End of season wrap. I review some of the themes from the last season include listening, leadership, wellbeing, peer review, and research excellence. I also invite feedback and you can go to the https://www.changingacademiclife.com/contact page to share your feedback and suggestions. And I share some transitions happening over the break before coming back in Sept/Oct 2023.See https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal83-reflections-transitions  for a time-stamped overview, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

End of season wrap. I review some of the themes from the last season include listening, leadership, wellbeing, peer review, and research excellence. I also invite feedback and you can go to the <a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/contact" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.changingacademiclife.com/contact</a> page to share your feedback and suggestions. And I share some transitions happening over the break before coming back in Sept/Oct 2023.See <a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal83-reflections-transitions" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal83-reflections-transitions</a>  for a time-stamped overview, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

End of Season Reflections and Transitions

Sarah Davies

Prof Sarah Davies (STS Dept, Uni of Vienna) researches conditions on academic work and knowledge production. In Part 2 we discuss her research on issues such as equity and valuing diverse work, care work in academia, creating collegial research cultures, and luck in research, and how accounting for luck might be one way of disrupting problematic rhetorics of excellence.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal82-sarah-davies-part-2 for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Prof <a href="https://sts.univie.ac.at/en/about-us/sarah-davies/%20" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sarah Davies</a> (STS Dept, Uni of Vienna) researches conditions on academic work and knowledge production. In Part 2 we discuss her research on issues such as equity and valuing diverse work, care work in academia, creating collegial research cultures, and luck in research, and how accounting for luck might be one way of disrupting problematic rhetorics of excellence.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal82-sarah-davies-part-2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal82-sarah-davies-part-2</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Sarah Davies (Part 2) on luck, disrupting excellence, and cultures of care

In Part 1, Sarah Davies (STS, Vienna Uni) discusses her experiences with academic mobility, touching on issues of cultural differences, precarity, and reflecting on who is able to be mobile or not and with what consequences. This leads to discussions about how we interpret CVs, and she challenges us to re-think internationalization and notions of excellence.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal81-sarah-davies-part-1 for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In Part 1, Sarah Davies (STS, Vienna Uni) discusses her experiences with academic mobility, touching on issues of cultural differences, precarity, and reflecting on who is able to be mobile or not and with what consequences. This leads to discussions about how we interpret CVs, and she challenges us to re-think internationalization and notions of excellence.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal81-sarah-davies-part-1 " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal81-sarah-davies-part-1 </a>for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Sarah Davies (Part 1) on mobility, precarity and notions of excellence

Elizabeth Churchill

Dr Elizabeth Churchill, Snr Director at Google, shares experiences on building team cultures, managing diversity, onboarding global teams, and useful management frameworks. She also shares her journey from psychology to working in big tech and now at the infrastructure level, what she was looking for in moving between companies, and her love of people, of being challenged and continually learning.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal80-elizabeth-churchill for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Dr Elizabeth Churchill, Snr Director at Google, shares experiences on building team cultures, managing diversity, onboarding global teams, and useful management frameworks. She also shares her journey from psychology to working in big tech and now at the infrastructure level, what she was looking for in moving between companies, and her love of people, of being challenged and continually learning.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal80-elizabeth-churchill " rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal80-elizabeth-churchill </a>for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

    Elizabeth Churchill on creating culture, leading teams, loving challenges 

Marta Cecchinato

The areas Marta Cecchinato discusses  include: her leadership of a new group, leading her department’s Athena Swan EDI initiative, supporting people on parental leave, her own experiences being a first-time mother, and the digital wellbeing strategies that have been most helpful to her. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal79-marta-cecchinato-part-2 for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

The areas Marta Cecchinato discusses include: her leadership of a new group, leading her department’s Athena Swan EDI initiative, supporting people on parental leave, her own experiences being a first-time mother, and the digital wellbeing strategies that have been most helpful to her. See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal79-marta-cecchinato-part-2" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal79-marta-cecchinato-part-2</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Marta Cecchinato (part 2) on promoting wellbeing through leadership, EDI & self-care

In part 1 of our conversation, Dr Marta Cecchinato from Northumbria Uni talks about her digital wellbeing research, the concept of microboundaries, and strategies for taking more control of these microboundaries. You can also download her booklet to find more practical strategies.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal78-marta-cecchinato-part1 for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In part 1 of our conversation, Dr Marta Cecchinato from Northumbria Uni talks about her digital wellbeing research, the concept of microboundaries, and strategies for taking more control of these microboundaries. You can also download her booklet to find more practical strategies.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal78-marta-cecchinato-part1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal78-marta-cecchinato-part1</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Marta Cecchinato (part 1) on digital wellbeing and microboundary strategies

James Wilsdon

James Wilsdon has been involved in many policy initiatives around research evaluation. Of particular interest here, he chaired a review of the role of metrics in the management of the UK’s research system, resulting in the 2015 report, The Metric Tide. Connecting to our recent episodes on review practices, we start here at about 19mins into the original recording exploring what is the purpose of research evaluation.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal77-james-wilsdon-replay for a time-stamped transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

James Wilsdon has been involved in many policy initiatives around research evaluation. Of particular interest here, he chaired a review of the role of metrics in the management of the UK’s research system, resulting in the 2015 report, <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Metric-Tide-James-Wilsdon/dp/1473973066/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Metric Tide</a>. Connecting to our recent episodes on review practices, we start here at about 19mins into the original recording exploring what is the purpose of research evaluation.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal77-james-wilsdon-replay" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal77-james-wilsdon-replay</a> for a time-stamped transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

James Wilsdon - Replay on metrics & responsible research evaluation

I found this a powerful conversation with Heike Winschiers-Theophilus on global south research, reviewer bias, abstract vs lived diversity, &amp; pluriversality.See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal76-heike-winschiers-theophilus for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

I found this a powerful conversation with Heike Winschiers-Theophilus on global south research, reviewer bias, abstract vs lived diversity, &amp; pluriversality.See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal76-heike-winschiers-theophilus" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/ cal76-heike-winschiers-theophilus</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Heike Winschiers-Theophilus on global south research, reviewer bias, abstract vs lived diversity, & pluriversality

Edward Lee

In this episode, Edward Lee discusses the culture of rejection, in CS especially, the problems with peer reviewing, the nature of conferences, and how we might approach reviewing differently and start to change the culture around publications, acceptance rates and evaluations without losing quality standards. See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal75-edward-lee for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

In this episode, Edward Lee discusses the culture of rejection, in CS especially, the problems with peer reviewing, the nature of conferences, and how we might approach reviewing differently and start to change the culture around publications, acceptance rates and evaluations without losing quality standards. See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal75-edward-lee" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal75-edward-lee</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation, transcript and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Edward Lee on the toxic culture of peer review

This short reflection follows on from the last episode, a replay of my 2017 conversation with Gloria Mark. I make a confession here that comes from my reviewing hall of shame about when I was a reviewer of one of the key papers leading to hew new book, a paper authored by Victor González and Gloria Mark. And how I (very wrongly!) argued for rejection. Luckily good colleagues saved me from myself and the paper was accepted but I use this as an example to urge us to be more reflective about our biases and position this also against the broader challenges around reviewing in our increasingly hypercompetitive publication culture.  For overview, transcript and related links go to http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal74-review-hall-of-shameThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

This short reflection follows on from the last episode, a <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal73-gloria-mark-replay" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">replay of my 2017 conversation with Gloria Mark</a>. I make a confession here that comes from my reviewing hall of shame about when I was a reviewer of one of the key papers leading to hew new book, <a href="https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985707" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">a paper authored by Victor González and Gloria Mark</a>. And how I (very wrongly!) argued for rejection. Luckily good colleagues saved me from myself and the paper was accepted but I use this as an example to urge us to be more reflective about our biases and position this also against the broader challenges around reviewing in our increasingly hypercompetitive publication culture.  For overview, transcript and related links go to <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal74-review-hall-of-sham" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2023/cal74-review-hall-of-sham</a>eThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

A confession from my review hall of shame

Academic life is changing. Many of us are drowning in increasing work demands. Our ‘value’ is increasingly defined by competitive metrics. Academic career paths are often uncertain and precarious. What can we do, individually and collectively, to change academic life to be more sustainable, collaborative and effective? This podcast series offers long-form conversations with academics and thought leaders who share stories and insights, as well as bite-size ‘Related Work’ musings on specific topics drawing on literature and experience.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

Academic life is changing. Many of us are drowning in increasing work demands. Our ‘value’ is increasingly defined by competitive metrics. Academic career paths are often uncertain and precarious. What can we do, individually and collectively, to change academic life to be more sustainable, collaborative and effective? This podcast series offers long-form conversations with academics and thought leaders who share stories and insights, as well as bite-size ‘Related Work’ musings on specific topics drawing on literature and experience. This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Changing Academic Life

Jan Gulliksen

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/2018/8/8/jan-gulliksen for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/2018/8/8/jan-gulliksen" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/2018/8/8/jan-gulliksen</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Jan Gulliksen on middle management, leading autists, and building values and trust… with drama

