The tyranny of email

Email: It sucks (time)

There are many things I can become quite righteous about in relation to time. Things I have little sympathy for because I feel like these are self inflicted wounds: the tyranny of email is decidedly not one of them. Email: it sucks, and it sucks your time away and it is very difficult to discipline yourself about it for a multitude of reasons. I feel this pain, although I suspect for slightly different reasons than many of you.

Email is a replacement of the letter, not snapchat. It is not a text. It is not an instant medium, yet we seem to have forgotten this very basic starting point. You SHOULD NOT be replying to emails immediately. It is not that kind of medium. Email is a very big waste of time, most of the time. And yet, and yet, oh, so addictive. I want you to visualise a dam that has burst - that is email. It is a wide open gate for the world to access your labour, unconstrained by contractual arrangements and pay. And that water never ever stops flowing in. Ever. Academics get asked to do a lot of work that is not even from their employer!!!! Can you even imagine that in any other industry? I don’t think so somehow. Yet you see every possible approach via email as something YOU MUST DO, even stuff you are not paid for and is not from your employer. You don’t have to, really.

Why is it this way?

Why do you spend so much time on email? Lots and lots of devilish reasons. You have all your notifications turned on like some Pavlovian dream. Respond on demand. The system is set up to have you perform like one of those rats trained to hit the lever to get a treat. Yet this rat is never satisfied, it keeps on hitting the lever manically to get its treat fix. Email is a treat because it is easy. It makes us feel useful (I am solving other people’s problems all day long! Hooray!), it makes us feel like we are contributing, and it provides that dopamine hit of quick wins. But crucially: it is EASY. Much, much easier than writing and research. The problem with this is those emails were not on your to-do list today or any other day. 10 other things were, and you did none, because you were on email, like the rat, tap tap tapping away.

I sympathise I really do. Although I was not an email addict, I was a compulsive solver of other peoples’ problems (that were presented, by email, as my problem - it is a wonderful sleight of hand no?). I was also someone likely to be emotionally derailed for the day as a result of a departmental circular of some kind, usually related to teaching or some new fiendish way of wasting my time invented by finance. That stuff BURNED. I was unable to discipline myself into not reacting this way, so evasive action was required. Divert, divert, divert. Do your work. Your actual work, which is on your actual list of things to do.

Controlling Email

Unlike time, you can control your email.

Most of the emails you get can go straight to trash and you should set up rules to make sure that happens. Unsubscribe rarely works, so just trash that stuff. Same with departmental and University circulars - set up folders, divert away from your inbox. Students - whilst in my opinion not the primary generator of email overload - should be directed by your signature (or in extreme circumstance, your out of office automatic reply) to the various avenues they can get the answer to their question - usually, the syllabus, or support staff, or the online learning portal, or course site, or discussion board. Wherever you collate your FAQs. You should have repeatedly made clear your email policy (don’t email me about …..) at the beginning of term. Come see me, ask me in class, post on the discussion board. I will not respond by email: that is OK - there are 700 of them (on this one course) and only one of you.

Most emails though can go straight to trash. If there are actually things you - and only you - have to action, you can mark these as to do, and make a slot in your diary to tackle them. Don’t do it NOW regardless of any stated deadline. If it was really that important (note, I don’t say urgent) they would have given you more than two days to respond. That is not your problem. Schedule and tackle accordingly. Remember: agency.

So once again, the secret is to schedule email, and crucially, schedule it after you have written. This will seem impossible for those with an email addiction so I suggest you work your way up to scheduling your email at 4.00pm, and start gently by scheduling email at 11.00am. Whatever you do, do not open email first. You should have scheduled slots to actually do the emails tasks if they are weighty. For the love of God, please do not reply all to anything, thus creating yet more emails for everyone. Keep your responses tight and short. Try not to encourage endless back and forth of never ending politeness that no-one knows how to stop except with the thumb up emoticon.

Email is tyrannical. It is time to revolt.

I can't find time to write

The next couple of blogs will be a series on ‘Time’, and the stories we tell ourselves about time. We wrap ourselves in these stories so we don’t have to face doing the difficult intellectual work of writing, but the key here is to recognise they are just that. Just stories. Not fact, not true, just things we tell ourselves (and for some, have heavily internalised as a defence mechanism to criticism).

Today I am going to start with the greatest lament of struggling writers everywhere - I can’t find time to write. Wrong. The whole premise is wrong. We don’t find time. We don’t create time. We don’t make time. We don’t lose time (it is not behind the sofa) and we don’t manage time. It is not an unruly toddler that has to be corralled.

Your whole attitude to time has gone astray right from the get-go here. We must see time instead as something we schedule. That is all we can do. Time unspools before us - we don’t create it, or find it. We can choose what we do with our time though, because we have agency - still, in these difficult times - we still have agency to schedule our time. Most working professionals do in fact possess this same agency. Of course, we have fixed slots for teaching, determined by the gods of timetabling, but after that, we decide what we do with our time and when we do it. Your synchronous teaching slots might account for 2-14 hours a week depending on you contract, position and location. That’s still a pretty small amount of a 40 hour working week.

We don’t find time. If you are working from a position of finding time, you have already lost. This is not hide and seek. Time requires us to schedule our behaviour into slots where we match task to be completed to a fixed time slot. We all know many academic tasks - especially teaching related ones - will take as long as you give them, so decide ahead of time, how long you are prepared to give to X task. Let your time allocation model be your guide. Be honest. And here is the rub - so often we are NOT honest. We don’t know how long something has taken us to do because we never set out with a particular goal in mind, and we have never timed ourselves doing it.

