Reevaluate: is the thing you are aiming for the process or the goal?

As I wrote to a mentee, which was as much a reminder to myself: a conference abstract is a tool for thinking,

For those of you not in academia, or new to it, a little context.

In some ways, I’m a small business owner masquerading as a university employee. I’m 100% soft money. I cover my salary, benefits, and those of any staff members I work with, typically through grants.

It never gets easier, you just go faster” - Greg LeMond.

This quip about cycling feels true about academia too. It’s not that my brain weasels are any less pesky, I’m just better at corralling them.

I’ve been trying to focus on moving things forward where the energy is flowing well, rather than trying push forward things with more barriers. The analogy being that its easier to push a rock downhill than uphill.

Non-profit organizations engage in stewardship of their resources in order to not only fulfill their mission today, but also in a year or 10 years. We are no different. Whatever our role, if we burn ourselves out today, if we don’t take time off to recover, we are unlikely to be doing this same mission in 10 years. We need to take time to take stock, to reset.

it seems I need to take stock and rebalance things in my life at least quarterly, if not more frequently.

In nearly every research project I've led there is a moment when I think "why am I doing this?”

Successes in academia often occur long after submissions, and can feel hard to honor.

“The secret of change is to focus all of your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new” (Dan Millman in Way of the Peaceful Warrior).

These are a collection of methods I use to help myself overcome resistance and make progress towards my small and large goals.

One of my goals for 2021 was to schedule (and stick to) having roughly one week a month with no/minimal meetings. I’m again setting this intention for 2022. These monthly reprieves (if I can make it happen) both enables time for PTO (because sometimes scheduling it when needed is too hard) and to enable time for thinking and writing – which are actually some of the most important parts of my job.

Sometimes individual-level self-care activities are wildly insufficient.

Individual-level mitigation strategies (meditation, yoga, therapy, exercise, etc) work when you have an adequate level of reserves/resilience. If you've burned through those, you might need a surprising amount of time off to even get yourself to the place where you can use those reserves and pursue self-care as maintenance going forward. Otherwise, it's like putting a drop in an empty bucket.

Ergonomics recommend switching between sitting, standing and moving every hour, and about converting video calls to audio calls to have some variation.

Curating our to-do list, staying focused, is something we have to practice, as if we are flexing the “no” muscle.

Trying to take time off has been especially challenging during the pandemic because it’s hard to figure out how to use time off when I can’t go anywhere or do anything wildly different without endangering my family. In academia, there’s also eternally something to do, so to take time off you just have to figure out a spot to pause in your to-do list. Yet it’s essential to give ourselves breaks to recover and get away from the computer, whether to come back slightly less burned out, or better yet, a bit more creative and resilent. In the times I have managed some breaks from work, I was reminded that I need to take my own commitment to time off seriously and spend time preparing myself and others to ensure the time off happens.