Anna Cox

Anna Cox is a Reader and Deputy Director at the UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC). Anna shares her early career experiences, the challenge of lecturing a large class, and how she and her partner created flexible work practices to manage family and work. She also talks about the research studies she and her students have been doing on ‘work life balance’, including the ways in which people are different, and strategies such as creating microboundaries and frictions to help us take more control of our work.“The longer people are in this job, the more busy they get. You always seem to get more stuff. No-one is ever going to take anything away from you. So therefore it is down to you to say no to things and that’s really hard. I think lots of people struggle with that.”“Making changes is hard so we need to be thinking, what are the strategies that will help us make the changes we want to make.”She talks about (times approximate) …1:45 Background in cognitive science and HCI, and early career learning curves e.g., performing in front of large classes, dressing the part, being mistaken for a student instead of the lecturer, coming to be an institution10:10 Taking a risk, giving up a permanent job for a temporary one in moving to UCL to pursue a research career12:35 Co-editing an HCI textbook and taking maternity leave during the process15:55 Experience of having first child, maternity leave, returning to work and taking advantage of being able to work flexibly to juggle family, partner needs….but all parties needing to be flexible 22:13 “I suppose some people might think that I had to compromise on things like travel but I’d never really it very much so at the time it never felt like something I was giving up”24:05 Getting research funding on balance, through an unusual ‘sandpit’ process mixing an initial face to face and then virtual meetings (interesting experiences of getting ‘kicked out’ of the environment but where participants didn’t feel like they had been able to go through the usual ‘goodbye’ rituals)27:29 Digital Epiphanies project and a network (Balance Network) funded, and using a PhD student to extend that work28:13 What is a Digital Epiphany? Related to post traumatic growth, can we track computer activity and give people feedback so that they get to their own epiphany about balance?30:45 Studying academics, and professional services staff, and patterns of work relative to role and type of life they want and helping people understand what their preferences are so they can create the support they need33:23 And what can an organization do – not have one policy for everyone!34:09 “The longer people are in this job, the more busy they get. You always seem to get more stuff. No-one is ever going to take anything away from you. So therefore it is down to you to say no to things and that’s really hard. I think lots of people struggle with that.”34:45 Work on how people handle their email, and what is the best way to handle it; the difficulty people had in following instructions about either keeping on top of email or only looking at it once a day; more efficient if they try to minimize time dealing with email in clearly defined times, less disruptive to rest of work and deal with email quicker36:38 Work of Marta and how people use smart watches to manage when and how they respond to messages. The strategies people are adopting to work around the technologies and evolving practices.41:50 Own use of insights from the studies? Going through stages of using tools to track how much time working on the computer; times of year particularly busy that can be predictable but never really plan for it; putting in work around deadlines; using tools to help justify taking a break afterwards.43:13 “Is the reason that there is so much on my to do list that I don’t work enough? And it was very interesting to track how much time I worked and then say actually I do enough. And there is just too much work. I feel like I need that evidence.”43:55 Times switching off email from the phone, removing work account – creating micro-boundaries, to make it harder to slip back into behavior you don’t want to do45:05 Other examples of micro-boundaries: different email accounts, different devices and apps; creating frictions; becoming more conscious of what you are doing and reflecting on data that tells how we are living our lives;47:35 “But making changes is hard so we need to also be thinking what are the strategies that will help us make the changes we want to make”49:05 Questionnaires for understanding work-life boundary preferences, and then thinking about what strategies to adopt to help us gain control again51:35 Reflecting on own personal balance – overall pretty happy. But the irony of the enormous work to put together the Athena Swan award submission in part about the things to support flexibility and balance.53:40 Getting too much? “You recognize things when the other things you want to do in your life start becoming more difficult to include… then that is a good sign you need to think about what you are doing and change things”55:05 Broader changes? Creating a culture where more and more papers become expected and impact on early career researchers. Thinking about number of deadlines, more journal focus, job ads/promotions, more men taking parental leave and its influence on understanding of working part time, and all of us thinking about working less and spending more time on things we care about.58:00 Getting ideas to try to out from other podcast stories; tells a similar story of seeing in an application about someone holding a daily stand up meeting for their team, and then implementing that for her team on Slack using a bot for a daily check-in by the whole team; advantages of increased visibility all round1:04:45 Good academic life – getting to spend lots of time with her kids and feeling challenged and fulfilled at work and having control over what you do at work.1:05:40 EndRelated linksDigital Boundaries Project https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.comRelated publications including microboundary papers: https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/publications/Microboundary strategies booklet &amp; self-study diary on communication habits https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/home/resources-links/Marta Cecchinato – research on work-life-balance https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/marta-cecchinatoLinks to questionnaires:Kossek, Ellen Ernst. "Managing work life boundaries in the digital age." Organizational Dynamics 45.3 (2016): 258-270. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261616300705Kossek, Ellen Ernst, et al. "Work–nonwork boundary management profiles: A person-centered approach." Journal of Vocational Behavior 81.1 (2012): 112-128. http://ellenkossek.hrlr.msu.edu/documents/YJVBE2638finalofboundarymanagementstylesarticle.pdfThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/anna-cox" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Anna Cox</a> is a Reader and Deputy Director at the <a href="https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">UCL Interaction Centre (UCLIC)</a>. Anna shares her early career experiences, the challenge of lecturing a large class, and how she and her partner created flexible work practices to manage family and work. She also talks about the research studies she and her students have been doing on ‘work life balance’, including the ways in which people are different, and strategies such as creating microboundaries and frictions to help us take more control of our work.</h2><h2>“The longer people are in this job, the more busy they get. You always seem to get more stuff. No-one is ever going to take anything away from you. So therefore it is down to you to say no to things and that’s really hard. I think lots of people struggle with that.”</h2><h2>“Making changes is hard so we need to be thinking, what are the strategies that will help us make the changes we want to make.”</h2>She talks about (times approximate) …1:45 Background in cognitive science and HCI, and early career learning curves e.g., performing in front of large classes, dressing the part, being mistaken for a student instead of the lecturer, coming to be an institution10:10 Taking a risk, giving up a permanent job for a temporary one in moving to UCL to pursue a research career12:35 Co-editing an HCI textbook and taking maternity leave during the process15:55 Experience of having first child, maternity leave, returning to work and taking advantage of being able to work flexibly to juggle family, partner needs….but all parties needing to be flexible 22:13 “I suppose some people might think that I had to compromise on things like travel but I’d never really it very much so at the time it never felt like something I was giving up”24:05 Getting research funding on balance, through an unusual ‘sandpit’ process mixing an initial face to face and then virtual meetings (interesting experiences of getting ‘kicked out’ of the environment but where participants didn’t feel like they had been able to go through the usual ‘goodbye’ rituals)27:29 Digital Epiphanies project and a network (Balance Network) funded, and using a PhD student to extend that work28:13 What is a Digital Epiphany? Related to post traumatic growth, can we track computer activity and give people feedback so that they get to their own epiphany about balance?30:45 Studying academics, and professional services staff, and patterns of work relative to role and type of life they want and helping people understand what their preferences are so they can create the support they need33:23 And what can an organization do – not have one policy for everyone!34:09 “The longer people are in this job, the more busy they get. You always seem to get more stuff. No-one is ever going to take anything away from you. So therefore it is down to you to say no to things and that’s really hard. I think lots of people struggle with that.”34:45 Work on how people handle their email, and what is the best way to handle it; the difficulty people had in following instructions about either keeping on top of email or only looking at it once a day; more efficient if they try to minimize time dealing with email in clearly defined times, less disruptive to rest of work and deal with email quicker36:38 Work of Marta and how people use smart watches to manage when and how they respond to messages. The strategies people are adopting to work around the technologies and evolving practices.41:50 Own use of insights from the studies? Going through stages of using tools to track how much time working on the computer; times of year particularly busy that can be predictable but never really plan for it; putting in work around deadlines; using tools to help justify taking a break afterwards.43:13 “Is the reason that there is so much on my to do list that I don’t work enough? And it was very interesting to track how much time I worked and then say actually I do enough. And there is just too much work. I feel like I need that evidence.”43:55 Times switching off email from the phone, removing work account – creating micro-boundaries, to make it harder to slip back into behavior you don’t want to do45:05 Other examples of micro-boundaries: different email accounts, different devices and apps; creating frictions; becoming more conscious of what you are doing and reflecting on data that tells how we are living our lives;47:35 “But making changes is hard so we need to also be thinking what are the strategies that will help us make the changes we want to make”49:05 Questionnaires for understanding work-life boundary preferences, and then thinking about what strategies to adopt to help us gain control again51:35 Reflecting on own personal balance – overall pretty happy. But the irony of the enormous work to put together the Athena Swan award submission in part about the things to support flexibility and balance.53:40 Getting too much? “You recognize things when the other things you want to do in your life start becoming more difficult to include… then that is a good sign you need to think about what you are doing and change things”55:05 Broader changes? Creating a culture where more and more papers become expected and impact on early career researchers. Thinking about number of deadlines, more journal focus, job ads/promotions, more men taking parental leave and its influence on understanding of working part time, and all of us thinking about working less and spending more time on things we care about.58:00 Getting ideas to try to out from other podcast stories; tells a similar story of seeing in an application about someone holding a daily stand up meeting for their team, and then implementing that for her team on Slack using a bot for a daily check-in by the whole team; advantages of increased visibility all round1:04:45 Good academic life – getting to spend lots of time with her kids and feeling challenged and fulfilled at work and having control over what you do at work.1:05:40 EndRelated linksDigital Boundaries Project <a href="https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com</a>Related publications including microboundary papers: <a href="https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/publications/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/publications/</a>Microboundary strategies booklet &amp; self-study diary on communication habits <a href="https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/home/resources-links/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://digitalboundariesresearch.wordpress.com/home/resources-links/</a>Marta Cecchinato – research on work-life-balance <a href="https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/marta-cecchinato" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://uclic.ucl.ac.uk/people/marta-cecchinato</a>Links to questionnaires:Kossek, Ellen Ernst. "Managing work life boundaries in the digital age." Organizational Dynamics 45.3 (2016): 258-270. <a href="http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261616300705" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0090261616300705</a>Kossek, Ellen Ernst, et al. "Work–nonwork boundary management profiles: A person-centered approach." Journal of Vocational Behavior 81.1 (2012): 112-128. <a href="http://ellenkossek.hrlr.msu.edu/documents/YJVBE2638finalofboundarymanagementstylesarticle.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://ellenkossek.hrlr.msu.edu/documents/YJVBE2638finalofboundarymanagementstylesarticle.pdf</a>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Anna Cox on family, work & strategies for making the changes we want

