad, except when it’s being used against you or it’s holding you back from other things.
So, the reason to focus on particularly womxn is that when I first started out coaching, I had just come out of my third pregnancy, my third maternity leave. I think I was a full professor at that moment. But there were a lot of things about being a woman inside of academia that I felt like I had to work through and that I was particularly sympathetic towards, or that I felt that I had special things to say about to other women who had gone through a lot of the same things that I had.
I think there was also this study being done where they asked children to draw a scientist or an academic. Have you heard of that? And almost all of them, of course, drew someone like Albert Einstein. I did my PhD and then I quit academia. That was as far as I got. I did it in a physics department at a technical university.
The university was male-dominated, and you felt like there was one structure and one type of person that did really well in it. Then there’s other types of people who struggle more. I could see this every day when looking at my friends and colleagues.
Also, as you say, there’s a structural component. It’s rare you can single out people who are not treating everyone the same, but it’s mostly more of a structural thing. So, what are the actual structural changes that need to happen? And how can we contribute to changing this?
What usually happens is that people let writing fall to the bottom of the list, because they’re so overcome by the urgency of other things.
My background is in educational linguistics, and inside of educational linguistics, there’s a lot of people who fancy themselves as anthropologists as well. So, with that whole world, my research has been mostly ethnographic.
What I got out of doing a lot of ethnographic work with people in communities and observing how people act is that change has to happen from the top down and from the bottom up simultaneously.
Top-down change, a change that comes from the institution, is going to have one sort of effect. But I actually believe a more powerful effect is when individual people are changing the way that they approach the institution. Of course, institutions need to change — you can see sexist, racist and homophobic structures inside of actual rules, and the way that things get run inside of academic institutions. Sometimes you see them super clearly and sometimes they’re more hidden. You know it’s happening, but you don’t know exactly where it’s written down.
So, I think like to make real cultural change, you’ve got to be working with individual people. And that’s how I’ve structured my whole business. If we can work with individual womxn, and say, ‘Hey, maybe you’re feeling this way, or maybe you’re making certain choices based on fear that’s been put in your head since you were a grad student.’ A fear of ‘If I don’t work 24/7, people will think I’m not dedicated, and I won’t get promoted.’
Or a fear of not having money because that’s drilled into your head from when you’re a grad student (‘You need to go find funds, you need to go find funds!’) There’s this feeling of scarcity around a lot of things, and that’s a part of academia. So, instead of making decisions based on fear, where I’m making a decision based on what I’m afraid is going to happen, I’m going to make a decision based on what I want to happen.
To make it more concrete with an example: An attitude a lot of people have is ‘I’m just going to publish anything.’ Or, ‘Oh, you want me to co-author something? Great, I’ll do it, because it’s a publication.’ Instead, I would suggest that you should really curate your publication pipeline and say, ‘No, this is what I’m about. And these are the things I’m going to publish.’ Don’t just publish anything just because you can.
This way, you will actually publish more, because you’re not as overwhelmed. But also, you’re saying that you’re making decisions about your career. Not based on how you think you’re supposed to act but based on how you want to move your science forward or how you want to move your thinking forward.
It’s not surprising that inside of academia, you really feel the effects of patriarchy, and racism, and all the other kinds of structures that academia was built inside of. And those structures have traditionally favoured people socialised as men.
That’s the way that change happens and the more people who have professors who are doing that, and who are being mentored in a way that keeps you in charge of your career, the better. Don’t let other people decide what your career looks like for you. If you have people mentoring this way, then you’re going to start to change the culture from the bottom up.
Cultural change is tricky because the systems feel invisible. It’s about revealing the systems, it’s seeing more women in leadership positions, so they have more institutional power.
But we need everybody to step into power so that they have to make decisions based on what they want, not what they’re afraid is going to happen.
That’s what needs to change inside of academia. We don’t want to just keep reproducing the norm. That’s not good for science. That’s not good for humanity either. We’re not just replicating — we want to be different, and we want to be ourselves. And that’s what’s gonna move knowledge (and humans) forward. That kind of bottom-up change is really exciting to me.
