Emily Read, PhD, RN

How I am going to Redesign one part of my Life each Month

In this post I’m going to outline my approach. First, I’ll provide a positionality statement to give some necessary context. Then I’ll explain how I plan to look at my life as a system and redesign it in a systematic-ish, iterative way.

Positionality

I am approaching this project as a cisgender White woman who is a registered nurse and tenured professor at a comprehensive university in Eastern Canada. I grew up in a lower-middle-class home in a small town in Nova Scotia. My first job was a paper route when I was 10, and I have worked many different jobs since, including as a lifeguard, personal trainer, babysitter, personal support worker, resident assistant, tutor, and lots more. I am the first person in my family to earn a PhD and become a professor.

I am also a mom of three wonderful kids and have spent the majority of my time as a parent without a partner. I have thought a lot about household management and operations, division of labour in caregiving and at home, and, more recently, about coordination and dealing with increasingly complex family logistics.

My “go-to” theory when it comes to understanding work is the Job Demands-Resources model. Very simply, the model looks at the demands people face in their work and the resources they have available to help them manage those demands. I naturally find myself thinking about this outside of work too, because people have a whole life. Work and non-work do not happen in isolation. We have one life, with a finite amount of time, energy, attention, money, space, and other resources, and demands in one area inevitably affect the others.

That is really the starting point for this project.

Looking at my life as a system

I have tried lots of approaches to productivity, organization, minimalism, planning, and household management over the years. Some have been helpful and others, not so much. I really wanted to love Getting Things Done, for example, but I have increasingly realized that I am less interested in becoming better at managing everything than I am in questioning why there is so much to manage in the first place.

I don’t want a better system for efficiently doing unnecessary work – I want to understand where the work is coming from.

So, rather than starting with a list of habits or rules, I want to start by looking at my life as a set of interconnected systems. Home. Clothing and stuff. Food. Health and fitness. Money. Work. Family logistics. Play. Technology. Relationships. The categories may change as I go, but the basic idea is that each area of life has its own tasks, routines, objects, people, decisions, technologies, handoffs, and expectations.

Each of those systems also creates demands. Some are obvious, like money or physical effort spent. Others are less visible: remembering, noticing, planning, deciding, coordinating, searching, following up, keeping track, and switching attention from one thing to another (the mental load).

And, of course, these systems are not separate. What happens in one affects the others.

Mapping before fixing

My first step each month will be to map the area I am looking at before I try to improve it. I want to understand things like:

What actually has to happen?

Who is involved?

What needs to be remembered, decided, bought, stored, maintained, moved, scheduled, or replaced?

Where are the points of friction?

Where am I duplicating effort?

What depends on me noticing something?

What falls apart when I am tired, busy, distracted, or simply having a very normal week?

What resources are already helping?

And, importantly, what is the system actually supposed to accomplish?

That last question matters because the goal is not to make everything as efficient as possible.

Some things are absolutely worth the time, money, effort, or mess they create. Playing with my kids is not inefficient because it takes time. Cooking something I enjoy is not wasteful because there is a faster option. Reading a book does not need to be optimized.

The question is whether the demands are helping produce something I actually value.

Redesigning

Once I understand the system a little better, I’ll look for opportunities to change it. If I were designing this system from scratch today, would I design it this way? If not, how might it be different and better?

I am deliberately not creating a rigid framework for this yet because I don’t know what I am going to learn. Part of the point of the project is to figure out which principles actually hold up across different areas of life.

My current process is something like:

Map → Question → Redesign → Test → Reflect

That is probably as formal as I want it to be for now.

What I am not trying to do

This is not a project about squeezing more productivity out of every hour. It is not about owning the fewest possible things (as a busy working mom having back ups are essential, not optional in my opinion). It is not about having a perfectly organized house that looks like a Martha Stewart photoshoot (love you Martha, but let’s be real).

It is not about using AI to automate every part of life.

And it is definitely not about pretending that every problem can be solved by an individual making better choices.

A lot of the demands people experience are structural (determinants of health). Workplaces, caregiving expectations, cost of living, housing, policies, social norms, available services, and the unequal distribution of unpaid work all shape what is possible. Personal redesign does not make those things disappear.

However, despite the many broader conditions that need attention, I do think there is still value in asking where I have agency and whether the systems I have built, inherited, or simply drifted into are actually serving me.

Coming up Next…

Starting in September, I’m going to choose one area of life each month and look at it closely. The first area is going to be Clothing & Stuff. This is on my mind because I am currently moving and that process always informs you of just how much stuff you have accumulated. My kids are also constantly outgrowing things and needing new things which also makes it a highly salient area for me at this stage of life.

I’ll map how it currently works, identify the demands and resources involved, question what I am doing and why, try some changes, and see what happens.

I expect some of the experiments will work. Some will probably be ridiculous. Some will create entirely new problems. I will share those too.

The point is not to arrive at a perfectly optimized life.

The point is to see whether I can deliberately use fewer resources on the things that do not matter very much, so I have more available for the things that do 🙂

Technology was Supposed to Save us Time…

I’m not that old, but as an “elder millenial” I am, at times, nostalgic for the simpler, slower times before smartphones happened and our relationship with technology changed so dramatically (for better and worse).