Let’s start with a benign example. You have to grade 100 1500 word essays. You are allowed in your time allocation model 10 minutes per essay. You set yourself a target of 30 essays this week, which requires 5 hours of marking on this calculation. That is what you must give it. Use a timer, move on, get quicker at this skill. Use rubrics, autofill comments on Turnitin, whatever strategy you need. You can give excellent feedback in that time, but it takes practice and some investment in working out how to create efficiencies that will pay you back forever. Schedule the time you require and stop when that time runs out. You should not sit for 5 hours grading - no-one should. This task should be spread out, hour to hour amongst your working week(s), to be fitted in around other tasks.

Then, move onto your next task.

That is where people go astray. They ignore the clock, the calendar, and simply continue until they run out of steam. They won’t assess how long that task took them - in fact it took them 5 hours to mark 5 essays instead of 30. That is clearly wrong. You are not paid to spend 1 hour per 1500 word student essay, and no amount of hiding inside some justification about quality will save you here. This was not a good use of your time, because you are paid to do many other things. This is exactly why agency scares people. You choose to spend your time this way. It is not that you could not find time to write. You chose to spend 5 hours grading 5 essays. You chose it.

The key to scheduling your time is to obey the schedule, and of course, put writing in the schedule to begin with. If you show me your schedule, I can find you 5 writing slots a week, guaranteed. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and I can absolutely guarantee you that. I don’t know how long they will last, but I do know, after a couple of weeks of coaching, your schedule will look radically different than it does right now, if you let me help you populate it. The first thing I ask clients to do is show me their schedule. Some are reluctant, some are a little sheepish, some don’t even have what I consider to be a proper schedule (classes written down on a bit of paper diary is not a schedule, it is a list of your classes). A few are wildly overcommitted, in life and in work, and their obligations have to be trimmed to match what they are paid to do; some clients have only a loose understanding of what is reasonable at any given career stage. Some have massive inefficiencies in their practice that can be streamlined to enable more writing slots to be scheduled.

I don’t think this is revolutionary but experience tells me this should be said explicitly. It is no good having a schedule if you ignore it at the first opportunity - the first time someone asks you for something, interrupts you, or an email pops in, or indeed, if you delight in writing a complementary essay of feedback on the student’s essay.

People resist scheduling for all kinds of reasons, but mainly, they resist it because then - when they scheduled 5 hours to write that week (a mere 1 hour per day) and they did not do it - they can have plausible deniability as the movies say. I just didn’t have the time: oh but you did, and it is RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SCHEDULE. You chose not to. And that recognition is the first step to unwiring these writing myths - the greatest of all being ‘I can’t find time to write’, facilitated by the second greatest myth which is ‘I have no control over my schedule’.

How to become an expert advisor

One of the things that I get asked to talk to PhD students about is how to leverage their PhD beyond the academy on the basis that I have had a career as an expert advisor to European institutions. We all know the academic job market is thin and precarious, and it is necessary to think about where you might want to go beyond your PhD if the academy does not work out (or indeed you have already decided it is not) for you.

I recently had the opportunity to give a short interview on the wonderful podcast The PhD Life Raft to talk about this topic, so I thought an accompanying blog might help PhD students to think through this too. Many of you will disbelieve your own expertise, and many of you might think this cannot possibly be a career option for you, but hear me out! I had no connections. I was first in my family to go to University, I was from a working class background with the wrong accent. I did not in short look like the type of person a European institution might use as an expert advisor, so before you count yourself out, please take a minute to consider this as a possible opportunity for you.

Why become an expert advisor?

In or out of the academy, it is important to move your research into the real world where it can make some sort of difference - to influence how policy makers or industry acts, and if you remain in the academy, this is also good for things like proving the impact of your work or engagement with relevant stakeholders. If you are looking for an academic job, these industry/outside links are becoming prioritised as Universities seek to prove their worth to the ‘real’ world. It is a competitive advantage to have these links. Good old fashioned money is also a good reason - depending who you eventually work with, these companies can provide an excellent income stream for you personally. If for no other reason, cultivating these contacts is a good way to future proof your career - who knows where you will one day end up looking to work and building strong relationships over time with industry partners can only be a good thing.

What does expert consultancy look like?

This obviously depends on your subject area but usually you are holding an expert advisory role in one way or another, for example:

• Advising professional regulatory bodies

• Advising legislators, governments and international organizations

• Advising industry (private companies or individuals)

• TV / Radio – become a ’talking head’ for media

• TV / Radio – make research programs / content

When can / should you do this?

You can do this as soon as you have your PhD, but it is important to start making relationships as early as you can. I made my relationships whilst still doing my PhD because I went to the institutions in question to conduct research and talk to as many people as I could, but not to make connections; simply to gather the information I needed for my PhD. I had no agenda, and that is probably a good thing. It is important to think early and make a conscious decision that this is going to be part of your research career, and that it is an important part. I was only ever interested in getting my research into the institutions to convince them my approach was the right one and influence them to make decisions about policy and legal change. You must, in the early stages of any relationship formation, be generous with your time. It is part and parcel of the give and take.

Be flexible in what you consider your expertise

Sometimes, in our insecurity, we can draw our expertise quite narrowly, and usually, when industry approaches you for advice, that advice is often rather wide-ranging, coalescing around the kernel of your expertise but perhaps not only on that ONE thing you consider yourself to be an expert in. Here is where we need to demonstrate a bit of confidence in our research skills and know we can get to grips with lots of things in a relatively small space of time. You need to be flexible and a little bit brave.

How does it happen?

It happens though two things: establishing your expertise in ways that matter and building relationships with those you want to work with. Traditional academic publications are obviously one way to demonstrate your academic expertise, and they are the baseline, but not the only way. You need to reach the audience you want to work with. If you are working for an institution like I was, they are reading academic publications because they are staffed by researchers. But if you are working with industry, they are more likely to be reading practitioner led / industry led journals, so you need a good publication strategy to reach these audiences. This is a different kind of writing too, so this requires some learning and flexibility on your part. You can also showcase your expertise by building a convincing brand online (where you can also showcase your research) but can demonstrate your expertise in any number of formats.

