Technology. Education. Art (TEA) tealearn.org

Home > TEA Blog

Do You Sleep At All? How I Manage to Be Productive (Part I)

Posted by: Benjamin Onuorah

In May, I sent the manuscript of my latest book, “Fuji: The History of An African Popular Culture” to a major American university publisher for external review. I completed the full manuscript in April 2024 and spent over a year revising, rewriting, and copyediting.

For me, productivity is not a game of volume or number alone, but of creative and innovative consistency. My last journal article was published in 2018. But my last book, the one that gave me the Dan David Prize and consolidated my status as an original thinker, was published in 2022. And the next book (on Fuji) will be out, most likely, in 2027.

Books are far more difficult to write than articles because they require access to a dense trove of data and must be built around a thematic focus. Also, they take longer time to complete. If you don’t believe in delayed gratification, you can’t write a book.

Is it not counter intuitive that I would stop writing journal articles and focus on books and other creative works, like documentaries, that require longer gestation period? By 2018, I was already due for promotion to full professor, when my book on guns came out. At that point, I knew that publications count wouldn’t matter anymore. What would really count is consistent creative innovation.

Focusing on long-term projects, in a totally new field/direction, is capable of yielding major impact that could help deal with saturated productivity, that is, when you keep being productive without any new change in the way you do things and the outcomes. Saturated productivity is a sign of weakness, not of strength, because the brain is unable to process another way of proving productivity beyond the channel it has already mastered.

True productivity is creative and innovative productivity. I don’t write synthesis, that is, a book or journal article written from published sources. I have stopped editing books. In fact, my last edited book was published in 2019.

I’m not a computer desk historian. I write original books, which are far more difficult to write. I must sit physically in an archive, negotiate relations with archivists, and conduct oral interviews wherever the search for knowledge takes me. This epistemic ritual is not only self-humanizing, but it also legitimizes academic rigor and the essence of knowledge production, in the first place.

Because I have self-defined productivity, not necessarily as output that people can see, but as process that only me can feel and experience, I don’t have to worry if people can’t see my productivity. Hence productivity is about progress and process, not always output. If you cannot see process and progress as productivity, you will be frustrated thinking that you are not productive.

Yours Sincerely in Fuji:
Ìsòlá awón bí ogbón
The Okà ò sò'fò of Ibadanland
Prof Saheed Aderinto

Source

Share: