Rewind: How to Marie Kondo Your Academic Career
Rewind: How to Marie Kondo Your Academic Career
Publish Not Perish is On Winter Hiatus!
Greetings, dear readers! Publish Not Perish is on hiatus until January 9th, but I’m rewinding some of my posts in case you haven’t had the chance to read them yet. Today we have How to Marie Kondo Your Academic Career, which was originally published in August. I'll post the introduction first, and you can access the entire post by clicking the link at the bottom.
Academics are often pulled in many different directions at once. As a result, writing and other things we value land in the dust of our busyness. Many of us feel that incorporating more writing time into our schedules would require 60-hour work weeks that none of us have the energy to manage. Is it even possible to be a balanced human being—one that allots a desirable amount of time for writing tasks and our other work, while also having a life beyond academia?
It would be a gross oversimplification to suggest easy answers for this conundrum that would work for everyone. And we can’t ignore the realities, and culture, of overwork and burnout that have been exacerbated during the pandemic.
What I offer today are ways of thinking about balance, time, and the priorities that may help us take back some agency within the constraints we face. And yes, it’s also about asking that key Marie Kondo question: what sparks joy?
But first, the bad news.