Jolanta Burke

Jolanta Burke is a Positive Psychologist, who works as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Leader of the MAPPCP programme at University of East London and also has her own consultancy business. Her enthusiasm and passion for her work is infectious. She shares how she dealt with burn-out during her PhD, and having to find a place of harmonious rather than obsessive passion, and how this influences her work supervising students now. She also shares her experiences working in business contexts as a consultant, in creating positive workplaces and how she thinks we could better do this in academia. And she shares her passion for making a better world through communicating our research to people and to help people.[Note – this contains a common Irish turn of phrase that some people might find uncomfortable]“We are creators of our own life. When things don’t work you can always take a step back and fix it.”“Positive organisations are about high performance, getting the best out of people, and people getting the best out of each other.”“People in academia have a responsibility to share this wonderful knowledge. … My mission is to make a better world.”She talks about (times approximate) …01:50 Start: Background working in managerial roles in business for many years, getting interested in the information given to trainers but recognised mixed views, saying ‘research says’ but no basis more assumptions. Yale study about goal setting, that everyone talks about but was never actually done. This inspired her to look at research, did two Masters, and fell in love with Positive Psychology. Left job to do full time PhD in Trinity. Working in academia since then and absolutely love it.5:12 First Masters in learning and development, hated psychology after bachelors, but by end of Masters missed psychology and came across positive psychology and did another Masters in positive psychology, looking at what’s right with people, and using strengths to live a better life. Crucial in a work context.7:54 Biggest challenges coming back to study after being in work – taking ages to understand how to carry out research. Now puts so much effort into explaining the process to students and giving them the bigger picture. Talks about going step by step through the process of designing research with them, setting up expectations between meetings, keeping in touch, loving working with students because “I know I’m making a difference in their lives”, giving feedback to students whenever they need it.11:40 Challenging at times to “My work is part of my life”. Working from home office most of the time. “My life is my work… but I manage it in a way that allows me take a break.” Taking time out throughout the day. Actually doesn’t know how many hours she works.13:10 Worried that passion can fall into obsession. Did get into obsessive passion during her PhD, over the top, caught up in PhD frenzy, leading to burn out in 3 months of PhD, needing to take a month out of her PhD and went back home. Came back refreshed, refocussed. Since has always tried to be aware of ‘harmonious passion’15:52 Different strategies after the month off: to do with flow, being engaged, driven by pleasure for reading and learning; finding something physical; office only for work, reading one ‘silly book’ per month and to force this set up a book club, the group forces her to read; going hiking especially when times are hectic; having to see friends twice a week. Calendar goes out months in advance. Makes sure every week has something scheduled. And there are days when needs to close off emails but usually fills days with blocks.20:15 Constantly involved in loads of projects but also constantly looking for balance, mental health really important and minding it, “I’m the only one who can actually do it”. “We are creators of our own life. When things don’t work you can always take a step back and fix it”. Still days when overwhelmed but now has an awareness. Now has a scale in her head 1-10, when reaching around 7, it’s time to stop. “I’ve been there done it and don’t want it so I need to protect my peace and quiet”22:55 Supervisor understanding of need for time off. Tries to put the same into work with her students. Gives example of student who was overwhelmed and giving her extra support. Could have accessed university support structures eg counselling but didn’t want to “send her off’.25:45 Recent article about PhD students and stress. Are counselling services the right avenue? Has come across a good few people who don’t want any more to do with the topic of their PhD, one in particular standing out, completely burnt out. We’re getting something wrong, we’re putting too much pressure on people. If she hadn’t looked after herself during her own PhD, this is where she would have ended up. Awareness of obsessive vs harmonious passion made all the difference.27:51 Supervisor still said she had to push herself, live and breathe topic, but didn’t know the sort of person she was. One of the worst pieces of advice she could have got. So when her students email her now saying they are overwhelmed she says to them “That is absolutely no problem. Go and live your life. If you need to take a break, take a break. … it’s not the be all and end all.” Even if time is running out, there are always ways to work around this. Gives example of a particular student and how she approached this with her.29:35 Helping people get the perspective, in the moment merit versus distinction might seem a big trade-off but cost can be too high. Also points to importance for us as supervisors to get to know who we’re working with, where they are coming from. The most crucial thing in the first meeting, “Why are you doing this, what do you want to get out of it”. Might not work for all students though. Some might still need some pushing along. When you get to know them and their motivations, you can tweak the way you talk to them to connect to this. Gives some examples. Getting to know the students is crucial and knowing when to push and when not to push.33:08 Also has students who are a puzzle, trying hard to find a way. Transparency great way to grow. Great to name it if you don’t think there is a connection.34:10 How does working from a home office go, does she miss the social aspects? No and a puzzle for her too. Actually more of an introvert. Gets tired with too many people around her. Shares an office with two other people. Hard to concentrate, Never effective when there. Goes home to do the work. Even in business always had own office, with peace and quiet. Doesn’t feel alone. Has lots of meetings.35:30 Day is very structured. In the morning never have meetings. Meetings arranged for the afternoon. Gets up does writing and jobs that need attention. Gets up really early in the morning. Loads of energy. Has a morning routine. Doesn’t switch on email until around 9am. Diary is her life. Most of the time leaves email to the afternoon.37:55 Always interested in workplace and positive psychology in the workplace. Masters 10 years ago while working full time. Very intense. In the company, she was an internal consultant with opportunities to try things in the company. Still consulting with businesses. Does part-time lecturing to have time to do this work with businesses. Business School in Trinity College asked her to deliver talks to MBA students and this led to other course teaching, leading to developing a positive organisation module.  And this led to writing a book on applying positive psychology to business because she couldn’t a book on the topic to give to her students. Now almost finished the book. Will be published in May next year.41:30 What is a positive organisation and intervention? Intervention is like an exercise or activity to help people live a good life. Gives an example of an intervention in a company helping their sales people, teaching them optimism to retrain their thought (but without using the terms optimism or positive psychology etc).  Three months later market share had increased by 11%. And clients were mentioning spontaneously about how positive the team were.44:55 Not about creating happy workers. But can create an environment of transparency, coming from leaders, recruiting people who are great at what they do and will connect to others. Positive organisations understand the importance of working on people’s strengths, on creating an environment that has a balance of positive emotions. Unfortunately the ‘positive’ in the positive psychology can lead people to think it is just about happiness. It’s not. Positive organisations are about high performance, getting the best out of people, and people getting the best out of each other.47:10 Comparing business and academic department/university as organisations – very different. Own views, in business too focussed on money. Not idealistic enough. In academia, reversed, all about ideas but not enough thinking about money. Would love a happy balance. Academics need to understand they don’t need to work in silos. In business you work in teams. In academia, bright ideas, write a book, my idea is best, rather than sitting around a table to discuss how to help others and also make money and create happier people outside. We do research to help others, not just because we want to publish a paper.49:30 Pressure of publishing. Every time she has a review coming up, panics, and quickly finishes a paper she has in progress. But she loves doing so many other things. Would prefer to write a book to help people love a good life than write an academic paper.  Conflict. But maybe when more experienced this is clearer. Writing books to go to different groups of people. People don’t read academic books.51:40 In reaching people she also has done a slot on radio and has a YouTube channel. These things are more important to her than anything else. Sometimes feel bad about it when among all these famous researchers creating new models. But wants to help people understand things better and wants to help people outside of academia. Doesn’t want people reading the like of Tim Robbins. People in academia have a responsibility to share this wonderful knowledge. Talks about her YouTube channel. “My mission is to make a better world.”54:15 Is public engagement valued in Psychology? Recognised but looked upon as the worst version of what you can write. But still appreciated. Need to write books. Part of evaluation is needing to have books or papers published. But big pressure on papers. Thinks books for the public will become more recognised otherwise what are we doing this for? Allowing for diversity.56:50 What could each of us do to create a better workplace in academia? Stop working in silos, create teams, not just in one department but creating working teams to make a difference. Play to our strengths and teams would allow for people to use complementary strengths to add value for one another and for people. And need to know what our strengths are. In business, create teams on basis of someone good on one basis and another person on another, but we don’t do this in academia. More than character strengths, others are more focussed on preference for working in particular ways. Place for all of them. Also a place for just having a conversation of what are my strengths.1:01:15 When doing her PhD, did an additional inter-disciplinary thing with PhD students from different disciplines/universities coming together for an entrepreneurial degree, to think about how to create a business out of their PhD topics. Talks about how the lecturer got them working together. Project work “How will I work with engineers? I don’t think like them!” Had conflict, it was brilliant. Could we introduce something like this from academics? Teams wanting to improve their work together. Developing our own personal skills for working together.1:04:02 Final thoughts. Really important to life your life to the full. If work gives you satisfaction make it an integral part of your life. Always make sure no matter how much passion you have for things you always need to have balance and have passion for other things as well. Harmonious passion.1:05:22 EndRelated LinksJolanta Burke – at UEL https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/b/jolanta-burkeMAPPCP program at UEL https://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/msc-applied-positive-psychology-and-coaching-psychologyJolanta Burke - consulting http://jolantaburke.comJolanta’s YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/PositivePsychologyforLifewithDrJolantaBurkeStrengths survey (example) - http://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/b/jolanta-burke" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Jolanta Burke</a> is a Positive Psychologist, who works as a Senior Lecturer and Associate Leader of the <a href="https://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/msc-applied-positive-psychology-and-coaching-psychology" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">MAPPCP</a> programme at University of East London and also has her own <a href="http://jolantaburke.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">consultancy</a> business. Her enthusiasm and passion for her work is infectious. She shares how she dealt with burn-out during her PhD, and having to find a place of harmonious rather than obsessive passion, and how this influences her work supervising students now. She also shares her experiences working in business contexts as a consultant, in creating positive workplaces and how she thinks we could better do this in academia. And she shares her passion for making a better world through communicating our research to people and to help people.</h2>[Note – this contains a common Irish turn of phrase that some people might find uncomfortable]<h2>“We are creators of our own life. When things don’t work you can always take a step back and fix it.”</h2><h2>“Positive organisations are about high performance, getting the best out of people, and people getting the best out of each other.”</h2><h2>“People in academia have a responsibility to share this wonderful knowledge. … My mission is to make a better world.”</h2>She talks about (times approximate) …01:50 Start: Background working in managerial roles in business for many years, getting interested in the information given to trainers but recognised mixed views, saying ‘research says’ but no basis more assumptions. Yale study about goal setting, that everyone talks about but was never actually done. This inspired her to look at research, did two Masters, and fell in love with Positive Psychology. Left job to do full time PhD in Trinity. Working in academia since then and absolutely love it.5:12 First Masters in learning and development, hated psychology after bachelors, but by end of Masters missed psychology and came across positive psychology and did another Masters in positive psychology, looking at what’s right with people, and using strengths to live a better life. Crucial in a work context.7:54 Biggest challenges coming back to study after being in work – taking ages to understand how to carry out research. Now puts so much effort into explaining the process to students and giving them the bigger picture. Talks about going step by step through the process of designing research with them, setting up expectations between meetings, keeping in touch, loving working with students because “I know I’m making a difference in their lives”, giving feedback to students whenever they need it.11:40 Challenging at times to “My work is part of my life”. Working from home office most of the time. “My life is my work… but I manage it in a way that allows me take a break.” Taking time out throughout the day. Actually doesn’t know how many hours she works.13:10 Worried that passion can fall into obsession. Did get into obsessive passion during her PhD, over the top, caught up in PhD frenzy, leading to burn out in 3 months of PhD, needing to take a month out of her PhD and went back home. Came back refreshed, refocussed. Since has always tried to be aware of ‘harmonious passion’15:52 Different strategies after the month off: to do with flow, being engaged, driven by pleasure for reading and learning; finding something physical; office only for work, reading one ‘silly book’ per month and to force this set up a book club, the group forces her to read; going hiking especially when times are hectic; having to see friends twice a week. Calendar goes out months in advance. Makes sure every week has something scheduled. And there are days when needs to close off emails but usually fills days with blocks.20:15 Constantly involved in loads of projects but also constantly looking for balance, mental health really important and minding it, “I’m the only one who can actually do it”. “We are creators of our own life. When things don’t work you can always take a step back and fix it”. Still days when overwhelmed but now has an awareness. Now has a scale in her head 1-10, when reaching around 7, it’s time to stop. “I’ve been there done it and don’t want it so I need to protect my peace and quiet”22:55 Supervisor understanding of need for time off. Tries to put the same into work with her students. Gives example of student who was overwhelmed and giving her extra support. Could have accessed university support structures eg counselling but didn’t want to “send her off’.25:45 Recent article about PhD students and stress. Are counselling services the right avenue? Has come across a good few people who don’t want any more to do with the topic of their PhD, one in particular standing out, completely burnt out. We’re getting something wrong, we’re putting too much pressure on people. If she hadn’t looked after herself during her own PhD, this is where she would have ended up. Awareness of obsessive vs harmonious passion made all the difference.27:51 Supervisor still said she had to push herself, live and breathe topic, but didn’t know the sort of person she was. One of the worst pieces of advice she could have got. So when her students email her now saying they are overwhelmed she says to them “That is absolutely no problem. Go and live your life. If you need to take a break, take a break. … it’s not the be all and end all.” Even if time is running out, there are always ways to work around this. Gives example of a particular student and how she approached this with her.29:35 Helping people get the perspective, in the moment merit versus distinction might seem a big trade-off but cost can be too high. Also points to importance for us as supervisors to get to know who we’re working with, where they are coming from. The most crucial thing in the first meeting, “Why are you doing this, what do you want to get out of it”. Might not work for all students though. Some might still need some pushing along. When you get to know them and their motivations, you can tweak the way you talk to them to connect to this. Gives some examples. Getting to know the students is crucial and knowing when to push and when not to push.33:08 Also has students who are a puzzle, trying hard to find a way. Transparency great way to grow. Great to name it if you don’t think there is a connection.34:10 How does working from a home office go, does she miss the social aspects? No and a puzzle for her too. Actually more of an introvert. Gets tired with too many people around her. Shares an office with two other people. Hard to concentrate, Never effective when there. Goes home to do the work. Even in business always had own office, with peace and quiet. Doesn’t feel alone. Has lots of meetings.35:30 Day is very structured. In the morning never have meetings. Meetings arranged for the afternoon. Gets up does writing and jobs that need attention. Gets up really early in the morning. Loads of energy. Has a morning routine. Doesn’t switch on email until around 9am. Diary is her life. Most of the time leaves email to the afternoon.37:55 Always interested in workplace and positive psychology in the workplace. Masters 10 years ago while working full time. Very intense. In the company, she was an internal consultant with opportunities to try things in the company. Still consulting with businesses. Does part-time lecturing to have time to do this work with businesses. Business School in Trinity College asked her to deliver talks to MBA students and this led to other course teaching, leading to developing a positive organisation module.  And this led to writing a book on applying positive psychology to business because she couldn’t a book on the topic to give to her students. Now almost finished the book. Will be published in May next year.41:30 What is a positive organisation and intervention? Intervention is like an exercise or activity to help people live a good life. Gives an example of an intervention in a company helping their sales people, teaching them optimism to retrain their thought (but without using the terms optimism or positive psychology etc).  Three months later market share had increased by 11%. And clients were mentioning spontaneously about how positive the team were.44:55 Not about creating happy workers. But can create an environment of transparency, coming from leaders, recruiting people who are great at what they do and will connect to others. Positive organisations understand the importance of working on people’s strengths, on creating an environment that has a balance of positive emotions. Unfortunately the ‘positive’ in the positive psychology can lead people to think it is just about happiness. It’s not. Positive organisations are about high performance, getting the best out of people, and people getting the best out of each other.47:10 Comparing business and academic department/university as organisations – very different. Own views, in business too focussed on money. Not idealistic enough. In academia, reversed, all about ideas but not enough thinking about money. Would love a happy balance. Academics need to understand they don’t need to work in silos. In business you work in teams. In academia, bright ideas, write a book, my idea is best, rather than sitting around a table to discuss how to help others and also make money and create happier people outside. We do research to help others, not just because we want to publish a paper.49:30 Pressure of publishing. Every time she has a review coming up, panics, and quickly finishes a paper she has in progress. But she loves doing so many other things. Would prefer to write a book to help people love a good life than write an academic paper.  Conflict. But maybe when more experienced this is clearer. Writing books to go to different groups of people. People don’t read academic books.51:40 In reaching people she also has done a slot on radio and has a YouTube channel. These things are more important to her than anything else. Sometimes feel bad about it when among all these famous researchers creating new models. But wants to help people understand things better and wants to help people outside of academia. Doesn’t want people reading the like of Tim Robbins. People in academia have a responsibility to share this wonderful knowledge. Talks about her YouTube channel. “My mission is to make a better world.”54:15 Is public engagement valued in Psychology? Recognised but looked upon as the worst version of what you can write. But still appreciated. Need to write books. Part of evaluation is needing to have books or papers published. But big pressure on papers. Thinks books for the public will become more recognised otherwise what are we doing this for? Allowing for diversity.56:50 What could each of us do to create a better workplace in academia? Stop working in silos, create teams, not just in one department but creating working teams to make a difference. Play to our strengths and teams would allow for people to use complementary strengths to add value for one another and for people. And need to know what our strengths are. In business, create teams on basis of someone good on one basis and another person on another, but we don’t do this in academia. More than character strengths, others are more focussed on preference for working in particular ways. Place for all of them. Also a place for just having a conversation of what are my strengths.1:01:15 When doing her PhD, did an additional inter-disciplinary thing with PhD students from different disciplines/universities coming together for an entrepreneurial degree, to think about how to create a business out of their PhD topics. Talks about how the lecturer got them working together. Project work “How will I work with engineers? I don’t think like them!” Had conflict, it was brilliant. Could we introduce something like this from academics? Teams wanting to improve their work together. Developing our own personal skills for working together.1:04:02 Final thoughts. Really important to life your life to the full. If work gives you satisfaction make it an integral part of your life. Always make sure no matter how much passion you have for things you always need to have balance and have passion for other things as well. Harmonious passion.1:05:22 EndRelated LinksJolanta Burke – at UEL <a href="https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/b/jolanta-burke" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.uel.ac.uk/staff/b/jolanta-burke</a>MAPPCP program at UEL <a href="https://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/msc-applied-positive-psychology-and-coaching-psychology" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.uel.ac.uk/postgraduate/courses/msc-applied-positive-psychology-and-coaching-psychology</a>Jolanta Burke - consulting <a href="http://jolantaburke.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://jolantaburke.com</a>Jolanta’s YouTube channel <a href="https://www.youtube.com/c/PositivePsychologyforLifewithDrJolantaBurke" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.youtube.com/c/PositivePsychologyforLifewithDrJolantaBurke</a>Strengths survey (example) - <a href="http://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.viacharacter.org/www/Character-Strengths-Survey</a> This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Jolanta Burke on burnout, harmonious passion, positive workplaces & helping others 