I grew up in Nova Scotia in the 80s and 90s, many of those years without cable TV. I remember my parents renting a VCR from Video Difference for my sister’s 10th birthday so we could watch a movie. It was a big deal.

When I was 9 I asked my parents for a computer for Christmas. I loved reading (and still do) and wanted to be a writer when I grew up and so, obviously, I needed a computer. I did not get a computer. I did, however, get a very old Underwood Typewriter which, while missing the mark entirely for 9-year-old me, is, in retrospect, actually quite charming and thoughtful in its own way.

At any rate, we did eventually get a second-hand Tandy 2000 which I thought was amazing. It required a giant floppy disk to run anything and another one to run a program. We had a writing program and a Jeopardy game (it was so hard!). It wasn’t until junior high that we got our first “modern” computer and dial-up internet started becoming available. We were the teenagers who used ICQ and then MSN messenger, livejournal, MySpace, and so forth. We still spent most of our time doing things in real life (sports, band practice, part-time jobs, hanging out at the mall, etc), we passed handwritten notes in class, watched MuchMusic (and Street Cents, obviously), and called people on landline phones.

Technology has fundamentally changed the university experience over the last several decades. I distinctly remember how difficult it was to check emails and sign up for my university classes in the early 2000s. I had to book a computer at the local library to access the internet to do this and it was painfully slow.

The 2001 university experience looked a lot different than it does today but when is the last time you really thought about it? Personally, it’s been a while since I’ve thought about how much more friction and effort was required to do basically anything back then and how much faster and easier a lot of things are now.

Forget about smartphones – most people didn’t have a cell phone, period. I went to the computer lab to check my email. I wrote papers by hand before typing and printing them (again, in the computer lab). Then I physically dropped them into my professor’s mailbox outside their office.

If I needed a research article, I went to the library, searched the catalogue, found the journal in the stacks, and either read it there or photocopied the pages I needed. Occasionally, it was actually hard to find an article because somebody else was using the only copy. And, every citation had to be typed manually. My version of Zoterro was a shoebox full of index cards with handwritten citations and notes about each reference.

Looking back, it is amazing how much time these routine tasks required. Today, many of those same tasks take seconds. We can search thousands of articles instantly. Reference managers organize our citations (thank goodness!). We collaborate online with colleagues around the world. AI can now summarize information, organize ideas, create rubrics, and answer questions almost as quickly as we ask it to. The productivity gains we have achieved through technology are remarkable.

So why do so many knowledge workers feel busier than ever?

This is the question I keep coming back to.

If technology has made us so much more efficient, why does it feel like we have less time instead of more?

I think it is because technology has changed the nature of work. Yes, many tasks that once took hours now take minutes. At the same time, technology has created entirely new work and more of it. We answer more emails because people can write more emails faster. We attend more meetings because virtual meetings are easy to schedule. We are constantly learning new software, new systems, and now, new AI tools. Peer review (generally speaking) is a hot mess because the volume of submissions keeps increasing while the pool of potential reviewers has not.

The pace of change has accelerated much faster than most of us can realistically adapt to it. As knowledge workers, we are surrounded by an endless firehose of information, decisions, tools, and opportunities. Collaboration, thoughtful scholarship, and teaching and learning take time, mental energy, and patience. Those are all limited resources.

In theory, the time we save through technology should give us more time for deep thinking, creativity, family, rest, and meaningful work. But does it? Imagine comparing a week of work in 2001 versus a week of work now. How much more work are we doing now? (A lot) And why haven’t we banked the time savings of increased productivity and given everyone a 4-day work week (or less)?

More importantly, where exactly are we headed? Just because we can do something doesn’t mean we should. Instead of thinking of technology as a way to replace as much human labour as possible, I’m interested in exploring how we can redesign work and life in ways that help people contribute in meaningful ways to society and live a good life.

I’m interested to know, what’s one thing that would make your work or life better by not having to do it?

The Parsimony Project

A year-long experiment in redesigning work and life in the age of AI.

Whether we like it or not, artificial intelligence (AI) is the next major technological revolution, and, perhaps, our doom… (hopefully not!). AI is already changing how we work, learn, and make decisions. For knowledge workers in particular, the changes are happening quickly and in wildly different ways. For a lot us (most of us?) AI just sort of popped up into all our digital tools without much warning (or permission) and little to zero guidance.

While I acknowledge the concerns about AI, it is also exciting to be able to figure out new ways of doing things. I can only speak for myself but I have lots of ideas and never enough time! AI has saved me time doing tedious work that would normally take a lot of time or that I wouldn’t even have time to do at all.

You’re probably wondering what kinds of things? Well, things like writing SPSS syntax to recode variable labels, clean up data, and run analyses, creating specific images for me to include in presentations that I have a hard time finding (for example, nurses wearing white scrub tops specifically), and learning how to use code to make my Brightspace course sites more user-friendly for my students (yes, you can do that).

I’ve found myself thinking less about what AI can do and more about what work actually needs to be done in the first place.

We spend a lot of time talking about how AI can help us write emails, summarize meetings, or automate repetitive tasks. Those are worthwhile conversations. But I think there is a deeper question that deserves our attention: Are we doing work that is truly necessary?