I’ve never really thought about how designing your career in that way is not only good for you, but also, how you’re really driving change that way! It makes a lot of sense and it’s also nice how in the end, you’re doing something that feels better to you, and that is good for the whole culture.
Academia is still a traditional setting, in many ways. It often seems stuck in the past, compared to other areas. Nonetheless, I think that as humans, we underestimate how much change we’re actually able to instigate and how much change is happening all the time. When we look back at TV shows 10 or 15 years ago, Friends, for example. Now everyone sees how sexist, racist the show often is. And most of us didn’t notice it 15 years ago and it was totally accepted. Now this has totally changed.
So, we’ve talked about how important it is to focus on your writing. The researchers I talk to often tell me that they don’t have the time or focus to write. I know a lot of them then end up using their weekends or night shifts to write. Or they simply don’t write, or not as much as they want to. How do you integrate writing in your day?
I think there’s a couple of beliefs that people are often operating under. I try to work against these when it comes to just making time to write. One of them is this belief that, in order to do writing, you have to have a big block of time. I often hear this. What used to happen to me was that I would hold Fridays, and I’d say to myself, ‘Fridays are going to be the day that I do the writing.’ And inevitably, something would happen on Friday, and my plans would be ruined. So, those big blocks are really hard to hold and it’s actually better to start with much smaller chunks. The best thing people can do is to put those chunks at a time of day that you are your most effective. Another thing people do, like you said, is say, ‘I’m gonna write on the weekends’ or ‘I’ll wake up at 5am every day and I’ll write for two hours, and then I’ll shower and go to work.’
Ugh, waking up at 5am to write sounds like a nightmare to me.
It is! Unless you are a person who feels like you are your best self at 5am, and there are people like this! And if that’s true, by all means, wake up at five in the morning.
But if you’re waking up early, then staying up late, or writing on the weekends, what you’re doing is you’re pushing writing to the periphery of your career. You’re saying to yourself that writing is secondary to the things I do during my “working hours”. A question to ask yourself is, ‘Is it secondary?’ Is writing less important than the things you do from 9-5, or whatever one might consider to be your working hours.
If you want to keep going the way you’re going — fine, but if you want to have more direction in your career, get your message out there and influence other people with your ideas, then the writing has to be the centre in your day. Not peripheral to what you’re doing. So now you’re all thinking, ‘How the heck do I do it, then? Because I’m really, really busy!’
Change has to happen from the top down and from the bottom up simultaneously.
What would you say to anyone who’s thinking that?
What I recommend is to do 1-2 hours of writing once or twice a week and to place those hours at a time of day where you are at your “soaring state”. I’d like you to picture the metaphor of a bird, soaring through the sky. The bird is not desperately flapping its wings to stay up, but they’re riding on invisible energy. Find the time of day where you have that feeling.
To find this time, I suggest getting a piece of paper, and every hour of the day, make a note about how you’re feeling in terms of your energy, your ability to focus, and your drive to do things. What I found, for myself, is that I’m very predictable. Between 8-11am, I can do anything. I can sit for three hours and not take a break. I shouldn’t, but this is when I can have my best thoughts. These are things that would take me much longer to do at 4pm or 5pm. But I can do them super-fast during that 8-11am time.
So, what you need to do is to figure out what that time is for you. Maybe you feel like you know what it is already. Take a few days to really reflect and think about how you’re feeling at different times of day. Then the ideal thing would be to place that 1-2 hours, once or twice a week, inside that window when you feel that “soaring” feeling or that “invisible energy”. You’ll notice that you can just write so much more, with that small amount of time – I’m talking two hours a week or up to four hours a week. Four hours a week would be a ton, actually!
What would you say to anyone who’s thinking that?
