My Writing Dashboard

Posted on by Josh Nudell

I have three spreadsheets that I use to track different types of activities throughout the year, with creating the new sheet being part of my ritual for the new year. One tracks the books I read (in addition to tracking the books on Storygraph). One tracks my exercise habits. The third tracks my writing.

These sheets, including the manual upkeep, serve similar purposes. First and foremost, they provide accountability not only to track what I’m doing, but how. For instance, tracking different types of information about what I read has caused me to seek out and read books by a wider variety of authors than I did when I first started tracking this information. Similarly, the exercise data has evolved so that I can see my activities and I am able to hold myself accountable for a daily yoga practice. I also like entering the data manually because it means that I look at the information almost daily, and a few simple formulas can give me a snapshot of how I’m doing.

The system I developed for tracking my writing shows signs of having developed organically.

I started this spreadsheet in October 2017, several months removed from having completed my PhD and wanting something to hold myself accountable as I was starting to revise my dissertation and turn chapters or conference papers into journal articles. The core of my system developed at this point with two sets of columns. The first tracks my daily academic writing, which I defined as time with the academic work open on my computer (or printout), social media closed, and with no other distractions. This is of course not all of that goes into research, but it serves as a rough proxy for time spent in dedicated work.

The section for daily academic writing consisted of four columns, to which I added two columns a few years later. Thus, each row in this section has the date, day of week, the time that I worked, the number of minutes in that period, the project I worked on, and, if relevant, the number of words written. The last two sections also double as places where I can add notes about what I worked on that day (editing, drafted introduction, etc).

From the start I also had a second section that collected the total minutes written on a weekly basis, tracked by date, using the spreadsheet function to collect the sum from the daily section and a simple formula that converts that total into hours written. At the top of this column I keep a running tally of the total hours written and the average length of time I spent writing each week that year.

Writing spreadsheet, weekly section.

Starting in 2018, I added a third section where I track everything I produced in that year, in both the total and on a month-by-month basis. What gets tracked here has evolved over time, but generally includes everything from blog posts to reference letters to job applications to presentations. I don’t count all of these as “academic writing,” but this section serves as a snapshot of what I have done in a given year in terms of my academic and academic-adjacent work. This section thus proves useful for filling out annual reviews, for instance.

Screenshot of the monthly section of my writing dashboard.

I added the fourth and final section of this sheet in 2020. Functionally, this section is a key for the projects that I am working on, listing not only the name of the project, but also an abbreviation that I use in the daily-writing section, a due date, and a color-coding scheme that can tell me at a glance the status of each project. The color-coding is the latest addition to this sheet.

Screenshot of the “projects” section of my writing dashboard

Last week on Twitter I ended up in a conversation about systems of tracking writing and accountability. I offered this system to someone asking how academics track their writing and one of the other participants in the conversation pushed me a little bit about whether this collected data is purely for accountability and, if so, what I’m holding myself accountable for, or whether it also has a diagnostic purpose.

To this point, I have mostly used this system for accountability, but only in the loosest of senses. My projects have largely been in various stages of revision since I started tracking this data, so word-counts are not the best way to assess progress. This is also just fine with me since raw word counts have never much worked with my process. Instead, my primary metric for tracking my writing is the time I spend doing it, and I have aspired to write for about an hour a day in the beliefs that writing a little bit every day will be better in the long run than writing in binges and that writing just a little bit most days will cause me to write for longer than the proscribed time on at least some of them. This aspiration has both been wildly successful and an utter failure. I have not averaged five hours of writing per week since the first three months that I tracked this data, at a time when I was teaching just one course, but most years I manage to average about four hours a week, albeit in more booms and busts than I’d like recently.

I don’t explicitly use this spreadsheet as a diagnostic tool. It serves this function in a passive way, in much the same way that I can get a sense of how my writing is going based on whether or not I am writing in this space. I do make notes to myself in the daily section, particularly when I have hit a wall, and I will do the same with the weekly section for weeks during which I’m sick or, for instance, if I got no writing done because I was in the middle of moving or going to a conference. The sheet for 2020 has a row that reads “NULL SET CRISIS.” In the past I have done somewhat minimal data analysis to see trends in my writing activity, but I didn’t find it that useful so I stopped.