And if we are, are we doing it in the best possible way?

These questions have become increasingly important to me because they sit at the intersection of so many of my interests. Throughout my career, I’ve studied leadership, healthy work environments, technology adoption, workforce sustainability, and organizational systems. Long before ChatGPT appeared, I was involved in research exploring the use of technology. These projects include exercise interventions with self-monitoring technologies (via Blackberry phones back in the day), passive home monitoring systems to help older adults age in place, exploring physiotherapists’ use of robotic exoskeletons with rehab patients, and an educational video game to promote careers in nursing homes. Looking back, technology has been a recurring thread throughout much of my work.

I’m also very fortunate to work in a faculty where innovation and creativity are encouraged. For example, our Master’s and PhD programs are primarily online now, which makes it more feasible for mid-career nurses (who are mostly women with job, mortgages, and often, caregiving responsibilities) to pursue advanced degrees. We have also become a leader in virtual reality simulation in undergraduate nursing education. It’s exciting to be part of!

I’ve also always been fascinated by productivity as a way of creating more time for the things that matter most. I love planning and organizing! And even though I love technology (when it’s awesome and works properly), I still use a paper planner in combination with digital tools. I’ve spent years experimenting with different systems, apps, and workflows. I’ve realized that the purpose of planning and creating personal productivity systems is not just to stay organized and “put the big rocks in the jar first” (and yes, those are both important), or to do just do more and more endlessly, but to be able to spend the one precious life that we have creating a meaningful life.

Beginning in September, I’ll be running a series of personal experiments to redesign my work and personal life around a simple question:

How can I spend more of my time doing the things that only I can do?

Each month over the next year, I’m going to focus on one area or theme and consider what’s working well and what isn’t, where I might want to intentionally redesign or establish a new way of doing something, etc.

Some experiments will succeed.

Some will fail.

I’ll write about both.

This isn’t a quest to become infinitely productive or to optimize every minute of my day. If anything, it’s the opposite.

It’s an experiment in stewardship.

How do we use our finite time, energy, attention, and talents more wisely?

How do we reduce unnecessary complexity?

How do we create more space for deep thinking, meaningful work, creativity, family, and rest?

And perhaps the biggest question of all:

If technology keeps making us more efficient, why do so many knowledge workers feel busier than ever?

I don’t have answers yet and that’s the point.

This project is an invitation to explore those questions with me.

Welcome to The Parsimony Project.

Professor’s Notebook: Wrapping Up your Semester of Teaching

The end of term is a busy time that often involves a lot of final assessment activities for the courses you are teaching. It can be challenging to go the extra distance to make sure that you stay organized during the transition from one semester to the next. Today I’m going to share with you what I consider the “must-dos” to close out your semester, stay organized, and learn and grow as a teacher.

1. Submit your final grades on time

This should be low-hanging fruit but you’d be surprised how many faculty members either do not keep track of the deadlines for grade submission or struggle to get all of their grading done on time (especially with final papers/essays). You need to know your institution’s policy and dates for submitting final grades. It is very helpful to add the relevant dates for each course you teach to your calendar and plan your assignments and exams in a way that gives you enough time to grade them and submit the final grades on time.

As an aside, we usually underestimate how much time it takes to grade assignments so it can also be helpful to do some time tracking when you grade so that you have a more realistic estimate of the time you will need to block off in your calendar for this. Time tracking is simply keeping track of the amount of time you spend doing things and can be as basic as writing it on a piece of paper or in a Word document. Even timing grading a random sample of papers can give you a decent estimate of your average grading time for that assignment.

Obviously, it will vary by course, level, quality of writing, etc. but moving forward, this information can help you make informed decisions about the assignments you develop for your courses. There is also the whole AI thing which means we could be (some are) moving away from more traditional scholarly papers or essays or that we need to allocate more time to grading smaller scaffolded assignments throughout the term. We may (probably) also need more time to deal with AI cheating issues for some types of assignments. Even so, you need to get your grades in on time and make a plan that allows you to do that.

2. Clean up and organize your teaching files

You should have a personal filing system that makes it easy for you to find information. Personally, I have a main folder called TEACHING with a subfolder for each of the different courses I’ve taught and another level of subfolders by year for the courses that I have taught multiple times. You might prefer to organize by year. There isn’t one best way to organize your files but you do need a system that is consistent and works for you.

When it comes to teaching, there are basically three types of files: 1) content that you’ve created for teaching and learning, 2) content that others have created that you are using for teaching and learning while minding copyright laws (e.g., book chapters, journal articles, etc.), and 3) content that your students have created during the course (e.g., assignments, discussion posts, exams, etc.).

In my view, the student-created content and your evaluations of it require the most consideration due to privacy concerns and the potential for grade appeals. As a general rule, I would recommend finding out how long you are required to keep student work at your institution and then deleting the student work once that time has passed. For example, if you need to keep it for 1 year, then at the end of this term you would delete/electronically shred all student work from the Winter 2023 term. This includes discussion posts in your LMS.

The exception to this would be excellent work that you would like to use for accreditation/program review purposes or as examples to share with future classes. If you would like to save specific pieces of work from students for these purposes, you should ask them for permission to save and share their work in those ways now and file it in a special folder. The best time to ask students is now after you’ve just taught them (and after submitting final grades). Generally, I would ask for this permission via email and then if the student replies giving their written permission, I save the email thread as a PDF in the folder with their assignment.

