You may have noticed that I’ve mentioned a new online course I’ve been working on for a few months. The course is called Calm Productivity and I’ve created it in response to a growing concern about the frenetic pace of academic life, and the increased pressure on academics to keep doing more, with less.
Don’t get me wrong; I believe that being an academic, even with it’s flawed systems, is nonetheless an incredibly privileged position in society. Academics have enormous control over their schedules, even when the workload is most pressing. We have the luxury of the ivory tower, where we enjoy relative seclusion and protection in our roles, not entirely subject to the same working requirements as most other people.
But, this autonomy and flexibility comes with an important responsibility; we need to make a contribution to society. The space and freedom that comes with being an academic must benefit our communities. Which brings me back to the Calm Productivity course.
Increasingly, I see that academics are struggling to find the time and space to make these high-value contributions to society. And I’m seeing, from personal experience, a high turnover and low retention rate of staff in higher education institutions. And those who are staying, are at risk of burning out. While I think that complex economic, social and political systems are the primary reasons for this situation, I also think that academics can make a few relatively small changes to their working habits and routines, which will make a significant difference to their well-being.
As an example of the kind of change I’m talking about, I’ve published a lesson from the course, called Checking email, from the module on Taking control of your email. If you look at the lesson, you’ll see that this isn’t asking a lot of anyone. If anything, it’s simply a suggestion that we change our default behaviour around one aspect of our relationship with email. I think that small changes like the one in this example, can make a big difference to how we organise our time.
Each module in the course is focused on a lever point in academic work; an area of practice where relatively small changes can have relatively large impacts. The course isn’t about making huge changes to how you work; it’s about taking something familiar (our schedules, emails and notes, for example), and looking at them with a fresh perspective.