In writing this post it has occurred to me that accountability and diagnostics would probably work better with an adjustment to the weekly section. The update I have in mind is to add two columns, one with a target for that week and the other being the time I spent writing in the week minus that target, thus giving me a snapshot of how I did relative to my expectations. These columns will also let me adjust my goals week-to-week based on what is happening with the rest of my schedule, hopefully making them more achievable (always my downfall in goal-setting) than holding to a single goal for every week.

However, as much as I started keeping this sheet because I wanted accountability and really like tinkering around with data in various aspects of my life, this system has also just served as a nice ritual around writing that reminds me that I have in fact done something even when it feels like that is not the case. I don’t know that I will ever go much beyond what I have now in terms of analysis, but it certainly helps me maintain what I hope is a healthy and productive writing practice.

April Reading List

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Surprise, there isn’t one!

I am actually not surprised by this development. I have tracked my reading by month going back to 2013 and, on average, April is my second-worst month for reading, ahead of only October. April tends to be when a lot of work obligations come due and so I find myself both scrambling for time and utterly exhausted. This year was no different and my ambitious reading goal fell by the wayside. As penance, I have posted a cat picture to conclude this post.

Now that the semester is winding down, I have already resumed progress toward my goal for May. Although I am hoping to use this summer mostly for rest and recovery (more on this in a future post), I also expect that the more languid patterns of summer will provide ample opportunity to read.

Previous months: January, February, March

Merlin and Nimueh demonstrating proper resting form.

March Reading List

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Back in January I laid out an ambitious reading goal for 2022: one article per working day, and resolved to write a wrap-up monthly recap post for accountability. March proved a challenge for a whole host of reasons so the total is much lower than I would have liked. April is looking worse, if anything, but I’m hopeful that I can get back on track over the next week.

Without further ado here is the list, divided once more into my favorite articles (honorable mentions) and the rest of the list.

Honorable Mentions

  • Sofie Remijsen, “Only Greeks at the Olympics? Reconsidering the rule against non-Greeks at ‘Panhellenic’ Games,” C&M 67 (2019): 1–61.

The rest of the list

  • Marcaline J. Boyd, “Sleeping with the Tyrant: Thebe the Tyrannicide and the Death of Alexander of Pherae in Plutarch’s Pelopidas,” Histos 15 (2021): 131–49.
  • Peter A. O’Connell, “How Often Did the Athenian Dikasteria Meet? A Reconsideration,” GRBS 60, no. 3 (2020): 324–41.
  • Piotr Głogowski, “Cyrus the Younger and his Persians: the dynamics of power,” GRBS 60, no. 2 (2020): 165–91.
  • Elizabeth Carney, “Royal Macedonian Widows: Merry and Not,” GRBS 59 (2019): 368–96.
  • Sarah Morris and John Papadopoulos, “Of Granaries and Games: Egyptian Stowaways in an Athenian Chest,” Hesperia Supplements 33 (2004): 225–42.
  • Loren J. Samons II, “Herodotus on the Kimonids: Peisistratid Allies in Sixth-Century Athens,” Historia 66, no. 1 (2017): 21–44.
  • Anastasios Nikolaidis, “Revisiting the Pylos Episode and Thucydides’ ‘Bias’ Against Cleon,” C&M 69 (2021): 121–50.
  • Cinzia Bearzot, “Political Murder in Classical Greece,” Ancient Society 47 (2007): 37–61.
  • Timothy Sorg, “Agyrrhios Beyond Attica: Tax-Farming and Imperial Recovering in the Second Athenian League,” Historia 64, no. 1 (2015): 49–76.
  • Joshua D. Sosin, “Ransom at Athens ([Dem.] 53.11),” Historia 66, no. 2 (2017): 130–46.
  • Etka Liebowitz, “Female Monarchal Succession in Hellenistic and Jewish Society in Antiquity: Parallels and Contrasts,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 49, no. 1 (2018), 30–48.

