If you don’t control your schedule, then it will control you. While academics probably have more autonomy around structuring their work day than many other employees, few feel as if they have any control at all, often spending our days reacting to a rising tide of demands for our attention. This module will help you effectively manage your time as a first step towards creating the head space that enables you to step back and review your working life. Scheduling focuses your thinking on the reality of time allocation. It makes you more aware of how you’re really spending your time, as opposed to how you think you spend your time. And it enables you to set aside space that allows you to make progress on the high-value tasks that lead to successful career progression.

Email and instant messaging result in a near constant disruption of thinking, with incoming information creating numbing streams of distraction that make it increasingly difficult to focus on what matters. This module focuses on changing your habits around communication, with an emphasis on limiting the role of email in your workflow. In this module, you’ll analyse your email workflow and your habits around working with email. You’ll explore alternative responses that allow you to put email into its proper place as an input into your work, rather than seeing it as your work. This module will help you create a system for using email more effectively, helping you to develop a different relationship with it. One where you are in control, rather than having your daily activities dictated by your inbox.

Notes are the foundation of academic work, and this module will help you establish that foundation. Most academics think of notes as being peripheral to the work, but the fact is that notes are the work. In this module, you’ll work through several different types of notes, each of which helps provide structure for thinking in different domains of academic practice. You will come to understand the purpose of these different notes, and how they inform and influence the work you do in a more intentional way. After this, you will no longer have the problem of notes – and thoughts – lying scattered around your workspace, with no clear purpose. These notes will instead serve as extensions of your working- and long-term memory, freeing up head space to focus on what matters for your career.

Much of academic work is the process of turning information into knowledge that has value for society. But few academics receive any guidance in managing the avalanche of information coming their way, nor any structure for effectively converting it into something valuable. During this module, you will develop a systematic approach to managing information, so that you can work more efficiently and effectively to increase your career capital. This process will reduce the amount of information competing for your attention, establish a personal library to curate high-value sources, and extract what is useful, so that it can be converted into something valuable that you can share with others.

Creating a more effective and efficient system for academic work means little if it isn’t tied to a higher purpose. Even though knowledge work is the defining characteristic of academia, we nonetheless find it difficult to articulate what it looks like in our personal contexts, and how to systematically get better at doing it. The aim of this module is to help develop a set of broader principles that help guide decision-making to shape a career that has high-impact in the long-term.