How to embrace limits

Plus a cute photo of my cats. Consider it an early holiday gift!

Hello and welcome to Academia Made Easier. I am so glad that you are here.

A word I have grown to despise is “busy”. It has become a default for all of us, our ubiquitous answer to the question, “How are you?”. The very word suggests chaotic energy. It should apply to toddlers and bees, not our professional and personal lives.

Living with multiple sclerosis (MS), busyness can come with a physical price. Experience has taught me that multiple evening work events in a short period can trigger a loss of sensation in my feet. Too much travel with insufficient recovery time can leave me feeling like an elephant is sitting on me. Days of back-to-back meetings can mean subsequent days of brain fog.

I used to see these physical realities as limitations – because they are. But almost a decade ago, a friend with their own experience with physical limitations offered me a valuable reframe. At the time, I was struggling to accept a bad MS relapse involving paresthesia in both my legs that was driving me to distraction. After listening to my distress, they asked me, “What if you were to see it as a gift?”

They explained their reasoning: “Other people don’t have any warning system for when they are at or beyond the point of too much. You have the gift of an internal alarm telling you when to stop — or at least slow down. You have a superpower.”

At the time, I didn’t much care for this suggestion. Paresthesia SUCKS. Chronic disease management can be a literal pain. This reframing idea struck me as overly positive. Limitations be a superpower? In this world?

Over time, however, my thinking has changed. I have found that when I adopt this reframing, I am empowered. When I accept the limits on what I can do before paying a physical price, I become more selective and strategic. I focus on getting the right things done, rather than all of the things done.

Practicing this over time has changed my life. I rarely have problems saying no (unless chocolate is involved) and I embrace setting reasonable boundaries with others. I have found that being gentle with my expectations for myself, rather than buying into the bullshit of academic burnout culture, allows me to achieve my work goals while maintaining my personal wellness goals.

It turns out my friend was right: limitations can be a superpower.

My friend’s reframe is available to all of us, not just those of us living with chronic health issues. So if a gentler approach to work and academia sounds appealing, today’s small thing to try immediately is for you.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Try a gentle fortnight experiment

When adopting a more gentle approach to work and life, I suggest you enter into the idea … gently. You likely have years or decades of deeply engrained burnout culture thoughts pushing you to do more, achieve more, and be more. This more-more-more approach, moreover (ha!), may have served you (or at least your career) well at times. So you don’t have to abandon it if you don’t want to. Instead, allow yourself to experiment with a more gentle approach to your work and life by pausing your impulse to be hyper-productive for just two weeks. Try the following:

1. Recognize that time is a container. As I discuss in “How to contain work to the realities of your limited work time”, it is helpful to imagine your time as a container. Containers have limits: even if you attempt to cram more items in, there is only so much a container can hold. Similarly, you only have so much time available and not everything you might need, want, or feel pressured to do will fit into your time container.

For your gentle fortnight experiment, I encourage you to maximize your agency to decide how tightly packed you want your time container over the next two weeks. A gentler approach means more empty space, rather than having this container packed to overflowing.

2. Remove what can be removed from your calendar and to-do list. Take a look at your calendar and see what you can scale back, postpone, or cancel. See my past newsletter “How to triage your to-do list” for concrete steps on how to do this.

3. Speak back to the shitty productivity voice in your head. Many academics I speak to feel guilty whenever they try to scale back, even for a short time. A voice in their head tells them they should be doing more, that they are wasting time, and that their hair looks like crap. (That last one just might be me.) In ‘How to end the semester gently’, I suggest giving this voice a name and speaking directly to it. (Yes, you may feel silly doing so. So what?) Then move forward with removing things from your calendar and to-do list for the two weeks. Remember: this is an experiment. Allow yourself to try it out. You can go back to packing every available minute with more and more stuff once the two weeks are done if you want to.

4. After your gentle fortnight experiment is complete, assess the results. What worked for you in adopting a more gentle approach? What did you like? What elements might you want to take with you moving forward? Can you see possibilities to make imposing limits one of your own superpowers?

If you try this, I would love to hear your thoughts on the experiment. Please come back and comment!

Until next time…

Unrelated to any of the above, I recently wrote a short piece that might interest you. In “Focusing on GenAI detection is a no-win approach for instructors”, I discuss the practical, ethical, and workload challenges of Gen-AI detection. I invite you to take a look and share with your university colleagues. And, as always, I invite your comments on and sharing of Academia Made Easier. It is a pleasure and privilege to connect with you through this newsletter.

Stay well, my colleagues.

P.S. Storm (grey tuxedo kitty) and Bandit (fluffy black kitty) are experts at living a gentle life. They aren’t necessarily gentle on the furniture, though!

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Have you got your copy of my new book, For the Public Good: Reimagining Arts Graduate Programs in Canadian Universities? If not, please order it now (and/or ask your university library to get a copy), be sure to sign up for the related Substack “Reimagining Graduate Education”, and note that my coauthors and I welcome invitations to work with units to implement the book’s ideas! Reviewer feedback of note:

• “It is the kind of quietly good book we need to see more of. … This book provides a very solid description of the process of defining and developing excellent, sustainable arts programs that serve students rather than academics. And not only is it dead-on in terms of its recommendations about how to design and evaluate programs, it has a lot of helpful matrices and worksheets to help those who are put in positions requiring them to do exactly that … More like this, please." - Alex Usher

• “Nearly half the book is dedicated to charting a transformative course for liberal arts departments.... If For the Public Good can provide the impetus for social sciences and humanities departments to refine their graduate studies programs, the career outcomes for tens of thousands of grad students will be the better for it. That alone would move the needle on Canada’s public good problem." - Literary Review of Canada