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 »Do you struggle with perfectionism?
Posts which address the impact of perfectionism on you and your work, and provide strategies for dealing with it.
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. You know when your phone warns you about the battery being low, it also asks if you want to enable Low Power Mode? You need to figure out what that looks like for you. […]
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. You can cry! In fact, put it on your to-do list. Cry in the shower every morning. Cry in bed wrapped up in your blankets. At a minimum stop trying not to cry. Tiredness isn’t […]
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 »
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 suffer from Impostor 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 in that it’s about not believing you are good enough. It prevents […]
Read More »Priorities or, 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 or nothing thinking: If you aren’t going to get an A, it’s not worth doing at all. It […]
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 »Perfectionism
I want to alert you to an excellent series of articles at Inside Higher Education, where Kerry Ann Rockquemore has been writing about academic perfectionism. Many times people get confused because they think that perfectionism is really just a form of striving, being goal-oriented, having ambition, being driven and/or having high expectations for your career. […]
Read More »You are not a procrastinator: Can you do it?
I’ve had more than one client recently worry about their inability to get down to their writing. This is not a minor problem. It can lead you to question your ability to do the work you are doing and to question your own identity. If you aren’t an academic and a writer, who are you? […]
Read More »Good enough?
Does something have to be finished to publish? Doesn’t publishing something that is “good enough” but “not quite finished” suggest that you are lowering your standards? What about “excellence”? Back in 2009, I attended a production of Ann-Marie MacDonald’s Belle Moral. The author’s note in the program caught my attention, especially the part of which […]
Read More »
