Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Email Sign-offs Every once in a while there is a bit of a social media storm about how we sign our email messages. There are some humourous memes attributing passive-aggressive intent to various formal sign-offs. They are only funny if you don’t regularly worry about whether the way you […]
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Email Overwhelm
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Spotlight On: Email Overwhelm. One issue that seems to affect your ability to find and protect time for writing is email. You may disagree on details. Not every suggestion will work for you. But I hope you find something in here that you can try to make your situation […]
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Email overwhelm as a collective problem
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Email Overwhelm as a Collective Problem. This post was prompted by the renowned classicist, Mary Beard, stoking up the embers of email stress recently over on Twitter. for all you guys (women and men) recommending 'delay delivery',. do you know what that means? It means that at 9.00 my […]
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Asynchronous teaching and setting boundaries
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Asynchronous teaching and setting boundaries I’ve noticed in various conversations on Twitter that there are some issues with setting boundaries in the context of pandemic teaching conditions. In this post I address a particular issue with asynchronous teaching. Never in class and never not in class When you taught […]
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Not contributing to other people’s email overwhelm
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Not contributing to other people’s email overwhelm As a companion piece to Managing email when you’ve rapidly switched to remote working, I thought I’d also share some tips to make email more effective as a means of communication. Modelling good email practices does create change. If other people find your […]
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Managing email when you’ve rapidly switched to remote working
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Managing email in the rapid switch to remote You probably have a hard enough time keeping on top of your email at the best of times. The changes you have had to make to respond to the pandemic are likely to make things worse. It is possible you […]
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The role of journal editors in long review times
The scenario You (or someone like you) submitted your journal manuscript. Polite enquiry or a well designed journal website has provided information about how long they expect the review process to take. That time has passed. You’ve allowed some extra, possibly a couple of months of extra. What the H-E-double-hockey-sticks (as we Canadians like to […]
Read More »Attending to correspondence
I love serendipity. Shortly after I talked to a client about email in her relationship with research collaborators, this appeared in my TweetStream from a Romantic literature scholar I follow: “Attending to correspondence” sounds so much more pleasant than “answering e-mails,” so that’s what I’m gonna call it. #passthescones — tricia matthew (@triciamatthew) March 11, […]
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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Email is not urgent
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Email is not urgent Do not start an email with this sentence or any variation on it: “Sorry for the delay in replying” You are busy. Your inbox gets full. Sometimes it takes a while to get back to people. Sometimes you miss something and notice it 2 weeks […]
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Dealing with email is NOT a task
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Email is not a task Are you treating dealing with your email as one task on your to-do list? Do you get frustrated at how many hours a day you spend on it? Is your measure of success dealing with all of it? Do you then chastise yourself […]
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