If you’re instead giving your best times of day to the urgent things, or to email, which a lot of people are using that time for – Stop! Use that time to figure when you could place writing time inside your schedule. Some people might say, ‘Well, I teach all mornings, and that’s my best time.’ And my response is, ‘Ok, next semester, can you request to teach at a different time?’ I want people to start organising their schedules around their writing blocks, instead of trying to fit writing in places. Because what you’re saying to yourself when you do that is that writing isn’t important. But it doesn’t belong at the edge — it belongs at the centre! It should be driving what you are doing.
I really love that because it’s so true. If you write in the nights, evenings, weekends – what you’re really saying is that this is peripheral stuff, this is not what my actual job is. But is your actual job answering emails? Probably not!
Right! Academics are creative all the time. They create experiments, they create pieces of writing, they create courses, they create lectures! We’re always creating! If you want to create, you have to rest. The more you create, the more you need to rest. So, for people who think, ‘I want to get more done, so I’m just going to work more.’ No. You have to actually rest more to be more effective in the work that you do. That’s another cycle that we get into. We think, ‘Oh, I’ll just keep letting work overflow into all the times when I should actually be resting.’ The world needs your brain! The world needs your brain to do things! You’ve got to rest that brain so that it can be really “On” for when you need to create. So, another thing that writing on the peripheries is doing, is taking up your rest time. You’ll notice that all of this is saying, ‘You need to work less.’ And that’s what I’m saying: You need to work less.
It makes so much sense. Unfortunately, in most academic institutions, the culture isn’t like that at all! We usually idealise overwork in academia, even though it doesn’t make sense. We need to rest. We need our weekends. I try to do this as well in my work life. I take weekends completely off. I’ve done it for a few years already and now it works so well that I can’t even touch anything that is related to work on the weekends anymore. My brain is in a totally different mode. And it’s a good feeling to be able to appreciate other things about your life – other passions, other things that you want to spend time on.
Totally! Now, a lot of people are listening and they’re thinking, ‘That sounds great for you, but I work in X institution and at X institution, this would never fly.’ So, that’s why there is coaches. That’s why we have programs! That’s what I do – create programs that support people as they push back against those things. Because sooner or later, you’ll burn out. You can’t sustain the level of overwork that is currently being glorified inside of your institution. Maybe it’ll happen after five years, maybe it will happen after 10 years, or maybe you’ll just be miserable.
If you’re waking up early or staying up late to write or write on the weekends, you’re pushing writing to the periphery of your career.
What’s the alternative? People say, ‘I can’t change!’ So, my response is, ‘Okay, then what are you going to do with your life?’ Because you’re either gonna hate it, or you’re gonna burn out and get literally sick. That’s why I think coaching and finding a community are important. Finding other people around you, in your institution, who also think, ‘This amount of work is awful, let’s figure out ways to support each other and to draw boundaries!’
If you look at the people in your field who you think are super-productive people. They’re publishing, they have a big team of people working with them or under them, they’re really well-funded, they have postdocs, PhD students, and research assistants working with them. What they all have in common is that they have access to resources. Or they have people helping them at home, they have somebody doing their laundry, they’re not cleaning their own house — they have support teams at home. I especially try to encourage women to remember that on weekends, you shouldn’t be folding laundry all weekend — if you can afford it.
Yeah, folding laundry isn’t rest! I mean, unless you find it meditative…
The third thing with people who look so productive is that they’re not healthy. That might last for a certain amount of time, but what’s the cost? In terms of your physical and mental health. It’s really about believing that you can have the career that you want, like you were saying before — you can design it. Maybe that can happen at your institution or maybe you need to change institutions. The most important thing to me as a coach is that people are happy and rested. Because they can contribute to the world better when those two things are true. So, I don’t think we need to keep glorifying “busy” and pretending that miserable is the default state. Because that doesn’t make any sense.
Yeah, you’re right. Overwork just doesn’t make any sense. Why would we want to work more if we could work less and produce better work or even more work? I also think it’s important that, as you said, to expect some pushback. If we now go out and start changing how we approach writing, how we approach our academic career, there might be some friction. There may be something to push through and some really big questions may be coming up. Like ‘Is this the right institution for me?’ or ‘Is this the right environment for me?’
