Before you meet, engage with each of the resources below. You do not have to engage with every resource, but try to choose at least three that feel most relevant to you right now. For each resource, you are simply invited to notice what resonates using the prompts below. Try to engage with at least three resources.

Resource 1: Protect Time for Deep Work and Scholarship

As you engage, notice:

• Activities in your role that genuinely require uninterrupted thinking time
• What currently fragments your attention or disrupts concentration
• The balance between deep work and more reactive activities in your week
• Whether your current working patterns support the scholarship you most value

Resource 2: Finding Flow in Your Work 

As you reflect, notice:

• Activities that absorb your attention so fully that you lose track of time
• Moments when you feel most connected to your identity as a scholar
• Conditions that help you do your best and most fulfilling work
• Whether these experiences have become more or less common as your career has progressed

Resource 3: Creating Space for Scholarship: What Writing Retreats Can Teach Us

As you engage, notice:

• Which aspects of writing retreats seem most valuable or appealing
• The conditions that help people make meaningful scholarly progress
• How protected time, reduced distractions and scholarly community contribute to focus and wellbeing
• Which elements of a retreat environment could realistically be incorporated into your everyday working life

Resource 4: Stay Productive with Your Writing (Even When You’re Not “In the Mood”)

As you reflect, notice:

• Which stages of the POWER writing process come most naturally to you
• Which stages you tend to avoid or postpone
• Whether you expect yourself to plan, write, edit and review simultaneously
• Ways in which separating different writing activities might help you make more consistent progress

Optional: Career stories and lived experiences

You may also wish to read one or more of the following career stories before the discussion:

• From fair trade chocolate to food systems leadership: building impact through collaboration, systems thinking and strategic career moves
• Moving institutions into a professorial role, overcoming imposter syndrome, and learning to prioritise the work that really matters
• From always volunteering to choosing deliberately: learning that saying no can protect both progression and wellbeing

As you read, notice: 

• Choices they made to protect time for work that mattered most to them
• Ways they balanced competing demands over time
• Similarities and differences between their experiences and your own
• Ideas that might be transferable to your context

The structure below is held collectively by the group. You may choose to rotate who keeps an eye on time or simply move together through the stages.

1. Arrival and framing (5–10 minutes)

• Brief reminder of purpose: learning from different perspectives
• No pressure to have implemented anything yet
• Agreement on confidentiality and respect
• An explicit intention that everyone will have space to speak

2. Resource reflections and shared learning (30–40 minutes)

A simple round:

• What stayed with you most in relation to your own experience of protecting time for your scholarship and being focused on writing
• Which idea felt most relevant to your current situation?
• What challenged or surprised you?
• What did you take from the resources that others may not have noticed?

As you discuss, consider:

• What conditions help you do your best scholarly work?
• What most often gets in the way?
• How has your relationship with scholarship changed as your career has progressed?

3. Coaching-style reflection: so what? (20–30 minutes)

Each participant shares:

• One thing that helps me make meaningful scholarly progress
• One thing that currently gets in the way
• One idea or experiment I would like to try over the next month

Peers respond with curiosity rather than solutions:

• What is important about that?
• What conditions seem to help you thrive intellectually?
• What might you learn from trying that experiment?
• If you designed your own “micro scholarship retreat”, what would it include?

4. Closing and commitments (5–10 minutes)

Each person is invited to name:

• One action they will take to create more space for scholarship
• One condition they would like to strengthen or recreate from the resources
• One thing they want to protect over the coming weeks

Optional:

• Who might support you in making this change?
• What might get in the way?
• How will you know whether the experiment has been successful?

This can be very light-touch and self-directed. Possible options include:

• Scheduling a regular deep work session
• Experimenting with a different writing practice
• Creating a personal “micro scholarship retreat”
• Arranging a writing or thinking session with colleagues
• Revisiting one of the resources after a few weeks and reflecting on what has changed

No reporting is required unless the wider programme explicitly asks for it.