Ali Black

Ali Black is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland Australia. Ali tells stories of courage and care and connection, stories that grew out of painful interactions with ‘the academic machine’ and feeling like failure. She talks about creating a different way of engaging in academia, one that is based on intentionality and meaning, on connecting to what is important, on being and becoming, and on creating a more caring and collaborative culture. An important step in this was reaching out to colleagues and forming a women’s writing group to write together and to explore their versions of slow scholarship.“How we might cultivate ethics of care and caring where we acknowledge our human dimensions and actually care for one another as part of our work.”“Failure is actually…an invitation and a gift to go’ well what do I want to do differently, what isn’t sustainable, what am I not prepared to do anymore’.”"… it is finding the ‘and’ in the ‘yes’"She talks about (times approximate) …2:11 Long career, working in three unis, career interruptions for children, family bereavement5:40 Writing about the blurring between the personal and professional; pressure to put on a professional face despite whatever is going on in the rest of life; the academy needing to recognize we are human beings and these personal things happen; cultivating ethics of care and caring for one another as part of our work8:18 Inviting women friends/academics to share stories about what is it like to be in the ‘afternoon of our lives’, meeting for writing workshops, giving feedback, connecting13:00 Stumbling across slow scholarship, trying other ways of being an academic, being more deliberate and intentional14:55 Common themes from the stories – understanding the complexity of lives that we’re all living and how amazing to negotiate all these things16:48 Importance of sharing and particularly responding to say ‘I hear you’ or ‘you’re amazing’18:15 “We’re in the arena and need to be valuing each other for having the courage to stay in the arena and to do our best and to care”19:00 Caught up in the managerialism, constantly feeling like we’re not enough, important to try to change the local culture so we can change the wider culture, and care for one another, doing those things that don’t count but count in terms of the quality of our lives and our values21:37 Being part of the academic machine and the tension of perpetuating the functioning of that machine, but being more alive when you follow what matters to you22: 37 Story of moving to a new university, accepting a lower position ‘to get a foot in the door’, meaning a salary reduction and being on probation for 3 years, and feeling like a failure, not being valued and wounded as a person and academic26:37 The ‘wise women’ writing became a saving space, finding her own ways of working on what mattered to her, creating a promotion application that was “like me” and getting promoted – getting there without playing the game perfectly; “In the end I can only be myself and I’m very good at being myself”30:05 Encouraging that might not have to do things the ‘system way’, but doing it our way within some of their frameworks; but not all happy story, having depression, but recognizing that“Failure is actually a gift because there’s no-where to go, you’re at the bottom of the heap, so you can only decide well what will I do now so it became an invitation and a gift to go well what do I want to do differently, what isn’t sustainable, what am I not prepared to do anymore.”31:20 Office surrounded by inspirational messages, planning, decorating diaryOn her desk: “Is this task vital? Does it really matter to me or someone l love and care about? Give my energy to what matters to me and to what inspires me” – as a result, not going to faculty meetings any more, anything that is deadening to the soul or joy or sense of hope33:54 Say yes to the spaces and places to contribute that you’re going to like a lot more, find meaningful or fit your values; if we said yes to everything we’d be overwhelmed overworked and wouldn’t be able to focus on what matters to you, changing your framing for service, meetings35:56 Importance of knowing ourselves, strengths, values38:25 Making time for human interactions, inspired by slow strategies suggestion from slow scholarship article, valuing quality over quantity, valuing thinking, that we need time to think41:10 Counting in some different ways, valuing time and thinking, and organizing spaces differently to engender intentional conversations taking to meet and discuss ideas – connecting caring listening important42:58 Taking care of ourselves before we take care of others; planning weekend spots with cups of tea, cats, sleeping in, family, leaving no space for work – weekends as sacred self care, family care times44:23 Still working long hours but on things that matter46:02 Importance of down time for creative thoughts to gel, need to stop thinking activity is productivity, making time to think and to write; importance of writing as research, and turning it into a collective process – “supporting the productivity of the academic machine while also being fulfilled for the personal the human being … it is finding the ‘and’ in the ‘yes’”49:25 Self care practices, reading widely, getting inspired, being content to be me but the best version of me, becoming intentional, creating a vision board53:11 Being, belonging, becoming … and ‘becoming’ takes the pressure off, always becoming56:40 Encouraging us to find our own groups and making local connections, and pointers to related links1:00:31 End Related linksIf you are a woman in academia, please contribute your voice to this survey on women in academia for research by Ali and Susie Garvis: http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/survey.htmlAli's Research Whisperer post "Saved by slow scholarship" https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/saved-by-slow-scholarship/Websites Ali has created to support women and their listening/storying/connectinghttp://www.wisewomen.world/http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/Blogs Ali finds inspiring  On Being http://www.onbeing.org/Brain Pickings https://www.brainpickings.org/The Slow Academic (Agnes Bosanquet)  https://theslowacademic.wordpress.com/Research Whisperer  https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/Slow Scholarship readingBerg, M., and Seeber., B. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Canada: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., &amp; Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14, 4, 1235-1259. Retrieved from   http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/1058Link to ‘Wise Women’ memoirs and the ‘invitation’ I sent out  https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z5q83mqkohac295/AACt8R6yox8AYaWYNdZiBG14a?dl=0 Manuscripts we have written about our collective writing or the blurring of personal/professionalBlack, A.L, Crimmins, G., Jones, J.K. (in press). Reducing the drag: Creating V formations through slow scholarship and story.  In S. Riddle, M., Harmes, and P.A. Danaher (Eds) Producing pleasure within the contemporary university. Sense Publishing.Loch, S., Black, A., Crimmins, G., Jones, J., Impiccini, J. (in press). Writing stories and lives: Documenting women connecting, communing and coming together. Book series Transformative Pedagogies in the Visual Domain, Common Ground Publishing. Eighth title Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research co-creation and practice. Kim Snepvangers and Sue Davis (Eds).Loch, S., and Black, A.L. (2016). We cannot do this work without being who we are: Researching and experiencing academic selves.  In B. Harreveld, M. Danaher, B. Knight, C. Lawson and G. Busch (Eds). Constructing Methodology for Qualitative Research: Researching Education and Social Practices. Palgrave MacMillan: UK and US Black A.L. (2015). Authoring a life: Writing ourselves in/out of our work in education. In M. Baguley, Y. Findlay., M. C. Kirby. (Eds). Meanings and Motivation in Education Research. UK: Routledge, Research in Education SeriesBlack, A.L, and O’Dea, S. (2015). Building a tapestry of knowledge in the spaces in between: Weaving personal and collective meaning through arts-based research. In K. Trimmer, A. Black, and S. Riddle. (Eds). Mainstreams, Margins and the Spaces In-Between: New possibilities for Education Research. UK: Routledge, Research in Education SeriesBlack, A.  (2017). I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing things I ‘almost’ cannot say. Life Writing, Reflections section, Taylor &amp; Francis. DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1191980Black, A.L, and Loch, S (2014). Called to respond: The potential of unveiling hiddens. Reconceptualizing Educatonal Research Methodology, Vol 5, No 2, Special Issue.  Manifesto of care:

