Real Academics Blog

Dear Real Academics, This past week I finished a lovely book by Christy Wright for women starting their own businesses (link at the end of this post).   Towards the end of her book, Christy addresses a psychological issue related to increasing what I call joyful productivity and decreasing anxiety, namely:  " Stop Doing What Doesn't Matter".  Here is a powerful, direct quotation from her book:  " A lot of the stress and feelings of being overwhelmed in our lives come not from doing too many things, but from doing the wrong things. We say yes when we mean no, and we commit to things that we end up resenting and regretting later. We stare at our phones and miss what's going on right in front of us. We do things out of guilt or obligation, then get mad about it. We end up grumpy and disappointed about how we are spending our lives. There are a lot of things that take up our time that aren't important and don't actually matter to us...So if we ant to create...

Dear Real Academics, As faculty (at the time of this writing), I am on a 9 month-contract.  But, every summer for the past 7 years in my tenure-track position seems to be a non-stop list of things to do including attending dissertation defenses, reviewing manuscripts, reviewing conference proposals, going to research meetings, analyzing data, writing and submitting conference proposals, writing and submitting manuscripts and grants, setting up classes for the next semester, setting up meetings for the next semester,  answering student advising emails,  managing upcoming faculty searches, and more. So, you can imagine how annoyed I get when I hear people assume that I am so lucky to be an "educator" because I get summers off. I wish!  Around the end of July this year, I was near burn-out.  Around the first week of August , I was looking ahead to the gazillion of emails streaming into my in-box to get things set up for the start of the semester (not to mention the...