357: Six Strategies for Managing Academic Writing Revisions Without Overwhelm

357: Six Strategies for Managing Academic Writing Revisions Without Overwhelm

===

Dra. Yvette Martinez-Vu: [00:00:00] If you're working on a manuscript or maybe you're working on a dissertation or maybe you're working on a prospectus or proposal, there's a good chance you might be feeling overwhelmed, behind, scattered or confused, and if that's true for you, then this episode is going to be one you don't wanna miss.

I work with a lot of grad students and this week I had conversations with two of my one-on-one coaching clients, and this topic came up the topic of how do I tackle my revisions and how do I set my daily milestones to make sure that I get them done on time?

And sometimes I notice that, folks working on manuscripts, myself included, we try to box ourselves in with one method of trying to [00:01:00] tackle revisions, and then we realize that we might need something else that maybe we need something more flexible or something that's more doable for our capacity and energy in any given time.

So today I'm gonna walk you through six different strategies for you to set daily milestones to tackle your revisions. As I always say, there's no single right approach. The goal is for you to find one that fits you, your current capacity, your current energy, your circumstances, your deadlines, and then hopefully you get to do what you need to do, which is you get those revisions squared away, you submit your manuscript, and you're off to your next milestone.

Welcome to the award-winning Grad School Femtoring podcast. The place for first gen BIPOCs [00:02:00] to listen in on inclusive grad school stories and learn about personal development and productivity tips. This is Doctora Yvette Martinez Vu, a certified coach, consultant and author, and I will be serving as your femtor, providing you with insider knowledge to help you reach your personal and professional goals.

Welcome back everyone to another episode of the Grad School Femtoring podcast. This is your host, Doctora Yvette, let me just start by saying that I almost didn't record this episode because it's been a rough start of the year. If you are listening to this at another time, know that I recorded this at the start of 2026 and it has been a year already.

It's not even the end of the first month of 2026, and it has been a [00:03:00] lot. There's been a lot going on in our country. There's been a lot going on, even in my own home with my family. So many illnesses, just so much happening that it's really easy to feel overwhelmed by our workload. So I completely understand the feeling of having work to do and then feeling like your circumstances make it nearly impossible to get that work done. But because this topic came up, not once but twice, I thought, hold up, hold up. Y'all know me. Every time something comes up, I wanna share the wealth. I don't wanna gate keep. Let me share some of these ideas, some of these suggestions that I brought up with my coaching clients, let me share them with my audience as well. So let's get started with that.

The first thing I wanna do before I share those strategies is help you to take a minute to slow down, ground yourself [00:04:00] and reflect to see where you're at with your writing. So first off, I want you to ask yourself, how much time do I actually have left to work on revisions?

That might mean. How many weeks before your deadline, that might mean how many work sessions you have. That might literally mean you adding up the days and hours that you have dedicated to do this and actually having that mental math of, I have 20, 40, 60 hours to get this done. Whatever that number is for you. So figure out how much time do I have left to work on these revisions?

Next I want you to ask yourself on a regular day, and this is whatever's regular for you. This is not an ideal day. So not your best day, just an average day. How much energy do I have to tackle this work? Because sometimes we have [00:05:00] all these great ideas and ambitions and we time block and we're like, oh, I'm gonna work 4, 6, 8 hours per day for X amount of days.

And then you sit down and you recognize that you're completely depleted. And while you might have the time, you don't have the energy for it. So recognize, on an average day, how much energy do you think you have to tackle this work?

And the third thing is to ask yourself, and this is one that you might need to take aside before you answer this is what's overwhelming me most right now. Is it the time pressure of like, oh no, I have this two week deadline. I'm saying two weeks because it's so funny. Both of my clients had two week deadlines. One was self-imposed, another one was externally imposed. So is it time pressure?

Is it the number of tasks? Let's say you got revisions back and you're like, whoa, this is just so [00:06:00] many things to tackle. Or is it the decision making and prioritization process of having a lot of feedback and not knowing where to even start or what's the most important thing to work on? So answer those three questions. How much time do I have to work on this? How much energy do I have to work on this? And what's overwhelming me most?