<h2><a href="http://www.usc.edu.au/explore/structure/faculty-of-science-health-education-and-engineering/staff/dr-ali-black" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Ali Black</a> is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education at University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland Australia. Ali tells stories of courage and care and connection, stories that grew out of painful interactions with ‘the academic machine’ and feeling like failure. She talks about creating a different way of engaging in academia, one that is based on intentionality and meaning, on connecting to what is important, on being and becoming, and on creating a more caring and collaborative culture. An important step in this was reaching out to colleagues and forming a <a href="http://www.wisewomen.world/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">women’s writing group</a> to write together and to explore their versions of slow scholarship.</h2><h2>“How we might cultivate ethics of care and caring where we acknowledge our human dimensions and actually care for one another as part of our work.”</h2><h2>“Failure is actually…an invitation and a gift to go’ well what do I want to do differently, what isn’t sustainable, what am I not prepared to do anymore’.”</h2><h2>"… it is finding the ‘and’ in the ‘yes’"</h2>She talks about (times approximate) …2:11 Long career, working in three unis, career interruptions for children, family bereavement5:40 Writing about the blurring between the personal and professional; pressure to put on a professional face despite whatever is going on in the rest of life; the academy needing to recognize we are human beings and these personal things happen; cultivating ethics of care and caring for one another as part of our work8:18 Inviting women friends/academics to share stories about what is it like to be in the ‘afternoon of our lives’, meeting for writing workshops, giving feedback, connecting13:00 Stumbling across slow scholarship, trying other ways of being an academic, being more deliberate and intentional14:55 Common themes from the stories – understanding the complexity of lives that we’re all living and how amazing to negotiate all these things16:48 Importance of sharing and particularly responding to say ‘I hear you’ or ‘you’re amazing’18:15 “We’re in the arena and need to be valuing each other for having the courage to stay in the arena and to do our best and to care”19:00 Caught up in the managerialism, constantly feeling like we’re not enough, important to try to change the local culture so we can change the wider culture, and care for one another, doing those things that don’t count but count in terms of the quality of our lives and our values21:37 Being part of the academic machine and the tension of perpetuating the functioning of that machine, but being more alive when you follow what matters to you22: 37 Story of moving to a new university, accepting a lower position ‘to get a foot in the door’, meaning a salary reduction and being on probation for 3 years, and feeling like a failure, not being valued and wounded as a person and academic26:37 The ‘wise women’ writing became a saving space, finding her own ways of working on what mattered to her, creating a promotion application that was “like me” and getting promoted – getting there without playing the game perfectly; “In the end I can only be myself and I’m very good at being myself”30:05 Encouraging that might not have to do things the ‘system way’, but doing it our way within some of their frameworks; but not all happy story, having depression, but recognizing that“Failure is actually a gift because there’s no-where to go, you’re at the bottom of the heap, so you can only decide well what will I do now so it became an invitation and a gift to go well what do I want to do differently, what isn’t sustainable, what am I not prepared to do anymore.”31:20 Office surrounded by inspirational messages, planning, decorating diaryOn her desk: “Is this task vital? Does it really matter to me or someone l love and care about? Give my energy to what matters to me and to what inspires me” – as a result, not going to faculty meetings any more, anything that is deadening to the soul or joy or sense of hope33:54 Say yes to the spaces and places to contribute that you’re going to like a lot more, find meaningful or fit your values; if we said yes to everything we’d be overwhelmed overworked and wouldn’t be able to focus on what matters to you, changing your framing for service, meetings35:56 Importance of knowing ourselves, strengths, values38:25 Making time for human interactions, inspired by slow strategies suggestion from slow scholarship article, valuing quality over quantity, valuing thinking, that we need time to think41:10 Counting in some different ways, valuing time and thinking, and organizing spaces differently to engender intentional conversations taking to meet and discuss ideas – connecting caring listening important42:58 Taking care of ourselves before we take care of others; planning weekend spots with cups of tea, cats, sleeping in, family, leaving no space for work – weekends as sacred self care, family care times44:23 Still working long hours but on things that matter46:02 Importance of down time for creative thoughts to gel, need to stop thinking activity is productivity, making time to think and to write; importance of writing as research, and turning it into a collective process – “supporting the productivity of the academic machine while also being fulfilled for the personal the human being … it is finding the ‘and’ in the ‘yes’”49:25 Self care practices, reading widely, getting inspired, being content to be me but the best version of me, becoming intentional, creating a vision board53:11 Being, belonging, becoming … and ‘becoming’ takes the pressure off, always becoming56:40 Encouraging us to find our own groups and making local connections, and pointers to related links1:00:31 End Related linksIf you are a woman in academia, please contribute your voice to this survey on women in academia for research by Ali and Susie Garvis: <a href="http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/survey.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/survey.html</a>Ali's Research Whisperer post "Saved by slow scholarship"<a href="https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/saved-by-slow-scholarship/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/2016/08/16/saved-by-slow-scholarship/</a>Websites Ali has created to support women and their listening/storying/connecting<a href="http://www.wisewomen.world/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.wisewomen.world/</a><a href="http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.thewomenwhowrite.com/</a>Blogs Ali finds inspiring On Being <a href="http://www.onbeing.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.onbeing.org/</a>Brain Pickings <a href="https://www.brainpickings.org/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.brainpickings.org/</a>The Slow Academic (Agnes Bosanquet) <a href="https://theslowacademic.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://theslowacademic.wordpress.com/</a>Research Whisperer <a href="https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://theresearchwhisperer.wordpress.com/</a>Slow Scholarship readingBerg, M., and Seeber., B. (2016). The slow professor: Challenging the culture of speed in the academy. Canada: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division.Mountz, A., Bonds, A., Mansfield, B., Loyd, J., Hyndman, J., Walton-Roberts, M., Basu, R., Whitson, R., Hawkins, R., Hamilton, T., &amp; Curran, W. (2015). For Slow Scholarship: A Feminist Politics of Resistance through Collective Action in the Neoliberal University. ACME: An International E-Journal for Critical Geographies, 14, 4, 1235-1259. Retrieved from   <a href="http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/1058" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://ojs.unbc.ca/index.php/acme/article/view/1058</a>Link to ‘Wise Women’ memoirs and the ‘invitation’ I sent out <a href="https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z5q83mqkohac295/AACt8R6yox8AYaWYNdZiBG14a?dl=0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> https://www.dropbox.com/sh/z5q83mqkohac295/AACt8R6yox8AYaWYNdZiBG14a?dl=0</a> Manuscripts we have written about our collective writing or the blurring of personal/professionalBlack, A.L, Crimmins, G., Jones, J.K. (in press). Reducing the drag: Creating V formations through slow scholarship and story.  In S. Riddle, M., Harmes, and P.A. Danaher (Eds) Producing pleasure within the contemporary university. Sense Publishing.Loch, S., Black, A., Crimmins, G., Jones, J., Impiccini, J. (in press). Writing stories and lives: Documenting women connecting, communing and coming together. Book series Transformative Pedagogies in the Visual Domain, Common Ground Publishing. Eighth title Embodied and walking pedagogies engaging the visual domain: Research co-creation and practice. Kim Snepvangers and Sue Davis (Eds).Loch, S., and Black, A.L. (2016). We cannot do this work without being who we are: Researching and experiencing academic selves.  In B. Harreveld, M. Danaher, B. Knight, C. Lawson and G. Busch (Eds). Constructing Methodology for Qualitative Research: Researching Education and Social Practices. Palgrave MacMillan: UK and US Black A.L. (2015). Authoring a life: Writing ourselves in/out of our work in education. In M. Baguley, Y. Findlay., M. C. Kirby. (Eds). Meanings and Motivation in Education Research. UK: Routledge, Research in Education SeriesBlack, A.L, and O’Dea, S. (2015). Building a tapestry of knowledge in the spaces in between: Weaving personal and collective meaning through arts-based research. In K. Trimmer, A. Black, and S. Riddle. (Eds). Mainstreams, Margins and the Spaces In-Between: New possibilities for Education Research. UK: Routledge, Research in Education SeriesBlack, A. (2017). I am Keith Wright’s daughter: Writing things I ‘almost’ cannot say. Life Writing, Reflections section, Taylor &amp; Francis. DOI: 10.1080/14484528.2016.1191980Black, A.L, and Loch, S (2014). Called to respond: The potential of unveiling hiddens. Reconceptualizing Educatonal Research Methodology, Vol 5, No 2, Special Issue.  Manifesto of care:

Ali Black on doing academia differently...caring, connecting & becoming

Chris Frauenberger

Chris Frauenberger is a post-doctoral researcher and principle investigator at Technical University Vienna. Chris shares his experiences navigating various post-doc positions, taking parental leave, negotiating with his partner about family-career choices, dealing with an uncertain future, and being strategic about trying to build up a CV and visibility to maximize the chance of getting a permanent position.   He also reflects on what happens if this doesn’t happen and being able to pursue other dreams. “It’s hard to say no to something because then you are effectively jeopardizing your CV and that’s a bit of a silly game”“Sometimes it’s really healthy to take a step back and think about what are the kinds of dreams that you have and if you’ve got enough dreams to do you feel less anxious about that one working out”“I’ve done all the things that I think I can do… but there’s a limit to how much control I have over the rest”He talks about (times approximate) …1:30 Moving to the UK as a PhD student and experiences; Shifting to a Post Doc position in Sussex and shifting topics13:40 Finding participatory design aligning with his values and it becoming one of his central fields15:50 Not being strategic about the decision of where to next, but relying on things ‘feeling right’, just doing things; no point not being happy with decisions19:35 Family situation, negotiating agreements to handle both partner’s career needs, but at a cost of lots of travel between London, Graz and Brussels for three years22:30 Tensions and tradeoffs in making decisions about moving to Brussels for partner’s opportunity, leaving professional networks and career imaginations, versus financial security, time with son but (always feeling a but); in the end still a quick clear decision25:20 Being emotionally hard to leave the UK, the difficult of thinking about doing participatory work with language issues in Brussels; making a deal with partner about next move being his if something came up27: 30 Enjoying the good life in Brussels, looking after children, but still trying to publish, write grant applications28:50 A lot of uncertainty around career but also a lot of security financially; but “what do I do with my career” and after two proposals fail “What if I don’t get back into that loop?”, checking out options in design companies29:55 Third grant proposal finally getting funded – straight after the call, being hit by the reality of having to “move all this to Austria now”, almost a frightening thought that it had come true; but no regrets32:00 The three years in Brussels show on his Google Scholar page – not just about writing journal publications but whole social networking you miss out on, not being asked to do service roles, not having visibility; also tiring without support structure around you34:00 Motivation to work on papers while on parental leave; driven by sense of unfinished business and carving out time to work on writing around running a household38:10 Anything different to support networking and visibility? Strategic twitter use but it still can’t replace the many small conversations you have when you meet people face to face40:30 Problems not having parental leave officially sanctioned and impact on applying for grants where this leave isn’t formally recognized since he was technically ‘unemployed’ not on parental leave43:15 Experiences taking on principle investigator role, being able to do what he wanted to do, employing good PhDs, steering/shaping and being able to step out and let it run45:35: Learning curves? Leading from behind, giving as much freedom as possible, leading by asking questions but depends on having the good people to do this with – felt natural47:20 Do differently next project? Shaping the environment, more of a research studio, getting to a more integrated way of working around a table50:15 Reflecting on being nervous at the beginning of the project about publishing and dealing with paper rejections in the first year – concern about “what if this project doesn’t yield the currency that I need” after three years not publishing52:15 Focussing on raising profile, saying yes to everything, lots of reviewing, service roles internationally and within the faculty – becoming more visible, setting up a good CV profile to be considered for jobs54:30 Huge relief of next project funding after other proposals falling through, other applications not coming off, but wanting to stay where he is, which makes for vulnerability and having little leverage; making it hard to say no because of CV; but liking many of the service roles for conferences and communities, and having influence59:25 The future after this next project? Not wanting to be in the same emotionally draining situation as at the end of the current project, diversifying in also thinking about career choices including outside of academia - “If that’s the case [of something not working out] I’m going to pursue one of my many other dreams”… wanting to stay in the academic system but recognizing that it “might spit him out”01:02:50 Academia quite hard in having to live with rejections and needing to find a way to distance self, but if things “don’t work out then you have to embrace that as a positive thing” and you go to a different dream01:05:00 Having an absolute last parachute of going back to Brussels if really needed but not wanting to; taking best of three years to be in a place and tiring to re-build it01:07:38 “That’s how I calm myself down, saying I’ve done all the things that I think I can do and like to think they’re working out well, but there’s a limit to how much control I have over the rest”01:08:00 One of the downsides of this constant worry is impact on doing actual research, instead time is spent on writing proposals, doing things for profile; having more future certainty will provide more freedom to do that01:09:40 Looking at what kind of position he wants to have, by looking at others and how busy they are and how little they do get their hands dirty, “it’s not entirely positive”; ambition to have a small research group1:11:40 Concerned with increased push to performance measurement, how to find time to write, do research and chase next job;1:14:00 PhD time the best of your life but not believing it when you are a student!01:15:45 EndRelated LinksOutside the Box project - http://outsidethebox.atOle Sejer Iversen - http://www.engagingexperience.dkThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="http://frauenberger.name" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Chris Frauenberger</a> is a post-doctoral researcher and principle investigator at Technical University Vienna. Chris shares his experiences navigating various post-doc positions, taking parental leave, negotiating with his partner about family-career choices, dealing with an uncertain future, and being strategic about trying to build up a CV and visibility to maximize the chance of getting a permanent position.   He also reflects on what happens if this doesn’t happen and being able to pursue other dreams.</h2><h2> “It’s hard to say no to something because then you are effectively jeopardizing your CV and that’s a bit of a silly game”</h2><h2>“Sometimes it’s really healthy to take a step back and think about what are the kinds of dreams that you have and if you’ve got enough dreams to do you feel less anxious about that one working out”</h2><h2>“I’ve done all the things that I think I can do… but there’s a limit to how much control I have over the rest”</h2>He talks about (times approximate) …1:30 Moving to the UK as a PhD student and experiences; Shifting to a Post Doc position in Sussex and shifting topics13:40 Finding participatory design aligning with his values and it becoming one of his central fields15:50 Not being strategic about the decision of where to next, but relying on things ‘feeling right’, just doing things; no point not being happy with decisions19:35 Family situation, negotiating agreements to handle both partner’s career needs, but at a cost of lots of travel between London, Graz and Brussels for three years22:30 Tensions and tradeoffs in making decisions about moving to Brussels for partner’s opportunity, leaving professional networks and career imaginations, versus financial security, time with son but (always feeling a but); in the end still a quick clear decision25:20 Being emotionally hard to leave the UK, the difficult of thinking about doing participatory work with language issues in Brussels; making a deal with partner about next move being his if something came up27: 30 Enjoying the good life in Brussels, looking after children, but still trying to publish, write grant applications28:50 A lot of uncertainty around career but also a lot of security financially; but “what do I do with my career” and after two proposals fail “What if I don’t get back into that loop?”, checking out options in design companies29:55 Third grant proposal finally getting funded – straight after the call, being hit by the reality of having to “move all this to Austria now”, almost a frightening thought that it had come true; but no regrets32:00 The three years in Brussels show on his Google Scholar page – not just about writing journal publications but whole social networking you miss out on, not being asked to do service roles, not having visibility; also tiring without support structure around you34:00 Motivation to work on papers while on parental leave; driven by sense of unfinished business and carving out time to work on writing around running a household38:10 Anything different to support networking and visibility? Strategic twitter use but it still can’t replace the many small conversations you have when you meet people face to face40:30 Problems not having parental leave officially sanctioned and impact on applying for grants where this leave isn’t formally recognized since he was technically ‘unemployed’ not on parental leave43:15 Experiences taking on principle investigator role, being able to do what he wanted to do, employing good PhDs, steering/shaping and being able to step out and let it run45:35: Learning curves? Leading from behind, giving as much freedom as possible, leading by asking questions but depends on having the good people to do this with – felt natural47:20 Do differently next project? Shaping the environment, more of a research studio, getting to a more integrated way of working around a table50:15 Reflecting on being nervous at the beginning of the project about publishing and dealing with paper rejections in the first year – concern about “what if this project doesn’t yield the currency that I need” after three years not publishing52:15 Focussing on raising profile, saying yes to everything, lots of reviewing, service roles internationally and within the faculty – becoming more visible, setting up a good CV profile to be considered for jobs54:30 Huge relief of next project funding after other proposals falling through, other applications not coming off, but wanting to stay where he is, which makes for vulnerability and having little leverage; making it hard to say no because of CV; but liking many of the service roles for conferences and communities, and having influence59:25 The future after this next project? Not wanting to be in the same emotionally draining situation as at the end of the current project, diversifying in also thinking about career choices including outside of academia - “If that’s the case [of something not working out] I’m going to pursue one of my many other dreams”… wanting to stay in the academic system but recognizing that it “might spit him out”01:02:50 Academia quite hard in having to live with rejections and needing to find a way to distance self, but if things “don’t work out then you have to embrace that as a positive thing” and you go to a different dream01:05:00 Having an absolute last parachute of going back to Brussels if really needed but not wanting to; taking best of three years to be in a place and tiring to re-build it01:07:38 “That’s how I calm myself down, saying I’ve done all the things that I think I can do and like to think they’re working out well, but there’s a limit to how much control I have over the rest”01:08:00 One of the downsides of this constant worry is impact on doing actual research, instead time is spent on writing proposals, doing things for profile; having more future certainty will provide more freedom to do that01:09:40 Looking at what kind of position he wants to have, by looking at others and how busy they are and how little they do get their hands dirty, “it’s not entirely positive”; ambition to have a small research group1:11:40 Concerned with increased push to performance measurement, how to find time to write, do research and chase next job;1:14:00 PhD time the best of your life but not believing it when you are a student!01:15:45 EndRelated LinksOutside the Box project - <a href="http://outsidethebox.at" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://outsidethebox.at</a>Ole Sejer Iversen - <a href="http://www.engagingexperience.dk" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.engagingexperience.dk</a>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Chris Frauenberger on post-docs, parental leave & multiple dreams

