Category: Essential
I am not my h-index: Rethinking scholarly impact metrics
Academic metrics like the h-index can drive unhealthy behaviours and distance us from our core purpose as scholars. While these traditional academic metrics provide comfortable validation, creating meaningful impact often requires looking beyond citation counts to measure how our work benefits real people outside academia.
Schedule personal time first, work second
Most academics make the mistake of scheduling work first and trying to fit life around it. Discover why reversing this approach is key to achieving better academic work life balance. Learn how prioritising personal commitments in your schedule can lead to more focused and productive work hours.
Rethinking your week: The case for a scholarship day
Dedicating one day a week to scholarship can transform your academic productivity. Drawing inspiration from Iceland’s successful shorter work week experiment and Google’s 20% time policy, explore how protected time for deep scholarly work can help you produce better outputs without working longer hours.
Strategic scholarly retreats
Strategic scholarly retreats offer academics a chance to step back from daily pressures and focus on career planning. These retreats, whether a full day or a few hours, provide time for reflection on research goals, teaching methods, and professional development. Regular retreats can lead to more impactful research, effective teaching, and a fulfilling academic career.
Support work-life balance with a daily shutdown ritual
A daily shutdown ritual is crucial for academics to maintain work-life balance. This post explores the importance of setting boundaries and offers practical suggestions for creating your own shutdown routine. Learn how to transition from work mode to personal time effectively, enhancing your well-being and professional contributions in academia.
Strategic content repurposing: Turning research into multiple outputs
Discover strategies for turning research into multiple outputs that make a real impact. Instead of creating each academic output from scratch, learn how to build interconnected pathways that help your research reach different audiences. Transform one project into various valuable outputs while maintaining academic rigour.
Improve academic writing with classic style
Good writing prioritises clear presentation of ideas with a focus on structure, logic, and function, akin to architecture rather than decoration. Classic style, which advocates simplicity, truth, and conversation-like diction, is recommended for its clarity and authority. Overly complex academic writing should be avoided in favor of minimalism and functionality to effectively convey research and…
Simple guide to writing effective AI prompts
Writing effective AI prompts is crucial for academics looking to reduce administrative workload. Using a simple framework of defining the AI’s role, stating your goal, and providing clear instructions can help you get better results. Learn how to write AI prompts that free up time for meaningful academic work.
Email-free mornings: The simplest productivity tip you’ll ever see
Stop letting your inbox dictate the outcomes of your day by aiming for at least 2 hours of email-free mornings.
Academic skill development: Excellence through deliberate practice
Most professionals have structured approaches to skill development, but academics often just do the work without deliberately improving their craft. Apply deliberate academic skill development practices to enhance your writing, reading, and analytical abilities – transforming routine tasks into opportunities for meaningful professional growth.
Getting started with generative AI
Getting started with generative AI is as simple as setting aside a few hours for experimenting with the technology. This will help identify what it’s good at, and where it fails. In this post I share a few simple ideas and prompts to help anyone interested in getting started with generative AI.
Use research projects to build academic skills
Design small research projects, structured around the features of deliberate practice, to help build academic skills.