The other types of files that you have (created by you and resources created by others) can be kept indefinitely in your personal filing system. I like to have folders organized by class or by week of the course and then a separate folder for assignments. I also create a brand new folder for each time I teach the same course. While this does create some duplication, it means that I have an archived version of the course for each time I taught it. Note that I always update and revise my courses to improve them so no two offerings are identical.

3. Read your student teaching evaluations

It might not be your favourite thing to do, but you really do need to read your student evaluations. Yes, there are known problems with student teaching evaluations – most students are not experts in teaching and learning, people have personal biases that negatively affect their ratings of women and members of minority groups who are professors, hard classes/subjects are viewed less favourably than others, and students with strong extreme opinions are most likely to complete the evaluation – however, there can still be helpful nuggets that can help you improve as a teacher so I wouldn’t advise ignoring them or sticking your head in the sand.

I would advise you not to take the feedback personally and to approach your teaching evaluations like a researcher instead. This is data after all. Print out your evaluations and go through them with different coloured highlighters. First, highlight all of the positive feedback in one colour. Then, highlight the negative feedback in another colour. I would ignore comments that are irrelevant to teaching (for example, comments about your appearance which yes, does happen when you are a woman). Look for common themes in each category. Are students consistently saying they didn’t like the textbook? Is there a 50:50 split on loving and hating an active learning strategy that you used? What is the data telling you overall? Write a brief summary of the overall feedback and consider what you might do differently next time to improve your teaching and students’ learning. You might also want to talk to your teaching support center or colleagues, do some research about the scholarship of teaching, or attend a teaching professor conference. Excellence does not require perfection, but it does require effort and there is always more to learn.

4. Take a day off (at least)

Lastly, it’s important to take at least a day off and decompress after a busy few weeks. Go do things that you enjoy and let go of the stresses of the semester. If you can take a vacation (at least a full week) I would highly encourage you to. Sometimes it feels like there is never a good time to take one but it is super important for your health and wellbeing, and, perhaps counterintuitively, taking vacation benefits your productivity at work long-term. Burnt-out people are not productive people so let’s avoid going down the burnout path 😉

And that’s it for today. Go wrap up your teaching semester and enjoy a well-deserved break~!

On Liberal Arts Education

Worker shortages across industries are creating intense pressures to create shortcuts to educate people to fill in the holes in the roster as fast as possible. We need tradespeople, we need nurses, teachers, doctors, and the list goes on… Yes, we definitely need more people in the workforce. But, we need the right people and we need them to know what they are doing (and also, to have the insight to know what they do not know and need to learn).

The trend to shorten education programs and view them as a type of factory that produces workers for the system leads to devaluing learning that is not directly linked to on-the-job tasks and skills that are visible and obvious to non-experts outside the field. For example, as a nurse, it is absolutely essential to understand ideas beyond the knowledge and skills necessary to do medical procedures like giving medications, inserting IVs, and so forth. Understanding the human condition, the determinants of health, the structure, history, and politics of the health care system, and the ethical aspects of care are also very important.

Teachers also need to have a broad understanding of the world, civic engagement, human development, social and political issues, science, arts, history, technology, and more, along with developing their skills and knowledge specific to teaching including curriculum and lesson planning, teaching, evaluation, and classroom management. It takes time to learn all of that.

Arguably, the purpose of education is not just to provide graduates with a career (though, yes, this is important too), but also to develop their critical thinking abilities, introduce them to new ideas, inspire them to think differently, and learn more about themselves and the broader world. Liberal arts education especially provides students with the opportunity to do this because it requires students to take a variety of courses across different disciplines and prepares them to be engaged and thoughtful citizens.

As a student, I didn’t really understand what liberal arts education was or why it was important, but in retrospect, I think it has been instrumental in my personal and professional development. For example, the English courses I took early on were challenging and required me to become a critical reader and thinker, as well as further develop my writing skills. These skills were incredible assets as a kinesiology and nursing student, as well as in my career as a professor. I also learned about different ways to think about and understand the world that I had not been exposed to growing up in smalltown rural Nova Scotia.

Even as a PhD student, my supervisor required me to take graduate courses outside of nursing. Instead of the minimum four courses, I took 10, including courses in instrument development in the Department of Psychology and courses in advanced statistics and teamwork at the Ivey School of Business. These courses introduced me to valuable new perspectives and new ideas outside of my home discipline which are still highly relevant to the work that I do now.

The benefits of liberal arts education and the perils of not exposing students to broader ideas and knowledge seem even more relevant today, with the pace of social and technological change. For example, it is readily apparent that we are not well-equipped to deal with the wide-ranging negative consequences of AI, many of which involve ethical and moral dilemmas. We are also living in a society that is increasingly influenced and polarized by the echo chambers of the internet and social media. Unfathomably, science (and education) is under attack and many people lack the knowledge and skills to critically appraise information and sources. Now, more than ever, we need to foster intellectual curiosity, critical thinking, and philosophical conversations and debates about social and ethical issues. We need liberal arts education.