In terms of building relationships, you can network through professional organisations, conferences and workshops (you can organise a workshop and invite these people to speak!). Make these opportunities happen for yourself - don’t be passive, hoping the right one will come along. Maintaining a public profile (webpage, Twitter, LinkedIn) is pretty important and following the industry people where they interact - on LinkedIn for example. Once you make contact through research activities, maintain these contacts, and be helpful when you can. Sometimes this does mean providing a little free advice now and again, but beware of exploitation and ‘exposure’ payments.

If you want to hear more about this, please check out The PhD Life Raft for this and lots of other PhD related advice!

How to set realistic goals for academic writing

It is the time of year when most of us get out the ‘big board’ and endeavour to do some planning about our writing goals for the year ahead. Last week, I talked about the importance of reflection in the writing process before we begin planning, so that we might learn a few things about our behaviour, what went right and what didn’t last year.

So, now we are at the goal setting stage, how do we go about it?

what is a goal?

Let’s start with the basics. A goal is something you intend to work towards, an idea or thing you intend to achieve. You decide that this is the ‘thing’ you want to make happen, and then make a plan in order to make that idea a reality. So in academic writing terms, a goal is a specific grant, specific book chapter, specific journal article, specific book that you want to complete. Note, I say specific. A goal cannot be ‘write 4 articles’. It is too vague to action - a goal is ‘write article X for journal X’. That is a goal.

What is realistic?

Goals need to be realistic. There are two mindsets in play when goal setting. Aim high, and be happy with what you achieve. Aim low, and achieve everything.

Aim high, and whatever you achieve might be more than if you had kept your sights low. Aim for the stars and all that. This really works for many people: having ambitious goals that will stretch you is a way to motivate and lift your performance. These still have to be realistic for you at your career stage - but what does this mean?

I am not referencing time here. I am not referencing how much teaching you have vis a vis X member of staff to whom you regularly compare yourself. I’m referencing experience and track record and so on, and also your motivation. So, don’t set a goal to apply for a €10 million grant in an area you have no track record in, or no track record in winning grants for example. This is not realistic. Otherwise, dream big!

People who adopt the aim high mindset are OK with failure. If they don’t achieve everything on their list, they are not wounded beyond all measure, they are not wracked with imposter syndrome, and they are not going to focus on the one thing they didn’t do. Rather they will focus on all that they achieved.

The other type of mindset is one that aims lower, but achieves everything on the list. This means you won’t be faced with any kind of failure, and you can build confidence in your ability to set realistic goals and execute them. There is nothing wrong with this approach. If you are the kind of person who focuses on the one thing that didn’t come off, make your goals something you can absolutely without doubt achieve. Keep it small, and manageable, yet more than ‘let’s see what happens’ (this is not goal setting). What is achievable for you depends on your life, your discipline, single or multi-authored and so on.

Break it down into priorities and tasks

Once your goals are settled, you need to break them down into tasks, and prioritise completing those tasks on a week by week basis. I talk about this a lot, because it is the single thing that academics do not do as a matter of routine. They set goals, but no concrete action plan is in place to achieve them. You can read here about priorities and tasks.

Set deadlines

You must set a deadline for any of this to work. Set a goal, and at the same time, set a deadline. Avoiding setting a deadline is a little bit like admitting you have no real plan to achieve that goal - a goal without a deadline is a wish.

Backward map

Once you have your goal, your deadline, your tasks and priorities, you can backward map in your diary - from the deadline to today - what you are going to do and when you are going to do it. Assign diary slots to your tasks, and make sure you have prioritised correctly.

This is how we set realistic goals for the coming writing year! Good luck!

What is an Academic Coach for?

There is something of a curiosity around people who leave a full-time, tenured, super secure position at a leading research focused institution at the peak of their career. Especially people who are still publishing, still writing, still actively engaged in research and for all intents and purposes are behaving as though they are an academic within an institution and, more importantly, still have a mighty fine relationship with their previous employer. That is me - I am a curiosity - perhaps not to close friends and colleagues who know me well, but I imagine those colleagues who are less close looking in wondering…what happened there! Leaving academia, or an academic institution, is considered shameful by other academics - an abdication of a core identity - and insane by those who are striving against the odds to obtain such a position.

Many people leave academia for all kinds of reasons. I am not typical. I have no hard feelings, I really loved my job, my colleagues and my academic life. Yet, I always knew there were other things in this life I could do, and wanted to do - alongside doing research - that I was not granted time for within a University structure. And that is what I do now.

What kind of an Academic Coach am I?

There are of course many coaching styles and approaches out there: executive coaches, life coaches, and so on. I am speaking about what I do. First, yes, I have undertaken training to be a coach: executive coaching, management coaching and so on. I have done various courses. I have also undertaken specialist training to support clients with dyslexia, and I will continue to train in all sorts of different ways I am sure. As a previous appraiser of mine was wont to comment ‘you sure do like going on a lot of courses, don’t you?’. Yes, I do! I like to learn things.

I have trained in coaching, but I am not the kind of coach who is going to ask you to colour in your wheel of life - that is just not my bag. I understand the principles and models of coaching - T-GROW, STEPPA, ACHIEVE, OSCAR and all that jazz, and I employ them as is appropriate. My courses and coaching is based on the latest research as well as my experience as an academic. But I am above all things pragmatic. So many years in academia has wedded me to research-based training and mentoring, but also ‘outcomes’.

What I do works.

I want to help you publish that book, get that promotion, win that best presenter title, get your paper published, change your attitude to, and relationship with, writing. Help you to rediscover your writing mojo. As the tag line says, I want to help you become a happier writer.* That is the kind of coach I am.

What kinds of things do I do as a Coach?

