Head space is a programme for academics who want to establish new habits and routines aimed at cultivating a space for calm productivity. To escape the unproductive and frenetic activities that fill our days.
And to create the head space we need to do the work we love.
I’ve started A New Thing. It’s called Head space and it’s aimed at academics in higher education who feel like they don’t have the time or cognitive energy to engage in meaningful, high-value scholarship. If that’s you, I’d really appreciate it if you check out the site.
Over the past few years I’ve seen an alarming increase in the number of academics reporting a profound dissatisfaction with their work, leading to high-stress environments, burnout and increased staff turnover. The administrative and managerial pressures, and unreasonable demands we place on ourselves, make it difficult to engage in the meaningful scholarship that makes our work worthwhile.
Many colleagues have simply accepted this as the inevitable price we pay for the relative advantage of being academics, but I believe that a different culture in higher education is not only desirable but essential. In order to solve the hard problems in society we cannot spend our days wading through inboxes, meetings, and administrative tasks that have little relation to high-value academic work.
The solution, in my opinion, isn’t to eliminate these things but to approach scholarly practice with a different mindset. If we think about professional athletes training for competition, they have very specific routines, diets, sleep schedules, and habits that they cultivate in order to achieve their optimal performance. What is the equivalent of deliberate practice for academics? What are the norms of practice in teams that drive our collective success? What are the routines and habits we put in place to improve our scholarship?
I believe that academia should be a space for calm and thoughtful engagement with the big ideas that move society forward, and Head space is my attempt to bring some of that ethos back into higher education.