Academic Coaching for Student Success

In sports the role of a coach is obvious to most people: the coach’s job is to bring out the best in their players and team and win. In my books winning doesn’t just mean beating the other team on the scoreboard – it means doing your very best and holding nothing back. In the words of John Wooden, one of my favourite coaches of all time “Success comes from knowing that you did your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

The best coaches help people identify and set goals and develop a plan to achieve them. They provide specific, constructive feedback and help their coachees identify strategies to overcome roadblocks. Coaches can also make learning and practicing new skills interesting and fun, and therefore help people stay motivated to achieve their goals.

Coaching is also relevant to many other contexts outside of sport such as parenting, personal training, and career coaching. In higher education, academic coaching is becoming more prevalent in response to increased numbers of students who are unprepared for university. In my discipline of nursing, we also see clinical coaching emerging as an effective strategy to support students who need extra support to develop their competence in clinical practice.

So what exactly is academic coaching?

The Coaching in Higher Education Consortium defines academic coaching as “fostering individualized relationships with students that promote their agency, self-understanding, growth, effectiveness, and persistence within the realm of education and across their lifespan” (1).

Academic coaching services usually provide students with tailored, individual sessions with a skilled academic coach to identify goals, strengths, areas for improvement, and strategies for success. Collaborating with an academic coach can empower students to build and refine skills required for academic success including self-regulation, time management, notetaking, studying, test-taking strategies, and planning and writing academic papers.

It’s worth noting that many universities and colleges have dedicated academic coaches with expertise in academic coaching. Professors are not expected to be academic coaches, nor are academic advisors who focus on academic regulations and course/program planning. Alzen et al. (2) provide a nice diagram showing the differences between counseling, academic coaching, and student advising which you can find here.

That being said, in nursing, my experience has been that faculty members invest a tremendous amount of time and energy supporting the learning needs of students because we tend to be a passionate and caring bunch. Knowing many faculty members in other disciplines, I’m sure we’re not the only ones. However, as much as we care about our students, academic coaching adds another thing to our already very full plates and there is a power imbalance between students and professors that can make it difficult for students to share all of their needs and challenges. Dedicated academic coaches provide better support for students and free up professors’ valuable time and energy to focus on what they do best.

What does the evidence say about the effectiveness of academic coaching?

Overall, there is a need for more research but evidence to date suggests that academic coaching can be an effective approach to supporting university students. For example, in a 2021 study, Howlett et al. (3) found that students who participated in academic coaching experienced an increase in meta-cognition (thinking about thinking) and that online coaching was just as effective as in-person coaching (good news for our distance students!). In another recent study, Alzen et al. (2) found that an academic coaching intervention had positive impacts on GPA, credits earned, and student retention for first-year students in Arts and Sciences at risk of not continuing (GPA < 2.0). Not surprisingly, in this study students who completed the academic coaching program had better outcomes than those who did not. While there remains a need for more research, the preliminary evidence does support the use of academic coaching for student success.

The tricky part, as with any intervention, is to figure out what works best, for who, and in what conditions. It’s possible (and perhaps likely) that while struggling students stand to benefit the most from academic coaching, they may also be the least likely to seek it out or take advantage of it.

References

Graduate Student Supervision: Fostering an empowering work environment in your lab/research group

Today we’re going to discuss how to foster an empowering work environment in your lab/research group. Over the last year, the “great resignation” has highlighted the importance of work environments on employee satisfaction, commitment, and turnover. People are done tolerating jobs (and people) that make them unhappy – and that includes higher education. We (the university/academy) can and need to do better.

As a graduate student supervisor, you play a major role in creating the work environment and culture for your graduate students and research personnel/team. How intentional have you been in creating that work environment? What supports and structures have you put in place to empower your team? Where do you even start?

Well, let’s start with Kanter’s (1993) theory of structural empowerment. Structural empowerment is all about providing people (usually employees but in this case graduate students) with access to the support, resources, information, and opportunities to learn and grow that they need to have in order to be able to actually do their work. There is a ton of research evidence showing that structural empowerment has positive impacts on employee and organizational outcomes. In addition, support has been identified as a key determinant of graduate student satisfaction.

It is also the case that when people don’t have access to these key empowerment structures it can make it really challenging – and frustrating – to accomplish their work. It’s pretty obvious that not having the information, resources, support, and opportunities you need to get the job done makes life difficult!

So when it comes to empowering your graduate students, how exactly do you do that?

Support

This might be both the easiest and most challenging source of empowerment to provide to your students because it doesn’t cost you money but it can cost you time, which is one of your most precious and scarce resources. However, you do not need to be/should not be the only source of support for your graduate students. Support can come from peers, committee members, and the university as well.

Resources

Providing graduate students with resources is all about making sure that they have what they need to successfully complete their degree. This could be financial support, time, access to equipment and/or software or access to space, among other things. This is one reason why getting research grants is so important – it gives you resources to share with your students.

Information

This is such an important aspect of empowerment for graduate students. It obviously includes access to the university library and research articles or databases, but there is also a whole heck of a lot of information (intellectual capital) in that brain of yours that you can share with your students ranging from content expertise, research methods, who’s who, and how to get things done as a researcher.

