How to make good use of the rest of summer

Southern hemisphere colleagues: please adapt ideas as best you can!

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

I hate to tell you this, but July is over. Gone. Past-tense.

Fuck. 

For me, summer is a strange time. The days are long. The demands are considerably lower than in the rest of the year. It feels like there is ample time to do all of the things. Rest! Relax! Exercise! Move writing projects forward! Move household projects forward!

Ah, summertime!

Then I blink and the end of July arrives.

Suddenly, the days are not so long. Growing demands are visible over the horizon. There is not ample time to do all of the things, or even many of the things. 

Where did the time go? What happened?

As August creeps closer and closer, lyrics from tick, tick … BOOM!’s “30/90” echo in my head:

Years are getting shorter

Lines on your face are getting longer

Feel like you're treading water

But the riptide's getting stronger

Not to mention lyrics from Don Henley’s “Last Worthless Evening”:

But there's just so many summers

And just so many springs …

(Time, time ticking, ticking, ticking away…)

Oh, the drama!

Of course, summer is not over yet. For those of us working in the Canadian postsecondary system, there is another month before fall classes start. There is still time! 

There is still time.

But time for what, exactly? Well, that’s what today’s small thing is about.

One Small Thing to Try Immediately: Set Reasonable Second Half of Summer Plans

As I have mentioned before, one of my coauthors refers to the last week of August as the “week of broken dreams” for academics. Academics often set overly ambitious goals for the summer months, come up short, and then end the summer feeling disappointed about not being able to achieve their unrealistic goals. 

I have a lot of experience with this. It is not fun.

It is also avoidable.

Here are three steps to pause, reassess, and revise your goals to fit the time remaining:

1. Consider how much more rest you need and plan for it first.

Rest is foundational to academic success. The work we do in academia - research, teaching, collegial governance, academic leadership - requires creativity and energy. When we ignore our need for rest, we undermine our academic work.

Rest includes sleep, mental breaks, “self care” (defined on your own terms), relaxation, and general downtime. Personally, I like long walks listening to podcasts and ignoring housework. Other people, for mysterious reasons, enjoy camping and watching sports. You do you.

So ask yourself, have you had enough rest to power you through the next semester? If your answer is no, create a strategy to build more rest into the remaining days of summer. 

2.  Identify your must-do list and schedule these items. 

Some stuff just needs to get done. Updating your syllabi. Completing a journal revise-and-resubmit before its deadline. Participating in the department “retreat” located in the department seminar room (but this time with flipcharts!). 

Add these items to your calendar and be sure to use realistic estimates for the time that will be required. If you don’t have a good sense of how long a particular task will take, triple your initial estimate. (Yes, I am serious.)

(Note: If updating your syllabi is on your must-do list, be sure to check out my Skills Agenda columns on designing syllabi. I cover creating your learning outcomes, selecting learning materials (including readings), designing assignments, establishing the schedule, and setting the course policies. And, as a bonus, I have ideas for how to get students to actually read the syllabus.)

3. Set an EASY goal that fit the time available.

After you schedule rest and your must-do items, you will notice that there is a limited amount of time left. 

Sorry.

Given that reality, I suggest you set one goal to accomplish by the end of August. The idea is for you to set yourself up for success rather than creating a list of unrealistic goals to use to beat yourself up with at the end of the month.

Remember: if you finish that single goal early, you can always set another one.

To set your goal, I recommend using my EASY goal framework. EASY goals have four qualities:

• Energizing. Just thinking about working on the goal is motivating.

• Agency. Making progress on the goal is in your control.

• Small. In this case, scale the goal to something that can be done by the end of August.

• Yours. No “shoulds” allowed. You actually want to do it.

Note: if you are a podcast listener, I talk about EASY goals on the Better Me podcast. (Thanks again, Heather Ross, for the invitation!)

These three steps will help you create plans that you feel good about for August.

I started this newsletter with bad news, so I will refocus now on the good news: Summer is not over! We still have time! 

Let’s make the best of it.

What are your own plans for August? Please hit comment and let me know!

Chipping Away: What I Have Been Up To

A quick update on some of my own activities since my last newsletter, since I have your attention:

• My coauthors and I completed a two-week “writing sprint” to move our book project forward. We have been co-writing for some time now, and this brief intense focus on our book was a great way to move the project forward. I learned about the writing sprint idea on Cathy Mazak’s Academic Writing Amplified podcast. (Thank you, Cathy, for the idea and motivation!) If you haven’t tried a writing sprint before, I encourage you to give it a try.

• Our family loves board games and a new one (to us) that we have been particularly enjoying is Wingspan. Each player is building a bird aviary, with gorgeous cards full of bird facts. It is an interesting game and I haven’t figured out the strategy yet, as evidenced by the fact that I keep losing! But still, very fun. (To check out Wingspan, see Amazon or Chapters-Indigo).

• In recent years (ahem, decades), I have struggled to include strength training in my fitness. While I feel like I should do strength training to prevent muscle and bone loss, I am remarkably undisciplined. But this spring, a new staircase opened near my house. I developed a 10-10-10 workout that I added onto my walks: ten cycles of stairs two steps at a time, plus 10 bench pushups and 10 triceps dips at every park bench I pass along the route. Habit-stacking for the win!

Image: Staircase on my running/walking route. I love this staircase so much.

Until next time…

In addition to thinking about what you will do with the remaining days of summer, I encourage you to celebrate what you have done already. Did you get some much-needed rest? Did you spend time with family, garden, move a project forward, and/or do anything else that you feel good about? If so, congratulations. I am very happy for you.

And to my southern hemisphere readers, thank you for reading despite the lack of seasonal congruence. I hope there were some ideas of use for you!

Stay well, my colleagues. 

P.S. My dog buddy Hank helped me run some errands recently. Look at that smile!

Image: Hank the Labradoodle in my car, being his usual joyful self.

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Loleen Berdahl, Ph.D.: I am a twin mother, wife, runner, cat lover, and chocolate enthusiast. I spend far too much time on Twitter and binge-watching television, and my house could be a lot cleaner. During work hours, I am the Executive Director of the  Johnson Shoyama Graduate School of Public Policy. I am the author of the University Affairs Skills Agenda column and my most recent books are Work Your Career: Get What You Want from Your Social Sciences or Humanities PhD and Explorations: Conducting Empirical Research in Canadian Political Science. 

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