Besides training in coaching, I have a lot of experience in academia which generic executive / life coaches do not have. That is not to say these type of coaches cannot help you in other ways - each type of coach does something rather unique and different. I see many people without experience of ever having worked a full time permanent role in an academic institution setting up as academic coaches, which I find peculiar to say the least. There is a lot of tacit knowledge gained through long years of experience that outsiders will never possess and research does not necessarily convey. The unwritten rules, and how best to navigate them, is not taught on generic coaching courses.

My work covers a gamut of things: helping with promotion forms, job applications, providing feedback and editing articles in preparation, book chapters, R&Rs. Advice on how to navigate difficult colleagues, or difficult situations. Advice on how to navigate your career. Help with grant applications. I work with people who, for whatever reason, find writing a challenge for practical or emotional reasons. I help them to work out a way of writing that works for them. I provide accountability, I help with planning and organisation. I provide mentoring for more junior academics who through me, have access to all the tacit knowledge it took me 17 years to accumulate, so they don’t need to stumble around in the dark making bad decisions. I am a shortcut, a leg up, especially for those from non-traditional backgrounds whose parents were not academics themselves. I am a safe space where you can admit the unsayable. There is little I have not heard.

Coaching can be a short term intervention, or a long term partnership. Weekly, or intermittent. Ad hoc or a regularly scheduled conversation. I can provide a space to reflect, resources to use, or pragmatic editing of text. We co-design our sessions so you can get exactly what you need.

Why am I an Academic Coach?

I love mentoring. I love helping people in ways that I was never helped. I like to make other peoples’ experience of academia easier than mine. I don’t think junior colleagues / PhD students should suffer just because I did. I like to see other people have success, and if I can play some small role in helping them to achieve that, I am both honoured and delighted to have done so. This suits who I am as a person.

Coaching speaks to my core values, and what better reason is there to do the job that I do now? I still research, I still publish, I still advise government bodies. But coaching gives me something that none of that does - a sense of joy in watching other people reach their potential and go beyond anything they thought themselves capable of.

*These are just some examples of things I have helped clients achieve through my coaching. You will find me credited in papers and books and all kinds of things.

Managing expectations of yourself as a writer

This blog comes as a request from readers, and again, not one I would have thought to do on my own. I want to say this is not addressed to one particular individual, because this does come up a lot in various ways, from various different requests. However, the phrasing of this particular question caught my eye.

As a writing coach (and an academic who writes a lot) this thought would never have crossed my mind. The request was actually phrased as: ‘managing expectations of yourself as a writer in the context of other obligations in your academic job’.

My immediate response to this is that I can read this question in two ways.

Unrealistic ambitions?

The first way to interpret this is: my expectations of what I can achieve in my writing are all out of whack with reality. I am expecting myself to get a €10m grant, write a book and publish 7 solo articles in one year. And if that is the case, I am overjoyed at your ambition, and I can happily refer you to my previous blogs about writing in your reality, managing a publication pipeline and why planning is essential. Some time management and a bump with reality should sort that out in no time. Happy days! As those awful posters on the wall of my workplace used to say: you asked, we answered!

The second way to understand this question though is, to me, infinitely more depressing.

Teaching is all I care about

How do I manage my expectations of myself as a writer when I have so many (more important/other) things to do?

There is something underlying this statement that is unsaid. And that is that writing isn’t a priority, it just isn’t as important as teaching. Writing is just one thing on a long list of things I have to do in any given week/term/year and I’m not certain I can fit it in, and so, how can I lower my expectations of myself i.e. stop feeling the guilt of not writing or being disappointed in myself that I can’t get it done? If you genuinely feel that teaching is all you care about, the solution is to have a job that only has a teaching element to it. If this is not how you really feel, let me, as the song says, flip reverse it.

You are a writer

What if I asked you this? How can you manage your expectations of yourself as a teacher in the context of your writing obligations in your academic job? Oooooooh.

Have a think. Let that just roll around in your head for a while. Let it percolate. Let it breathe. You are a writer. You research. You read, for a living. That is what you do. You also teach. You fill out lots of forms. You manage budgets and book rooms. But you are a writer: this is actually what you get paid to do.

How does that sound? Do you feel called out and confronted? That is what I am going for.

I spend 10 weeks (it is that long for this sole reason) training people out of the mindset that they are teachers who write on the side, rather than academics whose job it is to write and teach. That they are paid for both, and must do both in their working week. Yes, it is possible. Yes there are lots of tips, tricks and hacks, but also solid research that supports my course materials. It is possible, and people do it. I did it. I trained colleagues to do it. I now coach other people so they can do it.

It is not easy. It requires discipline and just a teeny, tiny bit of brain re-engineering via repeated engagement with my online videos and materials.

This is such a wild idea for some people it takes repeated run throughs of my course for it to really bed in. People actually start to miss my video missives (rants? brainwashing? serious talking to?). It is the reason that once you are enrolled, you are in for life - you just keep on (for free) because it takes a while to get used to the idea.

You manage your expectations of yourself by knowing who you are and what your priorities are, and you plan your schedule accordingly. Not what you think they ought to be, or what tends to happen. Is this easy: no! It is easy to be overtaken by events, not commit, not stick to your word. It is hard to stay focused. Your expectations must be realistic, for you, in your life and coaching can help you figure those things out. But after that, it is a mindset.

Happily that is all in your control.

The Entrepreneur Academic

Today’s academia is much like being in the circus, except in this circus you are the ring master, fire eater, juggler, clown, acrobat, tight-rope walker and every other single act inside the tent. There is no support act. You are the main, and only event.

Here is a crude representation of the evolution of the academic job. In a galaxy far, far away, it looked like this:

I know this is a little simplistic but it was a reasonably simple job.

Alas, it has now morphed into this:

There are no more hours in the week than before. This is upsetting, I know. This is what academia looks like now. Yet, you are perplexed why it is so hard to find time for writing. Wonder no more. This is why.