And then based on your answers, that will help to guide which strategy you might decide to use to start working on those revisions daily and by daily, whatever daily means to you. Might be touching it, it might mean every other day, but just these are strategies to get you to work on this regularly.

And now I'm gonna jump into the six strategies. The first strategy is doing the math. What do I mean by doing the math? This is literally counting all of the feedback and [00:07:00] the marginal comments that you got. There is actually a shortcut. If you work on Microsoft Word, there is a setting to download only the comments, the marginal comments. And what's great about that option is that. It'll give you an actual count. That's how I figured out that for one of my dissertation chapters, I don't even know how many years ago, 'cause it's about to be in a week or two. It's gonna be my 10 year PhD anniversary. So 10 years since I filed my dissertation, so this must have been 12, 13 years ago. I had 144 comments for one chapter. But I had done the math, so do the math. Figure out how many comments, how much feedback did you have? These comments can become micro tasks that you tackle one by one. And once you count them, then you can calculate, well, how many [00:08:00] of them can I realistically get done during my work sessions over the remaining days?

So for example, when I had that 144 comments for one chapter. I remember some comments were pretty simple and straightforward. And so for those simple ones, especially the line edits, I could tackle like five of them in one 25 to 30 minute session. But then some of them were big picture developmental edits and one comment could take me.

I don't know, two hours. So you'll wanna just be able to gauge the differences in the comments and that's actually takes me to another strategy, which is the strategy of breaking down the types of feedback that you got, did you get developmental feedback stuff about the argument, about the data, about the analysis, big picture stuff. Did you get stuff around clarity? Do you need to fix topic [00:09:00] sentences? Do you need to restructure things? Do you need to expand on some stuff to make things more clear? Is it line edits? This is just fixing a couple things here and there in the sentences. Is it formatting and citations? Why do you wanna group tasks by the types of revisions that they are? Because different feedback requires different cognitive demand. The developmental stuff is the one that requires the most energy, the most cognitive demand, the most focus. Whereas the line edits formatting that takes less time and citations is kind of hit or miss 'cause it depends on whether or not you have to go back to the literature and find it. That can be time intensive or energy intensive, but if it's just fixing a citation, that might not be a big deal. If you want to do it that way, you can group your revisions based on, well, how many things do I have related [00:10:00] to developmental?

How many things do I have related to clarity, related to line edits related to formatting? And depending on my energy, I might tackle one or the other first. Now another strategy, and this one is probably the one that a lot of people will need to resort to if they're short on time. This is differentiating between what is essential versus what is nice to have? And one way to discern whether something is essential is if the person who gave you feedback wrote up a summary. So sometimes they'll write in the margins and then they'll add a paragraph that's like the main summary. You wanna see what's in that overall summary 'cause that'll tell you the big major issues that you need to tackle. And that will then tell you what's essential and nice [00:11:00] to have are the things that if you have more time or that'll help to polish it, but you can get away without it. It'll still be a passable manuscript. It'll still be a publishable manuscript. Without that, or it would be nice to have in other circumstances if you had more time.

It actually reminds me of one time I worked with a client who hired me when she had six weeks left to finish her dissertation revisions and she had a bunch of jobs, et cetera, like she was going through it. And so when we met, it was literally just that like we need to discern and figure out what is absolutely essential and then how much time you have in your very busy schedule to work on what's absolutely essential. There was no time for nice to haves. There were a lot of things that in another world, in another circumstance.

This person would have done, but at least now they know and they have this as feedback for future [00:12:00] publications. So this is a very common one. Again, if you are running out of time or you, if you have very limited energy. Now another strategy that I want to share is section by section completion, and I think that this is something that a lot of folks do by default, you open up your manuscript and you just start with the introduction and then you go into the lit review and then, or the analysis or whatever your first section is. And it's funny 'cause I'm a humanist, but I work with so many social scientists that now my examples are sounding more like they're for the social sciences than the humanities anyway.

