A Belated February PNP Roundup
Last Month in Review
Greetings, dear readers!
I’m a bit late bringing you the PNP roundup for last month, but I wanted to make sure we didn’t miss out on this reader-favorite format!
I also wanted to say a big thank you to everyone who filled out the reader survey! I received almost 100 responses, and I really look forward to going through them. Thank you!
Here are some of my favorite media I’ve consumed over the past month on writing, productivity, and managing all the things. Some of this content is new, some of it is old, but all of it has kernels of wisdom for busy academic writers.
1. These are the Publish Not Perish posts from February, in case you missed any:
2. Dr. Briana Barner, who has written a couple of PNP guest posts, was recently interviewed on the Academic Life Podcast. In this episode, she discusses some of the dissertation-finishing tips she shared in her PNP post. One of the perspectives I really appreciate from Dr. Barner is that throughout her PhD experience, people consistently told her what the "right" way to be a PhD student was, and she persisted in doing it her own way, to great success. This reflection inspires me, and I highly recommend that you listen to her wisdom! Here are Dr. Barner’s previous PNP posts as well:
3. Mary Flannery, who writes , recently wrote a post that suggests we more carefully consider when we are feeling our “gut” or when we’re feeling guilt. She describes the experience of receiving yet another request for peer review and having to decide whether to trust her instincts or her guilt. Mary writes that your gut and your guilt are separate parts of yourself and that you must understand who is speaking when you feel compelled to say yes to something.
sometimes the best thing to do is to ask yourself, Who am I listening to right now? Which part of me is telling me what to do? It may not always be entirely clear, but sometimes just taking the time to ask yourself the question can help you understand where your various responses are coming from.
These are wise words to use for reflecting on any opportunity!
4. Dr. Leslie Wang recently discussed some of her reflections and advice on leaving academia in her podcast, which you can listen to or read the transcript of here. I recommend the episode even if leaving academia is not your goal because her advice on grounding yourself in your prorities and developing strategies to manage your academic career in healthy ways can be useful inside academia as well. She says,
And if you’re struggling in your daily life, as many academics are, it’s imperative to take a deeper look at what you believe to be true about your situation.
Once you know which underlying beliefs are operating, you can choose to reframe them or to take action to change things for the better.
I’ve noticed that scholars in career crisis typically try to act their way out of problems.
They often jump too quickly into trying to learn new skills or turning their CVs into professional resumes.
And there are tons of really great job strategies out there that you should definitely pursue.
But I assure you they will be far more effective once you’ve taken a closer look at your beliefs about your work.
A lot of people leave bad situations in academia just to find themselves in similar scenarios outside of it.
Therefore, I believe you need to recenter yourself and your priorities.
You must instill strict boundaries with work now so you don’t take bad habits into the next stage of your career.
Her wisdom reminds me of a recent post I wrote about PhD students viewing their studies as a job with boundaries rather than something they had to endure and then expect life to change in a faculty role:
Why you should treat your PhD studies as a job
Admittedly, there are toxic departments for PhD students and faculty alike, but lack of work-life balance can occur in any profession and at any stage of one’s career. It’s important to be intentional about setting boundaries for oneself, even if it is not our fault that neoliberal institutions will always compel us to do more.
5. Speaking of overwork, I came across this article that discusses how many of us seek a state of overwhelm in order to boost our own self-esteem. Oof. Here’s the summary of the article:
None of us want to admit that we would rather feel overwhelmed than underwhelmed. In fact, we often experience a greater sense of our own value when we’re working than we do when we’re not. Working is not just a way to stay busy, but also to prove our worthiness – to others and to ourselves. The result is that without the right guardrails in place, we silently collude with employers who encourage us to overwork through intense pressure to perform. The authors outline strategies for intervening if you find yourself compulsively overworking, including honestly recognizing your tendency to work long and continuous hours, prioritizing sleep and movement, and choosing one activity outside of work that brings you true enjoyment.
I believe we must be cautious not to blame individuals too heavily for these conditions and instead question the societal values and pressures that create them, but it is an intriguing viewpoint to consider just the same.
6. Academic writing is hard. Even though we all know this intuitively, we must remember it and understand the various challenges that may arise during a project. We may feel emotionally stuck because we believe our writing is incoherent or inadequate. We may feel intellectually stuck because we have not figured out how to connect ideas. The list of challenges is quite long. Karen Gonzalez Rice discusses challenges and strategies to overcome them in this podcast episode. I like how she normalizes that writing is difficult sometimes:
The writing lifestyle usually includes a pit of despair. This is just another phase of the writing process. The pit of despair or I like to call it the fire swamp because of the rodents of unusual size, it feels like putting out fires, having to be hypervigilant. This feeling of despair and fear, it's a completely normal experience. This is when we have these moments of what in the world am I going to do next? How will I be able to get through this problem? Sometimes this comes up in the content of what you're writing. Sometimes it's a structural problem that seems really difficult to overcome. And you know, other times it's just life intervenes.
You can listen to or read the transcript for some sense of camaraderie as well as some tips on how to work through the despair and the challenges.