And of these burgeoning responsibilities, what exactly have you been trained for? By now, most people have been trained to teach classes (though not-online). You have been trained in some aspects of research via your PhD. Everything else you have taught yourself. Every single thing.

You are already an entrepreneurial academic, albeit, not through any choice of yours.

This is not a vocation

I want to end this series of 9 blogs with a particularly challenging concept: academia is not a vocation.

You are not on the front lines (probably) battling Covid. No-one is clapping for you. Even the handful of academic scientists working on a vaccine like science for science I bet. Finding stuff out. Everything after is a bonus. 

Why is it important to recognise this? It is about creating balance in your life, and enabling you to set boundaries about what is and is not reasonable working hours. It is about being able to carve out time to do the various aspects of your job without sacrificing the rest of your life (health, family and friends) on the altar of academia.

Some academics bridle at being told it is not a vocation. It REALLY winds their clock and I’ve seen a lot of angry social media exchanges on this topic. I rarely use generational / class tropes, but forgive me, I am going to. The belief that academia is a vocation is particularly prevalent amongst a certain millennial-and-later generations, and I have to say it, folks from the middle classes more generally. Millennials and the after millennials (and the middle classes) have been brought up in a world where they believe work should be:

• (a) rewarding (on a personal level)

• (b) they should receive personal recognition of their greatness and be taken care of, nurtured and cherished by their employer

• (c) that work should be their passion.

There are outliers of course, and I personally know a few Gen Xer’s who need a reality check. Whilst these are lovely sentiments, they are just that. Sentiments.

I call bullshit here. This became a thing only to convince people to work for free and be enslaved by neoliberalism. Also it’s a thing that makes you feel important and special because I know we can all think of jobs that do not fulfil a, b and c and yet are critical to the functioning of society. The people that do those jobs are not inferior to you. 

Work is to there to pay you for your labour. It puts food on your table and a roof over your head. The minute it is unable to do this, you are engaged in charity. It is not work. When people use the phrase ‘vocation’ they mean working for free. You work for free, for nothing. There is a certain kind of self-indulgent bullshit in this narrative I cannot imagine my father, who worked down a mine, ever partaking in. 

This is not academia. Academia is for profit. Yes, you may enjoy some parts of your job, and that is wonderful. It’s still a job, and there is a lot of bullshit nobody enjoys in that job. You would not think working for Goldman Sachs was a vocation (trust me, I did, it wasn’t), and if anyone suggested it to you, you would laugh. They are for profit too. You probably don’t think working in Tesco’s is a vocation either, yet I think if recent times have taught us anything, it is a far more important job than yours. 

Academia is not special. It is a job. Nothing more, nothing less. When you frame academia through this lens, things look a little different. You may start to ask questions like ‘why am I working on Saturday to do the 30th open day this year when my contract states Mon-Fri 9-5?’. Why am I working evening and weekends and never taking my contractually entitled annual holiday? Why do I revel in busyness exchanges? Why do I not call in sick when I am in fact sick? Why am I checking my emails at all hours? Why do I allow myself to be routinely exploited, and then feel terrible about not meeting the norms of my exploitation?

It is not a vocation. It is a job for which you are paid. 

This is important to remember as in 2020/2021 all kinds of requests are going to be made of you that engage some kind of latent charity (vocation) instinct. They are not reasonable, humane, or your job.

Why I am saying this and making your feel bad? Because 2020/21 is going to be tough, and if you want to preserve your sanity and your writing and research career you need to start saying no to things otherwise you will have a mental or physical health crisis in the name of a vocation that does not exist. 

It is nice to like your job. But it is much better to have a life beyond it.

(If you are not being paid, please find a job that actually pays you. It is the very least your humanity demands for your labour – being an academic is not that great you should sacrifice your life trying to achieve it. It is a literal human right to be paid for your labour).

Working from home for academics

Being forced to work from home isn’t like working from home by choice

Academics are by and large used to working from home. Even those in purely lab based disciplines will at times write or do other work from their home. But now things are different. Working from home is no longer a choice, but something forced upon us. Not only that, you are now teaching as well as writing and administrating from home.

Worse, you are now doing this with your children in attendance, or your partner, or with your pets, (or all of these), or in total isolation from anyone you know and would normally interact with.

All of these situations are unprecedented in your experience.

YOU SHOULD NOT HAVE THIS UNDER CONTROL. You really really should not.

It never happened before. The idea that you can seemlessly transition into this chaos whilst maintaining sanity, let alone productivity, is ludicrous. Absolutely off the scale nonsense. Of course you can’t. No-one can. So let go of that bullshit right now. Breathe. Get through this moment. Then the next. Then the next.

Transitioning to coping

Here is a simple of list of things to keep in mind when transitioning into a being able to cope.

1. Dramatically lower your expectations (oh but the students will suffer, think of the students).

We are all going to suffer, regardless of what you do, and students will not be insulated from suffering as a special category of people. They are going to be stressed, and worried, but we are all stressed and worried. You are not a super hero. You are a person and you can only do what you can do. Grade kindly. Lower expectations of them and of you. This does not come easy for super competitive I-must-always-be-the-best personality types of academics. There is an apocalypse on - get a grip.

2. Stuff will go wrong.

Yes, children will interrupt lectures, tech will cut out, there will be delays. You won’t have all the answers. It will take time to work stuff out and get stuff together. Accept it. Do what you can. Move on. Accept imperfection.

3. Administrators will ask the impossible: ignore them

At the best of times, administrators have no idea of quality teaching. They don’t understand the classroom dynamic because they don’t really know what goes on in there. So the imperative to ‘just put it all on-line’ is yet another way in which they manifest that complete ignorance. You cannot do the impossible.

