Is anyone ever productive in the scholarly sense around the holidays? I honestly couldn't say whether I write more or less in December than I do at other times in the academic year. However, recently reading Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, on writing more generally ie not focused on academic writing, I learned the following. Lamott notes that:
"December is traditionally a bad month for writing. It is a month of Mondays. Mondays are not good writing days. One has had all that freedom over the weekend, all that authenticity, all those dreamy dreams, and then your angry mute Slavic Uncle Monday arrives, and it is time to sit down at your desk. So I would simply recommend to the people in my workshops that they never start a large writing project on any Monday in December. Why set yourself up for failure?" (p. xxviii)
Any application to law profs? Would our deans find this argument convincing?
I can never get anything substantive done during holidays. If I sit down and try, the daggers that my spouse shoots me while taking care of the multiple children are enough to make me close the laptop and pitch in.
I would agree that starting a writing project during December can be dangerous. But I have personally found that December can be a good time to continue and make substantial progress on papers that I have already started. For me, the key determinate is not the time of year, but whether I have finished grading papers. I think most of us hate grading. Nonetheless, we are loath to put other projects in front of it. The result can be that neither grading or writing gets done. But if I finish grading or simply tell myself I won't grade any papers between certain dates in December and January, then I can move on to writing without the thought of papers hanging over my head.
Why the hating on Slavic uncles?
The notion that Mondays are bad writing days is totally bogus.
I suspect Lamott was being a little tongue-in-cheek here. In fact, I know she was because the rest of the book is very much in the same vein. And to be perfectly frank, this semester I do a lot of writing on Mondays because I'm teaching Wednesday through Friday for the first time in many years.