The National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity. UCSF has an institutional membership which means grad students, postdocs, and faculty can join for free and get access to things like Monday Motivator emails with great tidbits of advice and recommendations to increase productivity.

Dr. Kemi Doll (amazing physician-investigator and coach of faculty who are women of color)

• video post about tactics to change your mindset to be more effective, including counteracting the fallacy “we are not ‘qualified’ to lead our work because we are still learning.”

• podcast “Your Unapologetic Career” episode 3, “The Foundations of Productivity”, in which she summarizes all the books/advice out there as saying: 1) Organize yourself, 2) Set aside time to do tasks, 3) Actually do the tasks in the allotted time.

• How to Raise Your Standards and Find Your People

• Learning How to Quit

Dr. Umimala Sakar, who, among other things, is Associate Chair for Faculty Experience in the Department of Medicine, has a great blog; this post has great reminders for productivity/collaboration and this one with more productivity advice like write one sentence every day on your top-priority writing project

Dr. Dawna Ballard, “an expert in chronemics—the study of time as it is bound to human communication”. Dr. Sakar summarized the key advice to K scholars and I particularly liked this one: “The best productivity strategy is . . . whatever strategy works for you. Try different things, but if something that other people swear by doesn’t work for you, move on. There’s no data to recommend any one method.”

Another resource recommended to me, but one I haven’t used much: Edge for Scholars

Great article with tips about how to manage lulls in motivation amid a pandemic. Tips include setting and accepting a low bar, leaning on your networks, checking in with coworkers/friends, finding small sources of joy, remembering what gave you purpose before the pandemic.

Focusing practices

Tips on minimizing Zoom fatigue

Advice for running a good hybrid in-person & virtual meeting

Several resources on email management. To some extent, it starts with turning off all notifications, checking email only a few times away, and figuring out a method that works for you to only handle most emails once (vs using them as a to-do list).

A pomodoro app, but with trees

The importance of breaks between virtual meetings to reset, because otherwise your brain becomes unhappy. Looks like I should start using that 5-10 minute break to meditate instead of check email.

Setting boundaries on generosity and service

Ezra Klein’s podcast with Cal Newport on the systems that contribute to multitasking and lack of productivity at work – like email, Slack, etc.

Food delivery services: we’ve tried and liked Good Eggs and Imperfect Produce but also recommended Thrive Market and Farm Fresh to You