4. Trust your professional integrity

You know how to teach. You know how to examine and you know how to be kind and generous in recognising that students are not receiving the optimum teaching experience at this time. You know exactly what they need to know and what they can do without. Trust that professionalism. Don’t wait for someone who knows nothing about your course or material to tell you what to do.

5. You will work less

Yes. It is true. You will work less. But you will probably work much more intensely because between homeschooling, feeding and caring for a household there will be little time available for actual work. Accept it.

6. The kids will be alright in front of the telly for a few hours.

Release the guilt.

7. Prioritise yourself and your family.

Work is after all just work. Academics fetishize work above all other things. It is time for a reset. Look after yourself, your family. Eat well. Stay healthy and exercise. Meditate or do whatever you need to in order to get through this uncertain time. Devote a large part of your day to these activities.

8. Research will wait.

Some of you may take refuge in writing and there is no judgment from me on that. For some people, this is a type of escapism by utter absorption in a task, and certainly, we would all like to escape right now. If that is you, have at it. Get a schedule together. Find a quiet space in your house and begin. Block out a maximum of two hours in your day and write to your heart’s content. Get a task list together and slowly work your way through it. At the end, write down tomorrow’s tasks, and repeat.

For many, this won’t be feasible, either due to little (or indeed grown) people in your tent, or the fact that right now you could not give a rat’s ass about research. That is also a completely acceptable reaction. In time it might change, but for now, just breathe.

9. Dynamics of communication will change

Communication will be difficult at this time. By this, I mean that people are worried, they are scared, they might be snippy or downright unreasonable, and at the best of times, email is not a great way to communicate. It lacks nuance and tone is often misconstrued.

Exercise a bit of patience with colleagues and students who are flailing about and are under who-knows-what pressure.

10. Practice kindness

Be kind to yourself and others. Academics are notoriously hard taskmasters with each other, with students, with themselves. Instead, choose to be be kind. It is a much nicer way to live.

Working from home hacks

Some of us work from home anyway outside of a pandemic and have actually experienced little disruption to our daily schedule outside of not being able to get everything they want from the shop. I feel like I have been in training for this my whole life, as I am a natural born hermit and normally work from home.

I have my ways, naturally, but have never given much thought (until now) to how I organise myself.

I have read with some amusement the many ‘work from home hacks’ articles which exhort you to ‘get dressed’ and ‘get up as though you are going to the office’ and all that jazz. Let me tell you, this is not how I work from home.

I have never done any of those things and am a very productive person. You do you. Wear what you want, do what works for you and your family. You will find your own equilibrium through this chaotic and unprecedented time.

My courses are in essence about managing your time well, and in regular life, I would certainly recommend setting a realistic schedule, whilst being absolutely honest about your real life circumstances. Your real life circumstances now include a global pandemic, and an entire disruption to the way we live and work and communicate. Try not to pretend anything is other than it is.

I would recommend setting very small goals, breaking down tasks into very small parts, ticking them off a list, and doing one tiny thing at a time. I would usually recommend a plan, because I am a planner. But right now, I have erased my whiteboard of plans because everything turned upside down and now I can’t leave the house. What I planned before, I now cannot do (or at least I cannot do it as I planned it). Accept it.

Crucially, don’t set yourself up to fail by putting in place unrealistic expectations. We need to really readjust what we can expect of ourselves in this period of unprecedented uncertainty. It is not business as usual.

Conferencing: to conference or not to conference?

Conferencing: the dark ages

Conversations about the pros and cons of attending conferences are beginning to change. In ye olden days (10 years ago) it was simply a must. You must go and be seen and network In Real Life. Then, the questions were about choosing the right conference in order to get the most out of it. In early scholarly life, this would have been decided by reference to the following:

• Were the right people (major thinkers in your field) going to be there?

• Was this going to be a real opportunity to get good feedback on your work?

• Could you afford it? Would your meagre conference budget be blown on one outing that year and if so, was it going to be worth it?

These were the BIG questions. No-one really thought about whether conferences would be accessible, in terms of not being ableist in their design, location or structure. No-one thought (or cared) about the differential impacts conferencing had on women with children (ie those primary carers who could not go), let alone the imperative to provide on-site childcare facilities to mitigate these impacts. No-one thought about the ‘othering’ and outright discrimination that can occur at these events for POC.

Less still (though all women knew it) was it openly discussed whether these venues would be safe spaces for women. Would they be able to navigate them without the customary, nay expected, bout of sexual harassment that openly populated women’s experience of conferencing.

The big decisions were between the major conferences in your field with thousands of papers, which in reality meant giving a paper to 4 of your work colleagues in a hotel room on the other side of the world (or to literally no-one), or whether to go to a smaller subject specific workshop where there was an actual opportunity to meet scholars closely connected to your field and get feedback were the hot topics of debate.

Shamelessly, the other major consideration was whether it was a lovely location. The more tropical the better. The more distant and exotic the better. It was one of the perks of the job.

Conferencing, climate change and accessibility

This attitude to conferencing seems woefully out of date with the times. Whether to conference or not at all is high on the agenda of many academics for ethical reasons. Whether to restrict your air travel (easier or harder depending on where you are located), prioritise train travel, offset your carbon emissions, or simply only attend local conferences are today’s conferencing questions.

Despite all the changes in technology that make remote participation a possibility, the people who organise conferences seem unwilling or unable to change with the times. We still hear the familiar narrative that in person drinks (hello, yet more exclusionary behaviour) are just so essential to building a network, but the truth is many of us are addicted to what we still see as the perk of the job. And unless conference organisers grasp the nettle, the pressure on junior scholars to go to these events will not abate. They feel they have to go. They must build their career through conferencing.