Opportunities to learn and grow

Each one of your students is going to be unique in terms of their strengths and learning needs. Discussing learning goals each semester can help you identify opportunities of value and interest to each of your students. For example, you may have a fresh master’s student who has never written a conference abstract and a more experienced grad student with lots of experience doing this – why not pair them together? The less experienced student will benefit from the mentorship and experience of the more experienced student and the more experienced student will have an opportunity to mentor and teach. (Of course, you should still provide some guidance and feedback to both students).

Other examples of providing opportunities include sharing information about key conferences and encouraging/requiring students to submit abstracts, providing opportunities to contribute to research projects, presentations, and projects that you are working on, providing hands-on training that advance your students’ skills and knowledge relevant to your field, and introducing your students to people within your professional network, to name a few.

Conclusion

So there you have it – you now know what structural empowerment is and have some ideas about how you can provide it for your graduate students 🙂

Until next week!

Simple Stress Busters to Cope with Mid-Semester Overwhelm

It’s that time of the semester again! The end is in sight but the work is piling up! You have a lot to do before the holiday break including finishing everything for your current classes and preparing for next term so that you can actually relax for a bit.

Research suggests that a wide range of stress coping strategies can be effective. These include social support, emotion-focused coping strategies (aimed at making you feel better), problem-focused coping strategies (aimed at improving or solving the problems/situations that are the source of your stress), and cognitive reappraisal (reframing the stressor and your interpretation of it).

Here are some Simple Stress Busters to Cope with Mid-Semester Overwhelm:

Do a short guided relaxation or meditation. Apps like Calm and Headspace are particularly helpful for this. Schedule 10 min in your day to do this so that it becoms a habit. I like to do it in the car at the end of the work day before I go pick up my son and dog from daycare. It puts me in a much calmer, more mindful state of mind and provides a transition from work to non-work that I find helpful.
Have a mini dance party! Listen to 2-3 of your favourite songs and rock out. This is such an awesome way to release pent up stress energy and add a bit of fun/play to your day 🙂 Often the songs we love also remind us of fun times with friends.
Speaking of which… Connecting with a good friend can also be a great mood booster. Taking 10 min to message a friend or family member and let them know you’re thinking of them is never a bad idea. Making use of commute time to have a longer conversation is also an excellent way to build in meaningful connections during your busy life.
Do something physical. There is a lot of research showing that physical activity and exercise have positive effects on your mental and physical health. You probably already know this! If you’re finding it challenging to get motivated, just commit to doing 10 min/day to start. You will probably feel better once you get going and even a 10 min walk/workout can help break up your grading marathons and give you some fresh air.
Go the F to sleep! I mean that as nicely as possible. If you are not getting enough sleep you are living life on hard mode. Getting a good night sleep when you are stressed out can be challenging, I totally get it! However, there are many things you can do to set yourself up for the best opportunity to have a good night sleep. These include creating a dark, quiet, cool sleeping space, turning off electronics an hour before bedtime (also you should absolutely have a consistent bedtime), having a caffeine cutoff time in the early afternoon, and doing a brain dump so that you can put your mind to rest.
Stop checking your email first thing in the morning. You have more important things to do most of the time. I like to plan my most important work for early in the work day because it ensures that it actually gets done. Your inbox is a black hole of other people’s priorities. It is a bit different for me now in my current role as an Associate Dean because I do need to be available for my team and there can be urgent things that need to be responded to. Our students are in clinical so serious things can happen (knock on wood they don’t). But if you are in a regular faculty position, you may want to consider scheduling certain times each day for email management and communication.
Book a massage or spa treatment. Find a local day spa or massage therapist that specializes in relaxation. Book an appointment. Go. Enjoy. Forget all the things. It’s that easy.
Stop comparing yourself to others. You might feel like you are “behind” or that you don’t measure up to the amazing superstar researcher that you look up to. Stop wasting your energy on that! Instead, focus on the unique value and expertise that you have to share. You are awesome and one of a kind! Take 5 min to write down what makes your teaching and/or research unique. Pin that on your bulletin board so you can look at it and remind yourself.

You certainly don’t need to do all of these but consider trying one out today and see how you feel afterward – maybe you will want to keep doing it 🙂

Have a great week and hang in there!

Emily

Need some more time for self-care? Download this awesome freebie I made just for you. Click here to subscribe to my weekly newsletter and get your free PDF of “How to Find Time for Self-Care”.

On Writing a Pandemic Impact Statement

Writing a pandemic impact statement can also be a valuable opportunity for you to reflect on how the pandemic has affected you and may be used as a tool to manage your expectations and priorities.

A major (and perhaps low fun) part of the tenure process is documenting all the wonderful, impactful things that you are doing.

Whether you are a new faculty member or have some experience under your belts, the pandemic has had an impact on both your career and your personal life – and you should document it, even if it’s just for your own personal records.

The purpose of a pandemic impact statement is to document, in a professional manner, the challenges and barriers caused by COVID-19 that have affected your work and productivity. In addition, it is an opportunity to document your resiliency and resourcefulness by highlighting what you were able to accomplish during this difficult time.

Writing a pandemic impact statement can also be a valuable opportunity for you to reflect on how the pandemic has affected you and may be used as a tool to manage your expectations and priorities. Lastly, you may be asked to submit a pandemic impact statement when you apply for grants or for tenure so having something ready to go will give you one less thing to do later!

