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Jo VanEvery

You are here: Home / Archives for goals

goals

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The value of intellectual engagement

Posted on November 18, 2020 by Jo VanEvery

Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Valuing Intellectual Engagement Burnout and stress are not just about the quantity of work you have to do. Lack of control and a sense of meaninglessness are major contributors to burnout. It has become very clear that your difficulty managing your workload is not a personal failing. You are […]

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Night-time camping scene with a dark blue sky full of stars and the only light coming from an orange tent to the left. A lone silhouetted star-gazer looks up to the stars with a bright headtorch beaming towards the sky. A glowing campfire is on the right.

Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars: making reasonable plans

Posted on September 18, 2020 by Jo VanEvery

 Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars I’ve written before about juggling as a metaphor for planning out your workload. Consider all of the things you want and need to do, at work and outside of work, as the box of things a juggler could be juggling. Identify […]

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You are not broken. You don’t need fixing.

Posted on August 17, 2020 by Jo VanEvery

Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · You are not broken. You don’t need fixing. One of the comments I got from my editor when working on the Short Guides was “What do you want them to do with this information?” She was really not happy with a prompt that asked the reader to notice something […]

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Prioritising and planning

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Jo VanEvery

I really need to share this post by Helen Kara with you. She makes some excellent points that fit very well with my approach to planning. And she made me realise something: There is a big difference between project planning and workload planning. What I focus on here most of the time is workload planning, […]

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The importance of your vision

Posted on September 30, 2019 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

One reason I started doing what I’m doing is that I could see all of these brilliant, interesting people not really enjoying their academic jobs. For various reasons you were discouraged, frustrated, or just plain overworked. As I’ve worked with clients I have noticed that one of the key elements in shifting that negative stuff […]

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Mid-career blahs

Posted on September 4, 2018 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, “I’ve Got Tenure, How Depressing” (Kathryn D. Blanchard, 31 January 2012), highlights the fact that even getting a coveted tenure-track position doesn’t necessarily lead to the “happily ever after” ending. Since my provost gave me the news about my promotion, I have been wallowing in “post-tenure depression.” Apparently this […]

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Making writing challenges like #AcWriMo work for you

Posted on November 13, 2017 by Jo VanEvery

I am writing this part way through November 2017. A few years ago Charlotte Frost and her team at PhDtoPublished got the bright idea to make an academic version of #NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and call it #AcWriMo. PhDtoPublished is geared to early career researchers and particularly those still in the late stages of […]

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The dangers of counting words

Posted on March 7, 2016 by Jo VanEvery 2 Comments

A lot of people count words as a way of measuring their writing progress. Although there are stages of the writing process where this is helpful, there are also points in the process where counting words could actually be damaging. What you measure affects your process If you measure the number of words you are going […]

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Thoughts on accountability, deadlines, goals and so on.

Posted on July 6, 2015 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

You want to write more. You want to finish and submit more of your writing. You may think that the only way to do that is to do one or more of the following: set concrete (product-oriented) goals give yourself deadlines for achieving those goals make yourself accountable to someone else for those goals and/or […]

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How to take the weekend off

Posted on May 18, 2015 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

Academic life is demanding. During term time you are juggling teaching, administrative and service work, graduate supervision, and your own research and writing. During the summer and your sabbatical, you feel like you need to devote as much time as possible to your research and writing to compensate for how hard it is to do […]

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Be an amateur

Posted on March 26, 2015 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

I’ve been thinking about the term amateur. I’m particularly drawn to the origin — “French, from Italian amatore from Latin amator lover”. I note that prior to the 19th century, usage is merely: “A person who is fond of something; a person who has a taste for something”. If you think about how you got […]

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What that 15 minute practice looks like

Posted on January 8, 2015 by Jo VanEvery Leave a Comment

You are probably worried about being able to write high quality academic prose, to get it published, to write and publish enough of it, and so on. You may look at my advice to write for 15 minutes a day and think that is never going to help you with that. What useful writing can […]

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