Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · What if *you* need an extension? I’ve been seeing a lot of conversation on Twitter about granting extensions to students. Much of it is framed in terms of compassion and kindness. There seems to be a prominent school of thought that you should just do this, almost automatically. That […]
Read More »Do you struggle with perfectionism?
Posts which address the impact of perfectionism on you and your work, and provide strategies for dealing with it.
Email sign-offs
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 […]
Read More »
So tired you could cry? Enable Low Power Mode.
This post is part 2 of a mini-series called So Tired You Could Cry. The 1st part can be found here. Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · So tired you could cry? Enable Low Power Mode You know when your phone warns you about the battery being low, it also asks if you want to […]
Read More »
So tired you could cry? Permission granted.
This post is part 1 of a mini-series called So Tired You Could Cry. The 2nd part is available here. Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · So tired you could cry? Permission granted. You can cry! In fact, put it on your to-do list. Cry in the shower every morning. Cry in bed wrapped up […]
Read More »
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 […]
Read More »
Juggling, jigsaws, and navigating by the stars: making reasonable plans
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 […]
Read More »
Sneaky ways your gremlins try to get you not to actually publish
I am tempted to put “Part 1” at the end of the title because I’m sure there are more, but since I have no intention of writing any more of this series at the moment, I’ll leave it. If you report your gremlin’s sneaky tricks in the comments or privately, I will add to the […]
Read More »
Where does confidence come from? Part 3: support
This is part 3 of a series about confidence. In Part 1 of this series, I talked about meaningfulness. In Part 2, I talked about security. The introductory section is repeated so you don’t have to read them in any particular order. Or, listen to the whole series here: Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Managing your […]
Read More »
Do you need to be excellent?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Do you need to be excellent? I have written before about “doing your best” being a distraction and instead encouraged you to focus on doing good work. In this post, I want to extend that argument using a recently published scholarly article as a jumping off point. (You can […]
Read More »
Do you suffer from Imposter Syndrome?
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Do you suffer from imposter syndrome? That’s one of those faux-medical terms for a Very Real Thing. You feel like you don’t really belong, you aren’t really qualified, and at any moment someone is going to find out and your whole life will come crashing down. It’s related to perfectionism […]
Read More »
Priorities or, why being a straight A student isn’t necessarily a good thing
Jo VanEvery, Academic Career Guide · Why being a straight A student isn’t necessarily a good thing I bet you were a straight A student. You got lots of praise for being a straight A student. You’ve lived your life thinking being a straight A student is a good thing. It’s not. It encourages all […]
Read More »All or Nothing thinking
How do you react if someone suggests you put less time and effort into your teaching preparation? Or, be stricter about office hours? What about the phrase “good enough”? What does that say to you? Confusing excellence with perfection As Kerry Ann Rocquemore pointed out in her excellent blog series on perfectionism. Many times people […]
Read More »
