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The Lonely Academic

“Engagement predicts wellbeing above and beyond anything else.” A quote from one of Emma Seppälä’s recent articles on work cultures and wellbeing. She is the science director of the Stanford Compassion Center, and if you’re interested in the science of happiness I highly suggest you follow her. It doesn’t surprise me in the least and it supports what I have experienced myself, and what I now observe in others’ situations. Academia tends to be awfully bad when it comes to engagement. Truly, awfully bad. And I have come to the conclusion it’s one of the worst stressors for researchers, far [...]

December 7th, 2015|
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The Inner Compass (or: Feeling Better When Academia Disappoints)

We tend to rely on external events to determine how we are doing: we publish an article and we are up; the article gets rejected and we are down. The meeting with the boss goes well and we are up; they push all our buttons and can’t see our point of view and we are down. We have a productive day and we are up; we have an unproductive day, our computer freezes on us, the data don't cooperate, nor does the photocopier, we are late for our meeting and down we go. In terms of happiness it isn’t the [...]

November 17th, 2015|
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Past the Breaking Point: The Myth of Competition and Performance in Academia

A few weeks ago a to-remain-unnamed director of graduate studies uttered the following statement: "Unless about 25% of your PhDs drop out, your PhD programme isn’t competitive enough." What? Did I hear that correctly? What did he say?! It wasn’t a mistake. When asked again, and given a chance to perhaps come up with some nuance or disclaimers, he said: “I stand by that. I mean it! If you can’t handle it you shouldn’t be in academia.” Right. This is a problem in academia: people in charge talk ‘excellence’ and ‘performance’ and 'competition' but they don't think it through. Instead [...]

November 3rd, 2015|
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Procrastination Part Two: Nine Suggestions

Procrastination. I am still on the topic. As I shared with you in the previous blog post, changing your procrastination habit involves changing your tiny daily actions. It is the smallest, subtle, incremental changes that produce the eventual substantial change in productivity. I am keen on this idea. It makes overcoming procrastination doable. You are no longer mentally fighting the huge imaginary procrastination beast (aka PhD monster), depleting all your resources, but instead see its ability to impress shrink one small action at a time. Nine anti-procrastination suggestions: 1. Create a minimal, doable schedule Start small. If you have gotten [...]

October 20th, 2015|
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Procrastination No More

I am currently working with someone I'd call the Queen of Procrastination. Let me just say that her workday tends to start after midnight, and that only if she has a deadline. Not just any deadline, but a deadline that CANNOT BE MET unless she gets something on paper that very night. She emailed me asking for 'sage advice'. (I love her.) The first week we worked together I recommended she set up a minimal work schedule. Minimal, so it would be doable (we agreed on two hours of work per day); and scheduled so it would be practical. It [...]

October 6th, 2015|
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Say Goodbye to Burnout: 6 Tricks

It seems to be a natural law that when you get whacked over the head by something, difficulties increase exponentially rather than linearly. As one PhD commented in a conversation we had: “It requires strength when you least have it.” It does. It forces you to become smarter than you were, to do things more cleverly. (Some people call this the ‘gift’ or the ‘lesson’. I don’t know about that, but I do know there are few alternatives). Sometimes there is a trick, a new way of thinking about things, of doing things, that makes all the difference. Not a [...]

September 21st, 2015|
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LIBRARY

Free Resources Library

I have compiled some free resources for you to download. An e-book, a short course with encouraging emails to nudge your writing productivity alive, and a worksheet with a mini-course to create an effective and very zen work routine.
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