So a lot of times people work their revisions chronologically. When I say section by section, I don't mean that way. I mean really thinking about it one section [00:13:00] at a time, but identifying the high priority sections. So start with the section that requires the most revisions or that is the most important to revise.

And , maybe you break up your work sessions based on those sections. And this is great because it helps you not to context switch too much. So instead of trying to go, okay, I'm gonna tackle this thing from this section, this thing from this section, and you're jumping around and having to switch gears from one type of thinking to the next you're, you stick to one section that's important.

And you work on it until it's done, and then you move on to the second most important section so you can tackle it that way one section at a time, and it doesn't have to be in chronological order. In fact, I don't know who it was that I heard this from, but I know it was from an editor. And this person recommended that you work backwards with your [00:14:00] revisions. So instead of starting from the intro and then working your way down to the conclusion, reading your paper backwards from the conclusion, working upwards, that is another strategy you can use. I have used that strategy as well and , you know, do with that what you will. I personally am a bigger fan of not going in order, but going based on the priority.

Another strategy you can use is this strategy that reminds me of the minimum and maximum approach that I introduce to my clients. Anybody and everybody that works with me is familiar with this idea of I will have you set a minimum goal for the week or maximum goal for the week. Ideally both. Minimum is if everything doesn't go well, what's the absolute smallest thing you can do to move the needle forward? Maximum is, in an ideal world, you have a great week. What's the most you can do without burning out? [00:15:00] This is a little bit different where your minimum goal is one anchor task or one like main task for that work session, and then you have other flexible tasks, like the goal for today is to get this one major thing done. If I have time, I'll do these other three things. Why is this helpful? Because if you give yourself a really long list and no flexibility, that can overwhelm you and make you not even wanna start. Whereas if I'm just focusing on this one thing right now, that can be more helpful instead.

Now the last strategy I'm gonna share is alternating between heavy and light revision days. So you could have days where you tackle the cognitively demanding revisions, or you have a longer day longer workday. And then you can have other days that are lighter days. And these are days where maybe you're [00:16:00] tackling more of the less cognitively demanding strategies like you're just going and.

Working online edits, fixing your formatting, fixing citations, or that day is lighter because you have a shorter work session. This, it is hit or miss for some folks, some people like that. They like being able to alternate between heavy and light days. Other folks prefer the consistency of the same amount of time for each work session. You know yourself best with this one, so if you think it'll work for you, go ahead and try it out.

Those are my six strategies for tackling revisions and for setting your milestones to regularly work on them until they're done. Let me know what you thought about this episode.

If you took one thing from this episode please remember that there is no single right way to make progress on your writing and your revisions. The best way to tackle your milestones regularly is the [00:17:00] way that is tailored to you, to your identities, to your circumstances, to your capacity, to your energy, and everything else that's going on in your life, even right now as we speak.

I'm trying to work on my second book project, and I need flexibility because so much has come up for the beginning of the year, and I hope that you can also offer yourself that same level of compassion and flexibility as you do your own, work As always, if you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend, a colleague, anyone who could benefit from it, and go ahead and leave a review.

I always enjoy reading those. I actually just discovered that I don't get to see or read reviews outside of the US. And if it wasn't for someone emailing me their review, I wouldn't have gotten a chance to see it. So if you're outside of the US and you leave a review, send me an email so that I can see it. Send me a screenshot of it and email me. I'd love to hear from you. [00:18:00] Alright, that's it for today, and as always, I'll talk to you all next time.

Thanks so much for listening. If you liked what you heard, here are three ways you can support the show. The first is to make sure you're subscribed and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. The second way is to get your copy of my free resource kit linked in my show notes. This kit includes tools, playlists on all things grad school, productivity, and personal development.

The third way to support my show is to follow me on social media. You can find me on Instagram with the handle at gradschoolfemtoring and on LinkedIn by searching my name. Thanks again for listening. And until next time.