Previous Months

January, February

February Reading List

Posted on by Josh Nudell

Back in January I set an ambitious reading goal for 2022, one article read per working day, and resolved to do a monthly wrap-up for accountability. I am generally happy with the returns even though some busyness in my schedule at the end of February caused me to fall a little bit short this month as well.

Without further ado, here is the list and a handful of honorable mentions for the favorite things I read.

Honorable Mentions

  • David Lewis, “Near Eastern Slaves in Classical Attica and the Slave Trade with Persian Territories,” Classical Quarterly 61 (2011): 91–113
  • James Roy, “The Son of Pharnabazos and Parapita, A Persian Competing in the Olympic Games: Xenophon Hellenica 4.1.39–40,” Classica et Mediaevalia 68 (2020): 119–34
  • Dominique Lenfant, “Eunuchs as the Guardians of Women: Orientalism and Back Projection in Modern Scholarship,” Greek Roman and Byzantine Studies 61 (2021): 456–74

The List

  • Anna Novokhatko, “The Wetted Sponge, the Wretched Rho, and other Greek evidence for Scribal Work,” Glotta 96 (2020): 148–73
  • V.L. Konstantinopoulos, “The Persian Wars and Political Conflicts in Athens,” British Institute of Classical Studies 124 (2013), 63–5
  • Rachel Bruzzone, “Killing the Past in Thucydides’ Plataean Debate,” Classical Philology 110 (2015): 289–300
  • Andrew G. Scott, “Spartan courage and the social function of Plutarch’s Lacaonian apophthegms,” Museum Helveticum 74, no. 1 (2017): 34–53
  • Andrew T. Alwine, “Freedom and Patronage in Athenian Democracy,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 136 (2016): 1–17
  • Christina Skelton, “Greek-Anatolian Language Contact and the Settlement of Pamphylia,” Classical Antiquity 36, no. 1 (2017): 104–29
  • Garrett Ryan, “Building Order,” Classical Antiquity 37, no. 1 (2018): 151–85
  • John O. Hyland, “Contesting Marathon: Billows Krentz, and the Persian Problem,” Classical Philology 106, no. 3 (2011): 265–77 (review article)
  • Richard Rawles, “Lysimeleia (Thucydides 7.52, Theocritus 16.84): What Thucydides Does not Tell us about the Sicilian Expedition,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 132–46
  • Christian Mann, “Campaign Agones: Towards a Classification of Grek Athletic Competitions,
    Classica et Mediaevalia 68 (2020): 99–117
  • Mait Kõiv, “Greek Rulers and Imperial Powers in Western Anatolia (8th–6th Centuries BC),” Studia Antiqua et Archaeologica 27, no. 2 (2021): 357–72
  • Aynur-Michele-Sara Karatas, “Greek Cults and Their Sacred Laws on Dress Codes,” Classical World 113, no. 2 (2020): 147–70
  • Krzysztof Nawotka, “Seleukos I and the Origin of the Seleukid Dynastic Image,
    Scripta Classical Israelica 36 (2017): 31–43
  • Marloes Deene, “Naturalized Citizens and Social Mobility in Classical Athens: the case of Apollodorus,” Greece and Rome 58, no. 2 (2011): 159–75
  • Benjamin M. Sullivan, “In the Shadow of Phoenicia: North Syria and “Palestinian Syria” in Herodotus,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 138 (2018): 67–79

Previous Months

January

A Reading Goal For 2022 and the January List

Posted on by Josh Nudell

In recent years I have become almost obsessive about tracking what I read. I have kept a running list of what I read for “fun” since 2013 (and intermittently before that) and started tracking the books I read for academic purposes in 2020. Beyond mere obsession, this habit allows me to visualize my reading diet, which has led to a dramatic shift in what I read over the past few years.

