When avoiding your grant is just elegant procrastination
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You tell yourself you’re not avoiding the grant, you’re just thinking it through.
You’ll just wait until you have more time to spend on it, the framing’s sharper, the funder’s clearer.
But here’s what’s really happening.
You’ve got a perfectly viable project idea sitting in your notes.
You know which funders it could go to (or you can spend 30 mins finding out).
You’ve even half-written the Case for Support.
And yet, everything stays as-is.
Because your brain starts offering you very reasonable sounding reasons to just wait a bit:
If I go for this one, I’ll be locking myself into this line of research for another five years — am I sure that’s where I want to go?
It probably makes more sense to wait for the next call, when I’ll have stronger outputs behind me.
It feels awkward to approach research services when I’m not sure I’ll go through with it. I don’t wanna pester them.
It’s not the right political moment for this topic — I’ll hold off until the climate shifts.
I’ve been told I should go for something “big,” but I’m not sure I even want “big.”
Every one of those thoughts sounds reasonable. Some of them even sound strategic. But together, they keep you exactly where you are and not moving to where you want to be.
The truth is, your brain would rather you stay where you are than move forward.
Even if it knows with a grant could come more buy-out, more time for lovely reading and writing, more autonomy. It would rather conserve energy and do sod all. That’s why it tells you “not yet” or that some things are too complicated now.
The truth also is there is no perfect moment.
Every successful researcher you admire once sent off a half-formed draft, adjusted the framing later, and learned by doing.
The difference between them and the ones still waiting is tolerated the messy middle. They acted while unsure and didn’t wait for things to be perfect.
So if your next grant feels fuzzy, start anyway.
You’re waiting for clarity before you move, but most of the time it doesn’t come until after you do so.
Get going and all the best