Kylie Ball

Kylie Ball is a Professor in the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Faculty of Health at Deakin University in Australia. She is also Head of early- and mid-career researcher (EMCR) development and publishes a very impactful blog targeted to EMCRs called The Happy Academic. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the EMCR support initiatives she has put in place, including workshops, mentoring programs and virtual resources, as well as the blog which she talks about as a form of virtual mentorship that can have a wider reach. We explore her own strategies for physical and mental wellbeing and how to form good habits. Themes throughout are around how much there is that we can actually take control of and make choices about, and we get a good sense of how to create a kinder and more supportive culture within our faculties."Leadership can happen at every level. …Every researcher is leading something.""We forget that we’re in a career where there is so much choice and flexibility. Seeing busyness as within our choice and there are things we can do about that really helps to give that sense of control.""I’m a big advocate that we can all find opportunities to be kind and it’s never a wasted act."She talks about (times approximate) …1:50 Kylie discusses how she got into research, instead of being a clinical psychologist that she had thought she would end up doing, and still has drive to help people04:20 Discusses research area around helping people have better health behaviours, translating research and having broad impact, and how long this can take06:50 Examples of where her research has had impact; how the relationship was built; and the long time frame to impact08:35 Recognises this as a privileged situation. More difficult for newer people coming in on short term contracts. And recognizes she might be able to help.09:10 Her own experience of short term contract, moving interstate for a one year contract; fortunately a permanent position did arise; but not the case now. Mentors many people and sees many people concerned about the future, and raising the same sorts of problems.10:10 Her role as head of early and mid-career researcher development. Keen to defines this inclusively, roughly as academic level A-C (entry level, associate, to lecturer, to senior lecturer). Wanted to know what the challenges were so spoke individually to all ECRs in the institute – 54 – and 15-16 senior people. One of the best things she could have done. Some based on another campus. Well set up between campuses for virtual meetings.13:30 So met and got a good sense of needs, coming up repeatedly: how do I establish myself as an independent researcher; how do I get my first grant; how do I achieve work life balance. Universal issues in this field. Gave a good sense of what people were struggling with. Then set up a range of initiatives to address this. Included: workshops mentoring matches; other professional development; also virtual resources like the blog.14:35 Workshops: looking at most pressing needs first, grants and fellowships, so first workshop with internal people to present eg strategy, lead times, planning, how to find sources, the process, compliance, internal funding scheme (great for pilot data, experience, confidence). Can see the trajectory of research funding from this first step. Most of workshops fully subscribed, tried to limit to around 17:25. Reasons for good buy-in? Culture very much around encouraging students and ECRs to get along to everything offered, can get something out of everything, fostering a vibrant research culture; also that this is what they had asked for.18:30 Other workshops around how to be a strategic researcher. Great to have internal expertise but also good to bring in external experts for fresh ideas, also level of perceived credibility of external. About saying no to things strategically, time management, writing. Another workshop around leadership – broad and difficult to do in a one-day workshop but as exposure to some of the challenges of leadership in academia and tendencies that impede us becoming the best leaders we can. Type of leadership? Leadership can happen at every level. Everyone is leading something. Qualities of a good leader in an academic context? Learning to take the step back from being the drive in everything and putting others forward and supporting them. A challenge of mid-career stage. Being willing to hand over the reins to others. Not trained in that.22:20 One of the other workshops from last year addressed that issue – mentoring for mentors. Idea is lots of use mentor others but have not had any formal training in that. Sometimes junior people come with issues and say struggling herself. But don’t have to have all the answers, can say “this is what I may do in this situation; have you thought about these different options”. Useful for getting some confidence around this.23:46 Mentoring scheme – not a formal scheme as people didn’t want to commit to this but asked early career people if they wanted a mentor. Sometimes their supervisor might provide some of this but sometimes there is a risk that discussions with supervisor can be very operational. So have tried to match people up with someone more arms-length from within the institute. Have also facilitated external mentor when people asked for this. Set up general guidelines around this. Eg meet 3-4 times per year, mentee brings the agenda and drives meeting, and provides a few resources such as types of questions to get best out of mentor. Almost all now have at least one senior mentor. The ones who have chosen not to feel they are well supported already. Left loosely structured (no fixed time limit). Uni does have a structured program with contracts, outputs etc but a deterrent for some people. Depends on the situation. Just flagged that either mentor or mentee felt relationship not working well … sometimes relationship naturally progresses. It’s very natural for mentoring relationships to have a set period of time. Also think people can benefit from having a number of mentors.28:25 Digital resources – three main aspects. Lots of senior staff had given presentations, lots of resources existing but sitting on people’s computer drives so wanted a repository to store these that are relevant to early career issues eg powerpoint presentations, resource sheets, templates, grant and funding related resources eg successful grants. Collated in a dedicated place. Used? Refers lots of people to them. Workshop resources also stored there too.30:45 Been running 18 months now. Did an informal evaluation after 1 year. Had conducted a survey before starting, as baseline, asking people what they thought about support available to them and also about generic things like job satisfaction, morale, perceived academic competence, work-related distress, work life balance. A year after assessed again and found good results. Satisfaction with program very high. Perceived competence, academic capacity, morale increased and decrease in workplace distress. Subjective feedback that favourably received. Part of the happy academic. Can’t underestimate their impact on harder outcomes like retention rates, productivity and KPIs like publishing.33:20 Connectedness from workshop. When asked about the needs, social element identified as critical, being connected to other ECRs, having a support network. So try things like put an hour at the end of the workshop for social get together. Also set up regular ‘shut up and write’ sessions. Part is to progress writing but part is the social situation and people talking to others they might not talk to. Do SUAW about every month. Limit to 12 people and they sign up. Part is pragmatic re room available but generally found haven’t had people wanting to come and can’t, also find people can’t attend at last minute, but people who have gone along have found benefits. Shared office with one other person.36:10 Describes institutes and school structure at Deakin. How is wellbeing being promoted in policy? In Kylie’s role. Also fortunate in having a head of school who is committed to these issues of wellbeing so a number of initiatives. Eg: Have had a consultant come in to work with people one on one, a mindfulness expert run mindfulness workshops regularly (quite popular, running it again this year), also have a team that are focused on creating fun events throughout the year eg easter bbq, celebrations for events through the year. Keeping a focus on fun.38:40 Role of KPIs in stress/reduction? Senior staff tried to convey a culture of delivering excellent teaching, research, yes there are KPIs and need to be agreed on in performance evaluation discussions, but the message is yes targets but they shouldn’t be the end driver so don’t e.g. have a strong focus on checking citations. Citations are out of our control. You can control submitting X papers per year but you can’t control how many citations you get. So while KPIs are there and they’re important, and we need aspirational goals for these things, we also try to balance that with a view to aiming for excellence in what we do and that’s not always easily captured in some of these metrics. Flexibility in performance reviews that all staff won’t be doing all things at all times … so might be some flexibility in workload allocation. Hate the word balance.. becomes another stress for people, “do I have balance?”. Going to be times we feel one particular part of our role takes over, so long as you can see that it’s a short term thing so in grant season (gives writing grants example). So long as you can see it is not forever and you have some strategies in place to cope with that. About perspective, insight, reflection, choice. Choice is critical. We forget that we’re in a career where there is so much choice and flexibility. Seeing busyness as within our choice and that there are things we can do about that really helps to give that sense of control.43:56 Often our own worst enemies in this field. People have to be a little bit obsessive, perfectionistic to persist with the things we do but think stepping back and reminding ourselves that we do have more choice than we probably realise and rather than doing everything automatically, saying yes to everything automatically, … try to encourage ECR people to build in white space, thinking and planning time to step back. Can’t see it when you are on the treadmill.45:05 Own strategies? Three main things: 1. Down time with family. Has 10 yr old daughter. Likes to switch off completely and spend time with her. Challenging to switch off. Mobile phones, blurring. Tries to get away eg to beach. Symbolic in a sense to get out of your normal environment, into nature.  Amazing how restorative that can be. 2. Exercise. A mad advocate that exercise can cure almost anything, and help with almost anything, a life line, Mental health strategy. For physical health. Time out. Tries running three times a week. Doesn’t need equipment. Can do anywhere. Doesn’t’ cost anything. Feels a million times better after 6-8 kms, mind much clearer. Feel much better. Evidence for that enormous. The ironic thing is that when you get busy it is often the first thing to go but it can be the best thing to help you think more clearly. Has tried to be consistent since high school. Doesn’t write it in the diary but has a regular time set up. Know from behavioural research, the value of regular habit.48:50 Other non-negotiables? Not really. Being a single parent, more stressful trying to block non-negotiable things, being more flexible works for her. One thing is Friday night is non-work night. Switches everything off. Came up a few years back when was on brink of burn out and working with a coach who asked what was the one thing she could do. Friday night ‘switch off’ was it. Small changes but they do add up.50:20 Third thing she swears by is meditation. A time to step back, reflect, and put down things carrying all day. Aim is to do it every day for 10 mins. Doesn’t happen every day. Training mental skills of attention and focus, skills we are at risk of losing because of social media, emails, interruptions, meditation a buffer against that short attention span. Lots we can be doing to improve our own mental/physical wellbeing but the challenge is lots of us know thus but how do we put it into place.52:15 Tips as behavior change expert? Write it down, book it into your calendar, make it an appointment. The other is about trying to make some of these automatic. Setting up your environment so you need less conscious effort to do it, to make it a habit, things that cue us towards some of these behaviours. The other is social support, who hold you accountable.54:00 The Happy Academic blog – started when she took on role as head of early and mid career research and development. Was hearing the same kinds of challenges again and again, not just in own institution but people internationally. Can’t reach all these people one on one, gets lots of requests for mentoring but can’t do it all. Thought a blog might be a good virtual way to help lots of people. Virtual mentorship. Feedback suggests it is achieving that aim. One of the most satisfying things she did last year. Always wanted a career where she was helping people. And loves writing. So this ticks a lot of boxes. Now takes a couple of hours to write a post, also jots down ideas in prep. Questions that people ask are a source of ideas. Schedule – tries to post once/month.  58:25 Blog post on kindness – sparked by a PhD student who finished and wrote a lovely card, saying “thanks for all your support and in particular thank you for your kindness, a quality which I feel is often missing in academia”. That resonated. Also consistent with stories over the years. Academia can be such a cut-throat and ruthless environment. And dealing with critique, rejection, awards, promotion. Hear all the time how thick-skinned you need to be to survive in this field. So wanted to highlight that this doesn’t have to be the norm and there are small things we can do that might a spot of joy in someone’s day, a question about how your day is going, can I get you a cup of coffee. I’m a big advocate that we can all find opportunities to be kind and it’s never a wasted act. Came across some great resources on kindness.1:01:25 Another of virtual resources is sending an email out highlighting some of the successes. Aim is that we don’t often celebrate these enough. Other thing that it can be good to share more is the rejection and failures side and how we have dealt with these. A hard thing to share. Another post on rejection showed some brave people who posted about their failures. Need to be careful, don’t want to focus on what doesn’t work, but recognizing we’ve all had rejections and your not alone and how we have dealt with it.1:03:45 Last post around saying now – key messages that resonated? Post got a lot of responses. People seemed to like was thinking about saying no is thinking about saying yes. Saying no to one thing means you are being strategic about saying yes to the other things that are already on your plate or are more important. You can’t do it all. Doesn’t mean you are not a good person.1:05: 40 Criteria for what to say yes to re mentorship – isn’t taking on more people now. Currently stretched, and referring people to the virtual mentorship through the blog. Advice from a coach previously was to consider yourself a free referral service, so she tries to find another link or mentor.1:07:58 EndRelated Links:Kylie Ball - http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/kylie-ballHappy Academic Blog – https://happyacademic.wordpress.comIndago Academy - Inspiring Research Excellence. Kylie's newly launched  development consultancy business- https://www.indagoacademy.comBlog post: “Let’s make kindness the next academic disruption” - https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/lets-make-kindness-the-next-academic-disruption/#more-877  Blog post: “the foolproof approach to saying no” - https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/the-foolproof-approach-to-saying-no/ This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/kylie-ball" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Kylie Ball</a> is a Professor in the Institute for Physical Activity and Nutrition, Faculty of Health at Deakin University in Australia. She is also Head of early- and mid-career researcher (EMCR) development and publishes a very impactful blog targeted to EMCRs called <a href="https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">The Happy Academic</a>. We have a wide-ranging discussion about the EMCR support initiatives she has put in place, including workshops, mentoring programs and virtual resources, as well as the blog which she talks about as a form of virtual mentorship that can have a wider reach. We explore her own strategies for physical and mental wellbeing and how to form good habits. Themes throughout are around how much there is that we can actually take control of and make choices about, and we get a good sense of how to create a kinder and more supportive culture within our faculties.</h2><h2>"Leadership can happen at every level. …Every researcher is leading something."</h2><h2>"We forget that we’re in a career where there is so much choice and flexibility. Seeing busyness as within our choice and there are things we can do about that really helps to give that sense of control."</h2><h2>"I’m a big advocate that we can all find opportunities to be kind and it’s never a wasted act."</h2>She talks about (times approximate) …1:50 Kylie discusses how she got into research, instead of being a clinical psychologist that she had thought she would end up doing, and still has drive to help people04:20 Discusses research area around helping people have better health behaviours, translating research and having broad impact, and how long this can take06:50 Examples of where her research has had impact; how the relationship was built; and the long time frame to impact08:35 Recognises this as a privileged situation. More difficult for newer people coming in on short term contracts. And recognizes she might be able to help.09:10 Her own experience of short term contract, moving interstate for a one year contract; fortunately a permanent position did arise; but not the case now. Mentors many people and sees many people concerned about the future, and raising the same sorts of problems.10:10 Her role as head of early and mid-career researcher development. Keen to defines this inclusively, roughly as academic level A-C (entry level, associate, to lecturer, to senior lecturer). Wanted to know what the challenges were so spoke individually to all ECRs in the institute – 54 – and 15-16 senior people. One of the best things she could have done. Some based on another campus. Well set up between campuses for virtual meetings.13:30 So met and got a good sense of needs, coming up repeatedly: how do I establish myself as an independent researcher; how do I get my first grant; how do I achieve work life balance. Universal issues in this field. Gave a good sense of what people were struggling with. Then set up a range of initiatives to address this. Included: workshops mentoring matches; other professional development; also virtual resources like the blog.14:35 Workshops: looking at most pressing needs first, grants and fellowships, so first workshop with internal people to present eg strategy, lead times, planning, how to find sources, the process, compliance, internal funding scheme (great for pilot data, experience, confidence). Can see the trajectory of research funding from this first step. Most of workshops fully subscribed, tried to limit to around 17:25. Reasons for good buy-in? Culture very much around encouraging students and ECRs to get along to everything offered, can get something out of everything, fostering a vibrant research culture; also that this is what they had asked for.18:30 Other workshops around how to be a strategic researcher. Great to have internal expertise but also good to bring in external experts for fresh ideas, also level of perceived credibility of external. About saying no to things strategically, time management, writing. Another workshop around leadership – broad and difficult to do in a one-day workshop but as exposure to some of the challenges of leadership in academia and tendencies that impede us becoming the best leaders we can. Type of leadership? Leadership can happen at every level. Everyone is leading something. Qualities of a good leader in an academic context? Learning to take the step back from being the drive in everything and putting others forward and supporting them. A challenge of mid-career stage. Being willing to hand over the reins to others. Not trained in that.22:20 One of the other workshops from last year addressed that issue – mentoring for mentors. Idea is lots of use mentor others but have not had any formal training in that. Sometimes junior people come with issues and say struggling herself. But don’t have to have all the answers, can say “this is what I may do in this situation; have you thought about these different options”. Useful for getting some confidence around this.23:46 Mentoring scheme – not a formal scheme as people didn’t want to commit to this but asked early career people if they wanted a mentor. Sometimes their supervisor might provide some of this but sometimes there is a risk that discussions with supervisor can be very operational. So have tried to match people up with someone more arms-length from within the institute. Have also facilitated external mentor when people asked for this. Set up general guidelines around this. Eg meet 3-4 times per year, mentee brings the agenda and drives meeting, and provides a few resources such as types of questions to get best out of mentor. Almost all now have at least one senior mentor. The ones who have chosen not to feel they are well supported already. Left loosely structured (no fixed time limit). Uni does have a structured program with contracts, outputs etc but a deterrent for some people. Depends on the situation. Just flagged that either mentor or mentee felt relationship not working well … sometimes relationship naturally progresses. It’s very natural for mentoring relationships to have a set period of time. Also think people can benefit from having a number of mentors.28:25 Digital resources – three main aspects. Lots of senior staff had given presentations, lots of resources existing but sitting on people’s computer drives so wanted a repository to store these that are relevant to early career issues eg powerpoint presentations, resource sheets, templates, grant and funding related resources eg successful grants. Collated in a dedicated place. Used? Refers lots of people to them. Workshop resources also stored there too.30:45 Been running 18 months now. Did an informal evaluation after 1 year. Had conducted a survey before starting, as baseline, asking people what they thought about support available to them and also about generic things like job satisfaction, morale, perceived academic competence, work-related distress, work life balance. A year after assessed again and found good results. Satisfaction with program very high. Perceived competence, academic capacity, morale increased and decrease in workplace distress. Subjective feedback that favourably received. Part of the happy academic. Can’t underestimate their impact on harder outcomes like retention rates, productivity and KPIs like publishing.33:20 Connectedness from workshop. When asked about the needs, social element identified as critical, being connected to other ECRs, having a support network. So try things like put an hour at the end of the workshop for social get together. Also set up regular ‘shut up and write’ sessions. Part is to progress writing but part is the social situation and people talking to others they might not talk to. Do SUAW about every month. Limit to 12 people and they sign up. Part is pragmatic re room available but generally found haven’t had people wanting to come and can’t, also find people can’t attend at last minute, but people who have gone along have found benefits. Shared office with one other person.36:10 Describes institutes and school structure at Deakin. How is wellbeing being promoted in policy? In Kylie’s role. Also fortunate in having a head of school who is committed to these issues of wellbeing so a number of initiatives. Eg: Have had a consultant come in to work with people one on one, a mindfulness expert run mindfulness workshops regularly (quite popular, running it again this year), also have a team that are focused on creating fun events throughout the year eg easter bbq, celebrations for events through the year. Keeping a focus on fun.38:40 Role of KPIs in stress/reduction? Senior staff tried to convey a culture of delivering excellent teaching, research, yes there are KPIs and need to be agreed on in performance evaluation discussions, but the message is yes targets but they shouldn’t be the end driver so don’t e.g. have a strong focus on checking citations. Citations are out of our control. You can control submitting X papers per year but you can’t control how many citations you get. So while KPIs are there and they’re important, and we need aspirational goals for these things, we also try to balance that with a view to aiming for excellence in what we do and that’s not always easily captured in some of these metrics. Flexibility in performance reviews that all staff won’t be doing all things at all times … so might be some flexibility in workload allocation. Hate the word balance.. becomes another stress for people, “do I have balance?”. Going to be times we feel one particular part of our role takes over, so long as you can see that it’s a short term thing so in grant season (gives writing grants example). So long as you can see it is not forever and you have some strategies in place to cope with that. About perspective, insight, reflection, choice. Choice is critical. We forget that we’re in a career where there is so much choice and flexibility. Seeing busyness as within our choice and that there are things we can do about that really helps to give that sense of control.43:56 Often our own worst enemies in this field. People have to be a little bit obsessive, perfectionistic to persist with the things we do but think stepping back and reminding ourselves that we do have more choice than we probably realise and rather than doing everything automatically, saying yes to everything automatically, … try to encourage ECR people to build in white space, thinking and planning time to step back. Can’t see it when you are on the treadmill.45:05 Own strategies? Three main things: 1. Down time with family. Has 10 yr old daughter. Likes to switch off completely and spend time with her. Challenging to switch off. Mobile phones, blurring. Tries to get away eg to beach. Symbolic in a sense to get out of your normal environment, into nature.  Amazing how restorative that can be. 2. Exercise. A mad advocate that exercise can cure almost anything, and help with almost anything, a life line, Mental health strategy. For physical health. Time out. Tries running three times a week. Doesn’t need equipment. Can do anywhere. Doesn’t’ cost anything. Feels a million times better after 6-8 kms, mind much clearer. Feel much better. Evidence for that enormous. The ironic thing is that when you get busy it is often the first thing to go but it can be the best thing to help you think more clearly. Has tried to be consistent since high school. Doesn’t write it in the diary but has a regular time set up. Know from behavioural research, the value of regular habit.48:50 Other non-negotiables? Not really. Being a single parent, more stressful trying to block non-negotiable things, being more flexible works for her. One thing is Friday night is non-work night. Switches everything off. Came up a few years back when was on brink of burn out and working with a coach who asked what was the one thing she could do. Friday night ‘switch off’ was it. Small changes but they do add up.50:20 Third thing she swears by is meditation. A time to step back, reflect, and put down things carrying all day. Aim is to do it every day for 10 mins. Doesn’t happen every day. Training mental skills of attention and focus, skills we are at risk of losing because of social media, emails, interruptions, meditation a buffer against that short attention span. Lots we can be doing to improve our own mental/physical wellbeing but the challenge is lots of us know thus but how do we put it into place.52:15 Tips as behavior change expert? Write it down, book it into your calendar, make it an appointment. The other is about trying to make some of these automatic. Setting up your environment so you need less conscious effort to do it, to make it a habit, things that cue us towards some of these behaviours. The other is social support, who hold you accountable.54:00 The Happy Academic blog – started when she took on role as head of early and mid career research and development. Was hearing the same kinds of challenges again and again, not just in own institution but people internationally. Can’t reach all these people one on one, gets lots of requests for mentoring but can’t do it all. Thought a blog might be a good virtual way to help lots of people. Virtual mentorship. Feedback suggests it is achieving that aim. One of the most satisfying things she did last year. Always wanted a career where she was helping people. And loves writing. So this ticks a lot of boxes. Now takes a couple of hours to write a post, also jots down ideas in prep. Questions that people ask are a source of ideas. Schedule – tries to post once/month.  58:25 Blog post on kindness – sparked by a PhD student who finished and wrote a lovely card, saying “thanks for all your support and in particular thank you for your kindness, a quality which I feel is often missing in academia”. That resonated. Also consistent with stories over the years. Academia can be such a cut-throat and ruthless environment. And dealing with critique, rejection, awards, promotion. Hear all the time how thick-skinned you need to be to survive in this field. So wanted to highlight that this doesn’t have to be the norm and there are small things we can do that might a spot of joy in someone’s day, a question about how your day is going, can I get you a cup of coffee. I’m a big advocate that we can all find opportunities to be kind and it’s never a wasted act. Came across some great resources on kindness.1:01:25 Another of virtual resources is sending an email out highlighting some of the successes. Aim is that we don’t often celebrate these enough. Other thing that it can be good to share more is the rejection and failures side and how we have dealt with these. A hard thing to share. Another post on rejection showed some brave people who posted about their failures. Need to be careful, don’t want to focus on what doesn’t work, but recognizing we’ve all had rejections and your not alone and how we have dealt with it.1:03:45 Last post around saying now – key messages that resonated? Post got a lot of responses. People seemed to like was thinking about saying no is thinking about saying yes. Saying no to one thing means you are being strategic about saying yes to the other things that are already on your plate or are more important. You can’t do it all. Doesn’t mean you are not a good person.1:05: 40 Criteria for what to say yes to re mentorship – isn’t taking on more people now. Currently stretched, and referring people to the virtual mentorship through the blog. Advice from a coach previously was to consider yourself a free referral service, so she tries to find another link or mentor.1:07:58 EndRelated Links:Kylie Ball - <a href="http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/kylie-ball" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.deakin.edu.au/about-deakin/people/kylie-ball</a>Happy Academic Blog – <a href="https://happyacademic.wordpress.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://happyacademic.wordpress.com</a>Indago Academy - Inspiring Research Excellence. Kylie's newly launched  development consultancy business- <a href="https://www.indagoacademy.com" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.indagoacademy.com</a>Blog post: “Let’s make kindness the next academic disruption” - <a href="https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/lets-make-kindness-the-next-academic-disruption/#more-877" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2017/12/06/lets-make-kindness-the-next-academic-disruption/#more-87</a>7  Blog post: “the foolproof approach to saying no” - h<a href="https://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/the-foolproof-approach-to-saying-no/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">ttps://happyacademic.wordpress.com/2018/02/15/the-foolproof-approach-to-saying-no/</a> This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Kylie Ball on supporting early career researchers, virtual mentorship and wellbeing