Of course, it is not just conference organisers that are to blame. The international conference is the spawn of many parents. Universities still have archaic ‘indicators of esteem’ in their promotion criteria which are most easily fulfilled by showing you have been invited or presented your work at an international conference. Similarly, the establishment of a global or world leading reputation in a field is seen as being concomitant with travelling to far flung places. Grant bodies require evidence of extensive dissemination of your work and whilst this can be achieved in many ways, the obligatory international conference circuit is still important. You can get enormous amounts of funding to build networks which in and of itself require travel to fulfil the grant conditions. Building cross disciplinary teams with international partner Universities also reflect the priorities of big grant funders.

No-one disputes global collaboration is part of moving knowledge forward. But does this require we all travel to multiple far flung places every year to huge conferences? I’m not sure it does.

Whether and how you choose to conference, or to limit your conference travel, is a decision for each scholar to make, but we should all be pressuring conference organisers and Universities to rethink centuries old mentality. The format of conferences must change for so many reasons: accessibility, discrimination, equality, sexual harassment and climate change are just some of them.

Self promotion versus engagement in brand building

Today I want to talk a little bit about the idea of your academic brand vis a vis the concepts of engagement and self promotion.

Building your academic brand is a minefield because it requires you to carefully traverse the terrain of being an insufferable ****** on social media who everybody hates, and someone who genuinely shares things to engage and inform a relevant audience about your research or ideas.

Twitter I think is probably the most difficult platform to manage in this regard. First you should be on Twitter. But how you use Twitter should be consonant with building your professional brand. If you want to re-tweet cat videos, probably get a personal account for this.

Twitter can be a valuable information source for your own research and it can be a good place to share your research, especially if your followers are people in your field (or connected) who might actually read and engage with what you are tweeting.* However, it can seriously damage your mental health too, so it pays to think before you Tweet, and also, think before opening Twitter.

I tend to use a social media management platform (I use Hootsuite, but others are available) to manage Twitter (and Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn etc). I am not just randomly hanging about there, because it is not a good place to be hanging out.

I am mindful of my social media health and you should be too.

Engagement

When you use social media to engage, you are sharing valuable information that other scholars might find useful. This can be a direct self promotion - here is a link to an article I have published on X. You can @ particular scholars who might find it helpful. This is of course telling everyone you published (hoorah) but it also serves a community purpose. It shares useful information. This is a good use of Twitter. This is engagement. You have built a following (or follow specific people) who are relevant to your research and field and you have given them a heads up on something they might find useful. You are building a community and a brand. If you are a senior scholar (but not the head of school) you should absolutely promote the work of junior scholars you think is interesting and useful via referencing it and its content. Use your platform to pay it forward. Be a generous and kind mentor.

You can even Tweet about being at a conference if you have something to say about it, the panels and the papers. Share what you have heard, or presented. Thinly veiled ‘it was great to be here’ references are pretty pointless. It is like writing ‘I WAZ HERE’ inside the toilet stall. With your name attached.

Grandiose self promotion

If all you do on Twitter is promote your CV (I was here, here, here and here, and also here; I did this, look how important I am, LOOK AT ME) you are one of those people I have to mute. I’m pretty certain others are muting you too. Similarly if all you do all day long (it appears) is Tweet things (such as calling out stuff) also know I have you muted too. So when you do Tweet something useful (if you ever do) I will absolutely not be reading your work, because you were muted.

This head mashing, screaming into the void tells me a couple of things about you. I might not want to work near you, and I might think twice about hiring you, if you appear totally self absorbed in relation to your social media posting. You might not be giving out signals that appear very collegiate or community building orientated. So it is worth considering how you use social media to engage peers.

Be aware of the signals your Twitter feed is sending out about you and the kind of colleague (and scholar) you might be. Navigating the line between building your brand and sending out the kinds of tweets that annoys everyone because they are grandiose acts of self promotion (or worse, the humblebrag) is something you should pay serious attention to. This is not the same as building your brand.

*If you are looking for tips in managing algorithms on Twitter and getting more followers, please see @careerconversations who has really excellent technical advice.

Building an academic brand

Immediately some academics will recoil at the title of this blog. Brands are for Nike, Starbucks, Coca Cola. Not for academics. But I’m afraid this is a rather old fashioned view. Like it or loathe it, the need to curate your brand is real.

You can either consciously curate your brand, or leave it to the vagaries of the internet to curate it for you. I would rather be in charge of mine.

What is your brand?

Your brand is what you stand for as an academic. It is more than your skill set (I know R!). It is more than whether you are a quants or qual person. In fact, it is not really any of these things at all. Your brand is not really your skill set per se. Lots and lots of people have these skills. Your brand is (a) what you are THE expert in (b) what your USP is and (c) what professional image you have created for yourself outside of your institution.

Your brand is not where you work

Academics change workplaces a lot for a wide variety of reasons. Thus your brand is not where you work. Your brand goes with you. Your brand is not what your close friends or even your immediate colleagues think of you. Your brand is not the ‘bio’ that gets trotted out at conference introductions by the Chair who has never met you and has not read a single thing you have ever published. It is not the awful three sentences at the beginning of edited collections that trot out your name, title and affiliation.

Your brand is the shop front. The logo.

Creating your brand

Brand creation happens in your professional interactions with others outside your department. These interactions can be with other academics, stakeholders, policy makers or industry. These interactions can be on In Real Life, or on Twitter, Facebook, Google Scholar, SSRN or any number of other social media platforms.

You have the power to create your brand, or let it be created for you. Managing your interactions, especially on social media, is critical to how you will be perceived by others who may one day recruit you for a job, research, expert advice or other work related opportunity.

What are you THE expert in?

Being an academic requires a lot of flexibility. Even in so-called research intensive, research-led teaching Universities, the reality is oftentimes we do not teach what we are experts in. We might teach on the edges of our wider expertise (if we are lucky). We might simply be required to teach an enormous compulsory subject that all undergrads must take because someone has to. So we can say we know quite a lot about a range of topics. We have flexibility. This is not the same as not having a brand.