In December last year, it occurred to me that my academic reading skewed overwhelmingly to books. I read articles, of course, when they are related to my research, but I had largely gotten away from reading articles as a regular practice. Coming into the year, therefore, I set an ambitious reading goal to fix this, but withheld saying anything until determining whether it was even remotely doable.

The goal is this. Every work day this year—roughly every week day outside of holidays and vacations—I aim to read one article. If I am successful, this will amount to roughly 20 articles a month, or 240 articles for the year. Some of these will be research related, many others will go toward informing how I teach, and I am prioritizing articles from the past decade. I suspect that I will fall often fall short (I did in January), but, as with many of my other reading goals, this is as much about building habits as winning a prize. My reward is being a better teacher and researcher.

At the end of every month, I will publish the list of articles I read and highlight a few honorable mentions.

Here is January’s list:

Honorable Mention

  • Debby Sneed, “Disability and Infanticide in Ancient Greece,” Hesperia 90 (2021): 747–72
  • Matthew Simonton, “Stability and Violence in Classical Greek Democracies and Oligarchies,” Classical Antiquity 36 (2017): 52–103

The List

  • Bill Caraher, “Documenting Wesley College: A Mildly Anarchist Teacher Encounter,” [posted to his blog]
  • Samuel Ellis, “Greek Conceptualizations of Persian Traditions: Gift-giving and Friendship in the Persian Empire,” Classical Quarterly 71 (2021): 77–88
  • Walter Scheidel, “Building Up Slaveries in Ancient Italy and the African Savanna,” [posted to Academia.edu]
  • Deborah Levine Gera, “Themistocles’ Persian Tapestry,” Classical Quarterly 57 (2007): 445–57
  • Jessica Romney, “Women in an Ancient Greek History Course: From Cameo to Part of the Whole,” Classical World 114 (2021): 227–48
  • Daniel Unruh, “Loaves in a Cold Oven: Tyranny and Sterility in Herodotus’ Histories,” Classical World 114 (2021): 281–308
  • Georgia Proietti, “War and Memory: The Battle of Psyttaleia Before Herodotus’ “Histories”,” British Institute for Classical Studies 58 (2015): 43–54
  • Naoise Mac Sweeney, “Regional Identities in the Greek World: Myth and Koinon in Ionia,” Historia 70 (2021): 268–314
  • Julia Kindt, “Personal Religion: A Productive Category for the Study of Greek Religion?,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 135 (2015): 35–50
  • Valeria Pratolongo, “The Greeks and the Indigenous Populations of Eastern Sicily in the Classical Era,” Mediterranean Archaeology 27 (2014): 85–90
  • Denise Demetriou, “What is an Emporion? A Reassessment,” Historia 60 (2011): 255–72
  • Lela M. Urquhart, “Competing Traditions in the Historiography of Ancient Greek Colonization in Italy,” Journal of of the History of Ideas 75 (2014): 23–44
  • Nicolette Pavlides, “The Sanctuaries of Apollo Maleatas and Apollo Tyritas in Laconia: Religion in Spartan-Perioikic Relations,” Annual of the British School at Athens 113 (2018): 270–305
  • Graham Shipley, “Sparta and its Perioikic Neighbors: a century of reassessment,” Hermathena 181 (2006): 51–82
  • Charlotte Dunn, “Messene Besieged,” Acta Classica 61 (2018): 190–200
  • Valerij Goušchin, “Solon’s Law on Stasis and the Rise of Pisistratus,” Acta Classica 59 (2016): 101–13

What We Choose to Remember

Posted on by Josh Nudell

President Joe Biden gave an address Monday night to memorialize the grim milestone of 500,000 Americans dying from COVID-19, according to the official tally. I am not saying anything novel when I say the event played to Biden’s strength as a politician. His ten-minute address was filled with empathy as he spoke about how lost loved ones remain with the living, about how we have to remember lost loved ones rather than becoming numb to the pain, and about how we should carry their memories forward into in our actions.

