As an academic you are expected to do a lot of things, expectations that appear increasingly unreasonable. You may need to do more work than you think is reasonable but you do not need to collude in the erasure of the political agency of others. What happens if you stop using the passive voice when talking about those expectations?
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Boundaries, balance and the whole you
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Boundaries, Balance, and the Whole You The term “work-life balance” is out of favour. I’m not sure why. Perhaps because everyone is working so hard it seems like an impossible dream. I came across a recent piece in Harvard Business Review arguing for the importance of boundaries. They are not […]
Read More »Beware the long list and wide expanse of time…
As tough as this semester has been and as happy as you are for it to end, the transition from a heavily scheduled term to an unscheduled break is tough. You’ve probably got a long list of things too do. Too long, I suspect. A long list + an open stretch of time = procrastination […]
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You can ignore the grading.
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You can ignore the grading This post refers to the break between the first and second semesters of an academic year, which in the Northern Hemisphere tends to incorporate the Christmas holidays. Often the exams and assignments that come in at the end of the semester need to be […]
Read More »Enjoyment and hard work
My friend Norma Miller posted this picture with a jokey comment her friend made: “A friend told me that if I was smiling, I wasn’t trying hard enough.” That kind of joke is not a joke That kind of joke causes injuries. That kind of joke makes you doubt yourself. You push yourself harder. You stop trusting your own […]
Read More »Reruns: Holiday Parties: turning dread into opportunity
I originally published this post in November 2010 and reran it in November 2011. It’s that time of year. No matter what you celebrate (if anything) you are going to be invited to parties. Many of these parties will involve talking to people you don’t know very well — the husband of your department chair, […]
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The cardinal rule of time travel
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · The cardinal rule of time travel Last week I talked about how helpful my Magnificent Metaphorical Time Machine is. Travelling forward in time can help you see the outcome you want, without worrying about the messy and difficult process of actually getting there. However, there is a cardinal […]
Read More »The value of time travel
I have a Time Machine. When I first started using it, I was a bit nervous. I worried that my clients would think this was a bit too weird. I was probably a bit tentative because of that and so it maybe didn’t work as well as it could have. But it still worked. Now […]
Read More »Making progress on projects
There are two basic ways to approach a writing project. You figure out what the final product will look like and make a plan to achieve it. You start writing. I am reminded of a passage in Alice in Wonderland: “Cheshire Puss,’ she began, rather timidly, […] ‘Would you tell me, please, which way I […]
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Writing for the people who will like your work
It strikes me that many academics spend a lot of time and energy worrying about the people who will hate their work. Even before you’ve written the article, you are imagining someone criticizing it, probably in a particularly mean and hurtful way. No wonder you have trouble writing. Write for the people who are eager […]
Read More »Writing makes you feel better
Think of a time when you weren’t finding time to write. How did that feel? I’ve heard enough academics complain about how little time they have for writing during term time to know that whatever specific feelings that brought up for you, they weren’t good. Now, think about a time when you were writing regularly. […]
Read More »Is your mind always racing?
I heard an interesting interview on my local CBC Saturday morning show* recently. The interviewee was a news anchor who had decided not to be plugged in and available 24/7, but rather to limit his smart phone and other device use to 16/6. Yes, he decided to not be connected to the internet, phone and […]
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