One finding may answer much of this question. The nearly exclusive emphasis of new faculty on teaching seemed to discourage serious involvement in any potentially competing activity. The findings seem to indicate that those faculty who claimed to be the busiest and who felt the need for large blocks of time devoted to scholarly writing, also were the faculty who seemed to procrastinate the most. They approached teaching as an overload and typically taught classes in less than optimal fashion. And, they made writing an artificially high priority, one rarely put into adaptive practice because the large blocks of time it seemed to require were rarely available.
Many new faculty fall prey to the busyness of preparing for teaching.
Once immersed in such busyness, no other high priority task seems admissible to daily routines. During the second year of this study, the faculty who seemed to display the greatest levels of busyness and procrastination were asked to alter their work strategies. First, they were asked to make a task like scholarly writing a moderate or low priority work activity. In other words, they were encouraged to have their expectation match what they did behaviorally. In this scenario, writing is treated as something that should be done, albeit grudgingly, in brief sessions amidst more important daily tasks.