I know that there might be some people who would be shocked by how I started my new year. And to be honest, I was impressed myself.

There was a time — especially during my PhD — when I lost the ability to find joy in writing (that’s a story for another blog). However, through rigorous efforts during my postdoc, doing such elementary things as writing a “Happy Journal,” I reconnected to the joy writing once brought me. Today, there is nothing — absolutely nothing — I would rather do than start my year with writing. Any kind of writing: academic writing and journaling.

Why start your year with the most challenging task within academia?

Because as an ever-busy and stressed academic, you deserve to prioritize yourself and your writing as the first task on your list for the upcoming year.

There is something so empowering about taking a whole week — as I did between January 5–9, 2026 — off for one single task: writing. While institutions still sleep — at least in Germany — it almost feels like working on a secret plan ahead of everyone else.

Using the snowy landscapes and watching snowflakes slowly make their way down to cover the whole ground in silent white, you sit at your table and allow yourself — in all slowness — to craft your arguments and let your mind immerse itself in thoughts slowly forming on the screen.

It’s magical!

The amount of thinking (and hereby I mean writing) I got done during this week, without doing anything else academic, was tremendous. Well, that’s not entirely true. I still agreed to meet with a PhD student to help with getting an overview of certain discourses and to brainstorm ethnographic PhD thesis approaches.

I literally set the foundation for a funding proposal being written for a major German funding body during this week. And throughout January, with daily writing windows between one and two hours (of course following the Pomodoro method), I succeeded in submitting the proposal by January 30.

Through these routines, there was also enough time in January to organize a major conference event — a study day on digital religion — at my institution. Yes, I hosted this thing, and of course I had the help of brilliant research managers at my institute.

However, these events usually take a lot of time and organizational thought: coordinating guest speakers, preparing your own input, managing participants, down to tasks such as selecting the right soup for everyone’s dietary needs.

How does selecting the right soup fit into an academic’s routine?

Well, I like to get my hands dirty. No — such things are simply part of organizing (international) conferences. I work at a small institution where one research manager is responsible for a bunch of academics, and yes, we are a team and do things together.

It is really fascinating how little effort it takes as a researcher to come prepared with a thorough presentation and fancy slides compared to the organizational load required to host research events. From making sure technical devices work in hybrid settings — which took me nothing less than four hours the day before the event — to moving tables and chairs or setting up coffee cups for participants, it is all part of the game.

Trigger warning — and now it gets pretty messy.

Apart from achieving the two major milestones of writing a funding proposal and hosting a conference event, I kept all the things of my daily work as an academic and ethnographer going:

• I conducted digital fieldwork with two very insightful and rich data interviews.
• I started drafting a new article on the relationship between theology and anthropology.
• I continued writing the proposal for my first book.
• I networked with publishers from major North American and European presses (yes, writing an email to an editor takes some thought and time).
• I offered my service to the institution by engaging in a working group on the use of AI in university contexts.
• I attended the usual team meeting of our institute, including a social lunch (guess how relaxed I am attending these in such busy times — sometimes I wonder how I am able to follow conversations at all).
• And I led and organized my research group of ethnographers of religion meeting on the topic of “emotions in fieldwork.”
  
  

I told you it gets messy. But this is not to terrify anyone or make people stop pursuing academic careers or finishing their PhDs. It is to let you in on the full picture: glamorous research careers are pretty messy at second glance.

So while I always pictured myself as an ethnographer traveling to foreign lands with my safari hat and sunglasses on to meet cool new people — well, that is just one side of being the ethnographer that I am.

How does one stay happy and mentally sound juggling all these different tasks at the same time?