Indeed, this is one reason why your brand is not located inside your employing institution. Whatever research excellence you were hired for is long forgotten in the handing out of teaching, which is a process of sticking fingers in a leaking Dam. Constant exposure to this ‘flexibility’ can make you doubt you have any expertise at all. But you do. This is your brand. If there was an imaginary rolodex* in someone’s hand, where would your name be located? What would someone say about you in answer to: ‘Who do I need for this? Oh, yes [blah blah] is the person for x’. Consciously build this brand by promoting this particular expertise through publications, impact and engagement work. And on-line (but more on this next blog).

What is YOUR USP?

What is your unique contribution to field X. Let’s say you are an expert on Brexit. This is a pretty big topic, even within one single discipline. There are by now literally thousands of academics claiming expertise in this area, even within one discipline. Even within one sub-sub-discipline within one country. Thousands. What makes YOU special? What perspective, contribution, and skill set do YOU bring to this topic that makes you more desirable than A, B, or C? And how have you summed this up as your brand identity?

What is your professional image?

What are you known for outside your institution in terms of attitude, or positioning. Do you occupy a specific disciplinary school to which you are an ardent disciple? Do you call out others on Twitter who do not agree with your position? Are you passive aggressive (or just plain aggressive) to those who are outside your knitting circle (obviously the answer to this ought to be NO). Are you a community builder or destroyer? These questions are important particularly when you are at any stage in your career that does not occupy the territory of being 3-years-from-retirement-after-a-40-year-career pigeon hole. And even then, it ought to be important if you are a decent person.

A brand is bigger than the one-trick-pony

Getting known for THE THING is clearly central to building a brand. But beware of becoming a one-trick-pony or talking head. This does not hurt your brand directly, but it hurts your academic reputation in a number of other ways, which in turn compromises your brand. Promotion, for example, requires you to show development of your skills and knowledge, a branching off into other (connected yet different) areas that complement your expertise. Development indicates growth and change, yet this does not warrant a scattergun approach of doing whatever is asked, whatever crosses your desk, whatever the next zeitgeist is. This starts to make you look like jack of all trades, and master of none. Flimsy. And flimsy is not a good brand.

Next week I will continue the academic brand theme by talking about self promotion and engagement.

*a rolodex is a round thingy containing business cards. Think Mad Men. It is how people in the olden days used to locate someone they needed outside their organisation.

Saying No and Yes: opportunities and distractions

One question which junior scholars (and sometimes senior scholars) struggle with is recognising good opportunities when they arise as distinct from a black sink-hole of despair. It would seem like these two things should be pretty easy to disentangle. Not in academia.

Most things are presented as an ‘opportunity’. And indeed many things are opportunities. But how do you decide whether this is an opportunity you want to say yes to?

Not all opportunities are good. This bears repeating. Not all opportunities are good.

Deciding what is good for you

It is not just the classics you need to beware of. The classic head of school two-step: ‘why, only you can perform this [insert soul sucking admin/teaching task here] due to your particular skills and experience - the department absolutely needs your input here’.

I mean right away, alarm bells ought to ring. You are not a trained administrator, you didn’t get a PhD to administrate. Try to remember, this does not speak to your skill set. When flattery occurs, break left. Quick. This usually means no one else will do it (yes, yes, we all need to perform some admin, but not all the things, all the time: others also need a turn). Same for BLOT101 that no-one wants to teach. We all must do a turn. But it should not be your turn for the rest of your life.

When these ‘opportunities’ present, the first thing to do is say you will get back to them. Take time, maybe a week, to mull it over. What will this new opportunity take away from me? Because make no mistake, it will take something you already do away from you because you are already overworked and your time is full. You cannot keep adding to an already full list of tasks without some deficit occurring somewhere. You will either do other things badly or not at all, or you will work every weekend and evening and you mental and physical health will suffer. So the questions is, what am I prepared to sacrifice to do it? Will the opportunity add to my CV? Will it take away crucial development in other areas? Is it time limited? How long will this really take as opposed to the advertised time it is meant to take? Will you end up doing this one-time thing for the rest of your career within that department?

If anyone presses you for an immediate answer, the answer is NO. You need to consult your schedule, check on what obligations you are already committed to.

Ask yourself this. Have you done your turn? Are there others who have not? Is this something you have not done before and will add a distinct and different line to your CV? These are good questions to ask yourself. Distinct and different is important especially in administration or wider service. If you do the same task for 15 years, for example, like convening a particular conference, it is only one line on your CV for 15 years of work. Think about that.

Publishing ‘opportunities’

I recently heard a podcast instructing junior faculty to say yes to all publishing opportunities all the time without any thought. Take all publishing opportunities. With respect, this is terrible advice. Your time is limited. You can only do so much and if you don’t manage yourself in academia, you will burn out. Quality matters.

So my advice would be different. Don’t take all publishing opportunities: they are not all equal. Think carefully. Do I have space in my pipeline? If I want to do this, what can I delete from my already full pipeline. One in, one out.

Quality publications should be prioritised. If it is a choice between a peer reviewed journal article (new opportunity) or a chapter in an edited collection (already in the pipeline), the choice is clear. Negotiate extensions or pull out. Don’t just pile work or work on work because you are afraid of never getting another opportunity. Curate your publishing strategy to build your brand. An Encyclopaedia entry is not equal to a journal article. An expert report for an international institution may be more important than a journal article.

All publishing opportunities should be run through the same filter. What does this bring to me? Where am I positioning myself by doing this?

There is nothing more soul destroying than committing to write something you have zero interest in just because you were asked and it is one more publication. It will destroy your writing happiness, which will in turn, put you off research and writing altogether. All too soon this can lead to a downward spiral.

Academia is full of distractions (some nice, some not so nice) which are parcelled as ‘opportunities’. Take time to decide when ‘opportunities’ present, do I say Yes or No?