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Always busy but no progress
In academia, it’s common to feel perpetually busy while at the same time, not making any meaningful progress. True productivity comes from establishing a steady rhythm of shipping important work, not just completing a high volume of tasks. Building and maintaining positive momentum is key to sustained progress.
Leverage your peak productivity hours
You only have 3-4 hours of peak cognitive productivity per day. Identify when you feel most focused and protect that time for demanding tasks. Batch easier activities during lower energy periods. Tracking energy levels, prioritising tasks, creating routines, taking breaks, and guarding peak times can help maximise your limited productive hours.
Thinking with others
We often think with others – “real” others like supervisors, co-researchers and critical friends and “imagined” others like the authors of the texts we are reading and working with. Sherran Clarence. Making Time to Think. PhD in a hundred steps. Reading academic texts involves engaging with the authors as “imagined others” who serve as more…
Email-free mornings: The simplest productivity tip you’ll ever see
Aim for email-free mornings and don’t open email for the first two hours of your day. That’s it. That’s the tip. Academia is an environment steeped in constant, ad hoc, unfiltered communication, accompanied by a deluge of incoming requests for your time and attention. It’s so easy to start your working day by opening your…
Learning something new takes a lot of effort
Learning a new city and institution requires a lot of effort and puts a lot of cumulative strain on our brains. Our brains are forced to create new patterns of familiarity by the simple act of navigating a new learning management system or new city. Those small tasks add up quickly. When setting research and…
It’s not your job to read everything
To return to information overload: this means treating your “to read” pile like a river (a stream that flows past you, and from which you pluck a few choice items, here and there) instead of a bucket (which demands that you empty it). After all, you presumably don’t feel overwhelmed by all the unread books…
Lazy productivity
A productivity approach where you tailor your environment so that the easiest, most natural action aligns with your goals. By doing so, even when taking the path of least resistance, it contributes to your overall objectives.
Meetings should enhance your productivity
Meetings should enhance your productivity, not impede it. Does it ever feel like your days are swallowed by a vortex of meetings? You review agendas, attend discussions, and take copious notes, only to find yourself yearning for the quiet space to think deeply about your research, writing, or teaching. This isn’t just a personal struggle…
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
Don’t let ‘perfect’ be the enemy of ‘good enough’. I’ve spent a lot of time experimenting with different habits and routines and have settled into one that works well for me. It’s not perfect, but I know what ideal looks like in my context. However, knowing what works best means that I can feel despondent…
Sustainable productivity
Long-term, sustainable productivity is about establishing habits and routines. This kind of productivity comes when you decouple the feeling of being busy with the long-term, incremental changes to habits and routines (Young, 2023). This feeling of being busy is what most of us associate with productivity, even when the work isn’t leading towards a high-value…