Best Practices

I scoured the internet so you didn’t have to, searching for university resources and guidelines to help faculty write a pandemic impact statement. Most of these documents are very similar (reference list is provided at the end). They start out with a paragraph about the pandemic and that it happened (yes, we know), explains why you need to document the impact of it, recommends keeping it between 1-2 pages long, and provides lists of probing questions by category (teaching, research, etc.) that can help you remember and document all the ways in which the pandemic has impacted you as a faculty member. Since I am a nursing professor, I also noticed that most resources did not include anything about the impact on clinical teaching which has been a major challenge for faculty teaching in health professional programs.

Two resources stood out as being particularly helpful. They were from the ADVANCE program at UMass Amherst (1) which provides a template to get you started and the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence at Purdue University (2) which includes a wide range of short exemplars that may or may not be relevant to you. Of note, it is not at all surprising to me that the most useful information came from academic leaders (who both happen to be women) working to advance equity, diversity, and inclusion for women and minority groups in academe.

(What) Should I share in my statement?

After reading all of these documents I still had a lot of questions about how to write my statement and I found myself carefully considering how much is actually necessary and safe to share with people who are evaluating me and my work.

This isn’t the first time I have wrestled with deciding how much is okay to share in formal assessment documents. My life hasn’t been easy. I worked multiple part-time jobs throughout university to pay for school and worked my butt off to earn scholarships. I started my PhD nine months pregnant with my son and have been a single parent throughout my doctoral and tenure track journey. My PhD supervisor died right after my graduation. I said goodbye to her in palliative care the night before I walked across the stage. How’s that for a way to start your tenure-track job? I cried a lot my first year as an Assistant Professor. Sometimes life is just hard.

I have been very open about all this but I have never felt that my personal life and the extra challenges I’ve faced were particularly relevant to my assessment documents or my ability to get tenure and be promoted. I guess I always thought that if I met the criteria anyway what does it matter if it was harder?

It seemed more risky to overshare, especially as a millenial (even though I have been working since I was 13 and am almost 40 now). I was afraid that my colleagues (who are mostly older than me) would think that I think I am a “special snowflake” that deserves or is asking for special treatment. Or worse, that I wouldn’t actually earn tenure on merit, but out of pity. In the end, I didn’t mention any of the things above when I submitted my file for probationary assessment. I got tenure early as an exceptional case and I know with my whole heart that I earned it. Perhaps if that hadn’t been the case I would regret not providing context about some of the extra challenges I’ve had to deal with. I will never know.

The pandemic has changed my view on this issue of sharing somewhat because it has forced some of the inequities in society and in academe to become more visible. The fact that many universities are requesting or inviting faculty to include a pandemic impact statement in the first place is an important signal that there is at least some awareness that the pandemic has affected people differently and should be taken in account when assessing employee job performance. However, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the tenure and promotion committee is still focused on assessing your performance, in your job, that they pay you to do.

I think the following statement from Harvard is particularly telling (bold emphasis mine):

In summary, this supplemental statement should describe any significant effects the pandemic had on your regular activities and plans, indicating ways that your focus or priorities may have necessarily shifted and articulating any deliberate choices you made to concentrate on specifically accessible opportunities and goals, given the constraints. It will not be necessary to explain why your work has been impacted (by describing specific childcare or health issues, e.g.), only to explain how (e.g., critical reduction in available working hours, inaccessible field site, loss of funding or unexpected new research expenses, etc.).

You’ll also be invited to highlight examples of innovation, training, additional mentoring or other service activities (e.g., clinical or first-responder service), new directions in research, or other unplanned but concrete accomplishments that came out of this period. A list of related resources is provided to assist you in reflecting on potential categories of impact and assessing extent (Harvard Office of Faculty Affairs, 2021).

While it may not be possible to completely separate the why and the how of the impact of COVID-19 on your work, I think it is best to keep things short and simple and focus on the how. I also really like the second point about highighting the good/new things that happened in response to the pandemic.

As an example, here is what I included in my pandemic impact statement about how my personal circumstances affected my work during the pandemic:

I am a long-time single parent of an elementary school-aged child with no caregiving support from family. School and daycare closures in March/April 2020 and Fall 2021 due to COVID-19 required me to work from home while parenting and supporting at-home learning for my son.

Out of two pages, this is the only part that mentions my personal circumstances and it is still focused on the how. The main point I am trying to get across here is that when it comes to caregiving for my son, I am it; I don’t have backup like so many of my colleagues. Point made. Aside from the infrequent times we’ve been trapped in the house, it hasn’t been all that different from pre-pandemic times. I still have to do all the housework, shopping, and caregiving. I am still the sole breadwinner. It’s impossible to find babysitters. Online conferences are more accessible but I miss in-person conferences which were often my only break from being a parent. Does the univeristy really care about that stuff? I’m not sure.

The rest of my pandemic impact statement is focused on how the pandemic has impacted each of my key roles: Research, Research Supervision, Teaching, Service, and Administration. That’s it.

So now what?

Go write your statement! Easy right?