Biden’s first month in office has been spent activating the government bureaucracy that had been allowed to atrophy in the past four years, so while there are many people understandably angry about the vaccine rollout, distribution is heading in the right direction. This was a somber moment marking a systemic failure, but the address also worked to model best practices and encourage people to turn their grief into action.

It was a good speech, for what it was.

Several times in the address, Biden reiterated a line from the ceremony the night before his inauguration to remember 400,000 deaths, that “to heal we must remember.”

In Biden’s role as Mourner-in-Chief, this was a powerful line that tries to use collective trauma as a catalyst to unify the country. It asks people to think about their loved ones and turn that memory into thoughtful, considerate behavior where individuals take responsibility for the safety of everyone. Certainly, this is a believable sentiment coming from someone who has lived with loss almost his entire political career.

Nowhere in the speech did Biden ask his audience to remember anything but their lost loved ones.

On the one hand, this specific event was not the place for a discussion about accountability. Merrick Garland as much as said that an investigation into the events of January 6 where a lynch mob stormed the Capitol would be his first priority as Attorney General and other inquiries into the events of the past year will unfold over the coming months.

On the other hand, remembering the loss without also remembering why they died is cold comfort. I understand the impulse to not stoke what talking heads on any number of cable news channels might decry as partisan anger, but transparency and accountability are very different from partisanship. The one seeks to rebuild the infrastructure and trust in institutions by applying rules equally, irrespective of party; the other sees the world only in terms of friends and enemies.

I have a lot of sympathy for President Biden right now. He is attempting to walk a fine line and live up to his casting as a man who could unify a deeply-divided country. The result is events like this one where he can strike an empathetic note and talk about healing while trying to restore the government bureaucracy into something that actually works for the citizens of the country. However, may of the forces dividing the country are outside of his control and have been building for years to the point where anything he does, however centrist, is going to be labelled socialist. A Newsmax host even attacked Biden’s dog compared to past presidential pets.

Cultural memory always entails a push and pull between remembering and forgetting. These memories are malleable and open to manipulation. While working on an article about Ancient Greece in the pre-pandemic times, for instance, I read a lot about the historical memory genocide in Rwanda, where the ruling party led by President Paul Kagame has consciously shaped the memory of its role in ending the genocide in order to secure political legitimacy. By contrast, after a particularly brutal civil war in Athens in 402/1 BCE, the Athenians swore an oath of reconciliation that required both sides to “not remember” what had happened, formally renouncing reprisals.

But I also fear that the emphasis on remembering framed in terms of the personal grief and loss risks forgetting that these deaths weren’t just something that happened. These people did not die because of some avoidable happenstance. We only reached this mind-numbing number because of specific actions and inactions.

President Biden is right: we cannot forget those who died, and already people are beginning to discuss what form COVID memorials ought to take. But we ought to also take stock of what we are choosing to remember. For my part, I would love to see a Vietnam War-style memorial to commemorate the dead and also agree with the former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith that local memorials dedicated to both COVID and the surrounding events of the past year would be appropriate. But I also believe that any memorial on its own would be inadequate. Remember the dead, yes, but also remember how we got here.

Summer Academic Plans

Posted on by Josh Nudell

About this time last year I wrote a post setting some summer reading goals that, ultimately, proved too ambitious. One of my resolutions for 2019 was to take better care of my physical and mental health, and I need to continue that through this summer while also making some headway on various projects.

Projects

I have three article-length projects at various stages of completion, and a fourth shorter piece.

I spent most of the spring semester working on a chapter for an edited collection on the use of history in the Attic Orators. This chapter offers a new interpretation of the Athenian conquest of Samos in 366 through the lens of cultural memory. When I started writing I thought one thing before writing myself into the weeds with the realization that the traditional narrative for this conquest is itself a historical memory and thus that I had to weave the two together. I’m not going to hit my initial target of June 1 for a complete draft of my contribution because there are too many knots left to unravel.

