How to Publish Fast When You Teach 40 Hours a Week

Publishing more research while teaching full time isn’t blocked by a lack of hours—it’s blocked by how academics choose research targets and how they schedule writing. The core prescription is twofold: build a “big” research agenda that can generate multiple papers on one theme, and then treat writing like a protected appointment through long-term planning and strict execution.

The first shift targets the common bottleneck of chasing small, isolated gaps. Busy faculty often spend months working a narrow question, publish, then must hunt for the next gap—an approach that collapses under heavy teaching, supervision, grading, and committee work. The alternative is to identify a research gap large enough to sustain three to five papers “on the same idea,” allowing parallel progress and reuse of core work like literature review and, in some cases, methodology. A practical example centers on professional discrimination faced by non-native speakers in English language teaching. While the topic has been examined from multiple angles, the approach described hinges on noticing something others missed: course book authors in English language teaching were overwhelmingly white native speakers from the UK or the US. That observation became an unexplored line of inquiry about how discrimination shows up in course book authorship and recruitment practices.

From that single, underexamined angle, multiple Q1 publications are framed as feasible. The example describes a first paper in a top 1% journal, followed by additional Q1 papers that stay within the same overarching theme while shifting angles—such as using different sample sizes, countries, and types of course books. The payoff is efficiency: multiple papers can be produced within a year because the work is anchored to one literature base and one research program rather than repeatedly restarting from scratch.

The second shift argues that the real problem is not time scarcity but inefficient use of available time. A claim is made that writing can be completed quickly when the process is systematized—citing an instance of writing and submitting a Q1 journal paper in just over five hours. More importantly, the transcript emphasizes planning failures. Faculty delay writing by pointing to predictable academic demands like exams, supervision, and class preparation. The response is that these are known in advance and can be planned for at the start of the academic year, then refined weekly.

That planning includes two layers: mapping the year to place writing blocks on the calendar, and reviewing schedules weekly to decide what to write, research, and read next. Execution is treated as the final gate. Once writing time is scheduled, it should be protected with the same seriousness as teaching or student supervision—meaning declining meetings that conflict with writing. The transcript cites Lizette Britz, described as working about 50 hours a week, while also being a triathlete and mother, yet managing to publish five Q1 papers in one year by saying no and executing on scheduled writing blocks.

Overall, the message is that career stagnation comes from repeating the same approach—postponing writing or working evenings and weekends until burnout—rather than changing the research strategy and the operating system that turns writing into a reliable output. The transcript ends by promoting a free one-to-one consultation to identify bottlenecks and outline an action plan toward multiple Q1 publications.