Head Space

Calm productivity for academics

Category: Focus

  • Less is more: Doing fewer things, better

    Sometimes the key to unlocking your full potential lies in the art of subtraction – doing less, but with a focused intensity. By focusing your energy on the work that truly matters, you’ll find yourself operating with greater clarity, intentionality, and impact. You’ll have the mental space to dive deep into your research, explore complex…

  • Embracing strategic inaction

    For overwhelmed academics, sometimes the wisest action is conscious inaction. Pausing to let emotions settle, gather context, and resist rash reactions can prevent overreacting and open space for innovative solutions. Judicious pauses aren’t unproductive – they allow reconnecting with priorities by doing less thoughtless busyness to ultimately accomplish more of what matters.

  • Cal Newport: Deep work

    Deep Work by Cal Newport explores how focused, undistracted work boosts productivity and fulfillment in a world filled with digital distractions. Through strategies and routines, Newport shows how cultivating deep work can lead to higher quality output, helping professionals, especially busy academics, achieve more meaningful results in their work.

  • Task-batching to reduce mental fatigue

    Task-batching helps academics overcome the mental fatigue of constant context-switching. Instead of multitasking between emails, meetings, and lesson planning, group similar tasks together and tackle them in dedicated time blocks. This simple approach creates the mental space needed for meaningful academic work.

  • Distraction-free writing: Plain text editors for academic work

    Discover how distraction-free writing tools can transform your academic writing practice. Moving beyond traditional word processors, learn how minimalist writing environments can help maintain consistent writing progress. This guide explores practical strategies for selecting and implementing distraction-free writing tools that align with the natural flow of academic thinking.

  • Attention is your most valuable resource

    Your attention is your most valuable resource. Choose carefully how, where and when you will allocate it to do your most important work.

  • Start your week with admin to avoid feeling overwhelmed

    Deliberately dedicating Mondays to admin tasks in academia can lead to a more productive week. By containing administrative work to one day, you create mental space and uninterrupted time blocks for meaningful academic work while reducing the anxiety of scattered administrative responsibilities throughout the week.

  • Set up your environment to make it harder to work from home

    What would you do if you couldn’t work from home? One of the biggest benefits of being an academic is that you can work anywhere, any time. And one of the biggest problems with being an academic, is that you end up working everywhere, all the time. But imagine getting home in the evening and…

  • Ideal habits and routines

    Just because you know what works, doesn’t mean that nothing else will work. Remember that the ideal routine is not the only routine.

  • James Clear: Atomic habits

    Atomic Habits explores how tiny changes can lead to remarkable personal transformations. Using a four-step method—cue, craving, response, and reward—Clear shows how to design productive habits and eliminate negative ones. This book offers academics practical tools for sustaining progress in high-stakes, fast-paced environments.

  • Writing regularly changes what you pay attention to

    I often find my attention being hijacked by whatever happens to show up in my feed. And in the moment, that content may very well be interesting. The problem is that so much information can be interesting while still having relatively little value. When I’ve set aside 1-2 hours of writing time every day, my attention…

  • Design your academic workflow to do less

    Improving your academic workflow isn’t about squeezing more things into less time. It’s about spending more time on fewer things.