The second article-length manuscript I hope to finish this summer is a revision and expansion of a conference paper I gave reconciling Arrian’s account of Alexander the Great’s reception at Ephesus with the longer trajectory of 4th century Ephesian history. I have been ruminating on this paper for about a year now and need to decide whether it is stronger to frame this as a historiographical contribution about Arrian or a revision of 4th-century Ephesian history.

If all goes well with the first two writing projects or I need to put one of them down for the time being, I also have a third article-length project simmering on the back burner. This project is a revisionary analysis of the Athenian imposition of empire on fifth-century Ionia. I submitted a version of the manuscript, receiving reader reports that suggested that my definition of Ionia was too narrow for the argument and that the inquiry needed to be expanded to look at the entirety of the Ionian-Carian district. I started on this last November, but didn’t have the energy to finish the new research.

The final shorter project is a public-facing article based on a suggestion made by one of my fellow panelists at the CAMWS annual meeting. I have been meaning to pitch a piece of this sort for a few years, but draw a blank when I try to decide what I to write. With this one I am about 75% of the way there and just need to develop this skill.

Of course the elephant in this drafting room are the book projects, present and future. The advice from senior scholars that this is the most important thing for securing a permanent job in the field is particularly comforting in that this is at least somewhat out of my hands.

Progress on my dissertation book manuscript (a new history of Classical and Early Hellenistic Ionia) slowed significantly after I submitted my book proposal. The sense of direction slowly, and then quickly, evaporated while waiting for feedback, and through several stressful and exhausting semesters that included teaching, applying for jobs, and managing a few interconnected health issues I allowed my focus to lapse. That is not to say that work entirely stopped, but I need to redouble my attention this summer even while I wait for feedback.

At the same time, I intend to spend time working on a book proposal for the second book project (a history of the city of Ephesus), because the press accepts and evaluates proposals for the series I have in mind without any completed chapters. The challenge on this one is that I still have a fair amount of reading to do in order to write the proposal.

These are ambitious summer writing plans, but I am not expecting to finish them all. Instead, I would like to finish a few of these projects while laying the groundwork for some of my future research.

Reading Plans

Last summer I set an ambitious reading goal, intending to branch out from a narrow focus on the Greek world. I read a handful of very good articles, but predictably fell short. I hope to return to some of these articles this summer, but mostly I want to get to the stack of recent scholarship on Greece and Rome that have piled up up from various conference purchases. My target for this is one per week, set low in hopes of exceeding the mark rather than falling short.

I started on this yesterday with Matt Simonton’s Classical Greek Oligarchy (Princeton 2017). Other books on this list include Emily Mackil’s Creating a Common Polity (University of California Press 2016), Kyle Harper’s The Fate of Rome (Princeton 2017), and Evanglelos Venetis’ The Persian Alexander (I.B. Tauris 2017). There are also a handful of books not on my shelves, most notably Donna Zuckerberg’s Not All Dead White Men (Harvard 2018), that I would like to finally crack open.

Teaching

This is the category that is most in flux. The summer class I was scheduled to teach fell through, which gives more time for research and prep for future classes, but in my precariously-employed situation things could change.

And yet I also hope to hone my craft this summer, particularly by continuing to read up on best practices. My summer reading list for this includes John Warner’s The Writer’s Practice and Norman Eng’s Teaching College.

As of writing this post, I am looking to prepare three classes for the fall semester. One is a World History (pre-1500) survey that I need to update and adapt from a three-week summer course where I want to think through the course design from the top down. The other two are topics courses for first-year honors students. I am doing two different topics here, one titled “Monsters, Humans, and Monstrous Humans” and the other “The Afterlives of Alexander the Great.” These courses are reading-intensive, and the latter requires some selection of what readings we will focus on from the disparate Alexander traditions, but I am looking forward to diving into the preparation for both.

ΔΔΔ

I may check in on these points from time to time throughout the summer, but, other than writing about the pedagogy books, I have no particular plans to do so until the start of the new semester. In the meantime, expect business as usual around here––mostly posts about books I read for fun and a smattering of other topics as I feel moved to write.