Sep 9, 2026 · 26 min · 9 segments
Why do some academic papers seem to move smoothly toward submission, while others get stuck somewhere between research, writing, and revision? One reason might be that you're doing the wrong *job*…
Kathy MazakHost
I'm your host Kathy Mazak, and on this podcast, we talk about writing and publishing and being joyful and having space in our academic lives.
So today, I wanna talk about what is your job? [laughs] And specifically, although I actually have several podcast episodes that talk about how your job, your career changes, like the purpose of your work changes over time.
What I'm talking about on today's podcast is what is your job as a writer? Or what is your job in relationship to your academic papers at different stages in your publication pipeline? Because I think that your job, like what you're trying to do with your paper at each stage of the pipeline changes, and in today's podcast, I'm gonna talk about why that's a problem, and the big takeaway, I'll just give it to you here, uh, up front, is when your expectations for the job that you're trying to do are aligned with reality at each stage of your pipeline, that's when your publications will really start to move a lot more quickly.
So, so the, the bottom line there is it's so much about how you think about things.
So today, we are not talking about how you find time in your busy schedule to write or why you're teaching too many classes or taking...
Today we're really talking about how do you think about how your project moves through the publication pipeline and how you can better align your expectations about what you should be doing with, like, reality.
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I'm your host Kathy Mazak, and on this podcast, we talk about writing and publishing and being joyful and having space in our academic lives.
So today, I wanna talk about what is your job? [laughs] And specifically, although I actually have several podcast episodes that talk about how your job, your career changes, like the purpose of your work changes over time.
What I'm talking about on today's podcast is what is your job as a writer? Or what is your job in relationship to your academic papers at different stages in your publication pipeline? Because I think that your job, like what you're trying to do with your paper at each stage of the pipeline changes, and in today's podcast, I'm gonna talk about why that's a problem, and the big takeaway, I'll just give it to you here, uh, up front, is when your expectations for the job that you're trying to do are aligned with reality at each stage of your pipeline, that's when your publications will really start to move a lot more quickly.
So, so the, the bottom line there is it's so much about how you think about things.
So today, we are not talking about how you find time in your busy schedule to write or why you're teaching too many classes or taking...
Today we're really talking about how do you think about how your project moves through the publication pipeline and how you can better align your expectations about what you should be doing with, like, reality.