So, just to recap, because we’ve touched on so many things. First, to work less, don’t work nights, don’t work weekends, and put writing in the centre. Second, try to find the time of the day when you “soar”, where writing feels easy and the ideas flow. And when you just commit to that time, 1-2 times a week, for around 2-4 hours, you can already produce quite a lot.
The more you create, the more you need to rest.
Absolutely. I would say — try it. Try doing it and see how it works. Does it work better than what you’re doing right now? And the other way to get that “soaring” feeling, if you’re always teaching during your best hours of the day, is to write with somebody. You could find a writing partner on campus and meet together, each with your laptop. It’s another way to replicate that feeling of soaring.
Of course, in COVID times, the way we do this is over Zoom. That’s how we do it inside of our programs, and the way that you can do it, is to find a friend and make a meeting time, and write together on mute. This way, it gets in your calendar, you have this other person who’s waiting for you, and you can feed off of each other’s energy. That is also an effective way to use a small number of hours a day — an hour or two, and up to four in a week, and make those hours really effective.
Writing is often so lonely, in a way. Usually, when we think of writing, we think of ourselves in a quiet room. Or typing on our laptop, and not really about someone else being there who we meet with to actually get the writing done. I like this type of social writing a lot!
To start wrapping up, if people who read the interview and are now all on board with the idea of centring their writing and writing more this way, where would you recommend them to start? What would be the first thing you would recommend them to do?
First, I would say figure out that time of day that works best for you. You can find out more about that on my website (cathymazak.com). I have a podcast and in episode two of that podcast, I dig deep into how you figure this thing out. I give my best and most recent up-to-date advice on the podcast. So, if you haven’t found my podcast yet, that’s a great way to start.
Sounds great! And how can you help academics? If someone wants to start working with you, and is interested in the programs you’re offering, what do you offer and where can they find out more?
We offer four programs. We have an entry-level program, just-trying-to-get-your-butt-in-the-chair program, called “Momentum”. It’s $27 a month. It’s meant to be an accessible price point. We have students writing their dissertations in the program, and all the way up to full professors. And what it is, is co-writing. This idea of writing together, on Zoom. We do scheduled, hosted sessions. We have six sessions a day. So, we pretty much have every time zone covered, except it’s a little harder in Australia and New Zealand. But for everybody else, we’ve got multiple times a day that you could jump on. And actually, that link is open all the time, so even if there isn’t a scheduled time, if there’s somebody else in the program that you wanted to get together and write with, you could go to that link.
Oh, wow! So, the idea is that you can join the Zoom link, and write together, so you have a group of people and you’re not alone when you write?
Yeah, you see everyone’s little head while they’re writing, and some people turn their cameras off. We have a big spreadsheet where people put their goals in. So, we’re doing goal tracking and on Mondays we have a half an hour motivational call, called “Monday Mindset” to get in your mindset for the week. That program is a great place to start, especially if your goal is finding time to write. For a reasonable amount of money, you get all of these possible times, you pick two or three in the week, you show up there, and a lot of people are seeing great results just from that.
We don’t need to keep glorifying “busy” and pretending that miserable is the default state.
Then I have a course called “Navigate” that is my full course that is everything from my writing system, how to set up your writing system, how to set up your pipeline, how to do project management, how to do a year plan, a five-year plan. It’s a much more comprehensive program, but it’s a digital course, so you can join and then do it at your own pace.
We do have group calls as part of that and an online community, so you get support and feedback from us.
Then we have two high-level coaching programs that have 1-on-1 and group coaching, and those are called “Elevate” and “Amplify”. Elevate is our post-tenure program, we describe it as “Up-level your post tenure career” and it is a six-month program. Amplify, which is our pre-tenure program, we describe as our “faculty writing accelerator” and is also a six-month program.
And if you don’t know where to start engaging with Cathy’s material, I’d recommend checking out her podcast “Academic Writing Amplified” — it’s a gem! Thank you so much for the interview, Cathy!
Note: The interview was transcribed and copy-edited for clarity and concision.
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