If fellow academics and supervisors had not seen me as an investment case, I would have made it nowhere close to where I stand today.

Without hesitation, people literally went the extra mile: providing hundreds of comments on my shitty drafts, writing thousands of letters of recommendation, and most importantly letting me glimpse into their daily work while sharing their overview of discourses and the formation of disciplines — which literally saved me millions of hours it would have cost me to understand all of this on my own.

Well, there are some days I feel guilty about taking so much of their time and investment. However, more often than that, I hear myself saying: exactly the way these supporters opened doors for me, I will open doors for others.

Who wants to read about you opening doors?

Well, I once was a “lost” student myself, having very little understanding of how to approach things such as completing a PhD. I did eventually figure it out. However, if people would have let me in on their routines and academic life organizations a little earlier, I would have saved between one and two years of wondering how to organize myself.

After I finally figured it out, I turned into an organization freak — or maybe I always was, I just didn’t know how to get it right — and I started to approach my academic life much more deliberately. This was not only important to survive in such a “slow-moving environment,” where success is about spinning the wheel 365 days a year instead of performing quick fixes.

This is why my February and March of 2026 were dedicated to daily writing routines, with writing windows ranging from sometimes just 20 minutes to, at other times, three 50-minute sessions in a single day. What these small writing windows led to is unbelievable:

• A polished book proposal for my first book
• The revision of a piece for the Journal of Anthropological Research
• Multiple paragraphs for a piece on the relationship between theology and anthropology
• A whole section of a sample chapter of my book
• The preparation of a habilitation proposal, which is supposed to mark my next milestone in German academia
• And multiple small writing assignments, such as conference abstracts and LinkedIn posts
  
  

The secret behind these “small” little daily writing windows are huge outcomes.

And I‘ll let you in on another secret.

I already picture myself holding a glass of wine by the end of 2026, scrolling through my routines blog posts. And although all the outside validation will say, “Oh, you just published five articles this year,” or “Oh, your book is still not published” — yes, you know all of these yourself — I will sit there with a glass of wine, candlelight on, in the middle of a snowy, Christmassy evening, slowly, very slowly scrolling through my routine blog posts and celebrating myself for every single tiny box I ticked.

Picture that. It could be you.