If you want some help with this I made a workbook for you that can make it less painful and get it done in a single afternoon. As I mentioned earlier, I read pretty much every guide and resource I could find for faculty on how to write a pandemic/Covid-19 impact statement. None of them were quite what I needed so I made my own tool and I think you may find it helpful too.

Inside this workbook, I show you how to organize your statement, provide comprehensive checklists of possible impacts for teaching both classroom and experiential learning courses (like clinical, labs, practicums, etc.), research, and service so that you don’t forget anything (it’s been a long pandemic!), and provide examples of what to write in each part of your statement. I used this workbook myself so I know that it works and the checklists alone will save you loads of time!

If this sounds like something you’d find helpful, click here to check it out.

And that’s it for this week!

See you next Sunday (hopefully with your pandemic impact statement crossed off your to-do list!)

Emily

References:

(not formatted properly but here are the links; #sorrynotsorry)

Harvard Office of Faculty Affairs (2021). COVID-related resources for faculty. https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/faculty-affairs/faculty/covid-related-resources-for-faculty/

California State University (Long Beach): https://www.csulb.edu/academic-affairs/faculty-affairs/covid-19-professional-impact-statement

Clemson University: https://www.clemson.edu/provost/faculty-affairs/Documents/tpr_documents/facultycovidimpactstatement_document.pdf

Cleveland State University: https://www.csuohio.edu/sites/default/files/CSU%20Faculty%20COVID%20Impact%20Statement%20Guidelines%202021_0.pdf

Georgia State: https://faculty.gsu.edu/files/2021/02/COVID-Impact-StatementsV2.pdf

Michigan State University: https://hr.msu.edu/ua/promotion/faculty-academic-staff/documents/Memo-Guidelines-COVID-19-Impact-Statement-12-2-20.pdf

Michigan Tech: https://www.mtu.edu/advance/resources/covidimpact/

NC State University: https://provost.ncsu.edu/faculty-resources/faculty-evaluation-and-covid-19/

Purdue University: Best Practices Tools – Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence – Purdue University

University of California (Santa Barbara): https://ap.ucsb.edu/news.and.announcements/covid-19/2021-01-25_Guidance_for_COVID_Impact_Statement.pdf

University of Central Florida: https://facultyexcellence.ucf.edu/document/optional-covid-19-impact-statement/

University of Connecticut: https://provost.uconn.edu/covid-19/covid-impact-statements-guidance/

University of Florida: http://aa.ufl.edu/media/aaufledu/tenure-and-promotion/Guidance-for-faculty-impact-statement-final.pdf

University of Massachusetts: https://www.umass.edu/advance/documenting-pandemic-impacts-best-practices

University of Nebraska: https://journalism.unl.edu/pdf/COVID%20Impact%20Statements.pdf University of Nevada, Las Vegas: https://www.unlv.edu/hr/employee-info/covid-statement

University of Texas: https://cns.utexas.edu/faculty-affairs/faculty-evaluations/covid-impacts/covid-impact-statement

Creating a weekly research writing practice

Creating a consistent writing practice is an essential habit that will help you be more productive and impactful as a researcher. If you don’t prioritize your research writing in your calendar other activities (often meetings and teaching-related work) will take over that time, leaving you feeling like you just don’t have enough hours in the day to get everything done. (Pro tip: you don’t and never will have enough time to do ALL the things so you must prioritize and choose what matters most).

Why weekly instead of daily?

A lot of people recommend daily writing but I find that a week is a better unit of time for planning and time management, especially as a professor. There are just so many different roles and activities that we must do as part of our job that to try to do all of them in a single day would make you crazy! Not to mention the cognitive costs of frequent task switching between diverse activities. Personally, I find that a 2-4 hour block of writing time allows me to really focus on what I am writing and make progress. Academic writing often involves searching the literature, reading articles, and interpreting/synthesizing results as you write too, so it can be a slow process! If you only have one hour/week or find that works for you, fill your boots but I do recommend a larger block of time if you can.

How to create a weekly research writing practice:

Step 1: Decide what day and time each week works best for you to write. This may be based on your schedule or on when you feel like you write best. Unfortunately, these don’t always match up, so if that is the case, I recommend being practical and going by what works for your schedule. I recommend picking a time on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday if possible so that you don’t skip weeks due to holidays.

Step 2: Create a recurring event in your calendar for the same day and time each week. This is your dedicated research writing time. Do not use it for anything else!

Step 3: Turn off emails and other distractions during your research writing time. Note that it may take some time for other people to get used to the fact that you are not available to them during this time. Reinforce that writing is an essential part of being a productive researcher and remind them of when you are available.

Step 4: Write! Work on high-impact research outputs such as grant proposals, research papers (and revisions), and conference abstracts.

And that’s it! It is actually very simple to set this up. The challenging part is showing up and writing every single week consistently. There are about 46 work weeks/year once you account for holidays and vacation time. So, if you were to write for 4 hours every single work week, that’s 184 hours of dedicated research writing time each year! Obviously (or maybe not?) you will probably need additional writing time at certain times (like before a grant proposal is due). However, during semesters when you have a heavy teaching load, you may find that this dedicated time is particularly helpful and important to keep your research productivity on track.

Have a great week and see you next Sunday!

Emily