Jofish Kaye

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/2/2/jofish-kaye</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Jofish Kaye on industry research, having an impact, and values-driven decision making

Lindsay Oades

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/9/7/lindsay-oades for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/9/7/lindsay-oades" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/9/7/lindsay-oades</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Lindsay Oades on academic wellbeing, connecting to strengths, meaning and purpose, and not taking the system too seriously

Evan Peck

Evan Peck is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University in the US. Evan has a passion for teaching and also wants to do good research but when he was looking around for a faculty position, he decided he didn’t want to trade off family life and life quality to do it all, as he considered he might have to at a top-rated school. He also wasn’t sure about industry where he could have better life quality but would miss teaching. He is now an evangelist for Liberal Arts Colleges, like Bucknell, as a middle way for PhD students to include when considering career options. Evan talks about his decision processes getting there and his current experiences as a new faculty in learning to be deliberate about his use of time so that he can include teaching, research and time for family. He also has a great blog post written on this topic."It's all trade-offs."“Put on the calendar, this is when I am done for the day and this is the amount of time I have to get work done and if it doesn’t get done it happens tomorrow and not through dinner”“So have to be deliberate about how you use your time.”“In Grad School it’s really easy to fall into this trap that your identity is the work you are doing and that’s why these rejections feel so much more personal”He talks about (times approximate) …01:30 Start02:15 Background starting out at a Liberal Arts College and having a broad education, teaching focus, courses capped at 30 students04:30 Path getting to Bucknell  via an UG degree at a Liberal Arts College and a PhD at Tufts Uni with Rob Jacob on Brain Computer Interaction, having a child during Grad School and starting to think about what measures of success and impact means and what he wanted06:00 Up to then a typical grad student perspective re rankings and top school as measures of success; realised “even if I were to be productive at the rate of someone at a top school, I think I would be miserable doing it” – something about the pace, can fit others beautifully but grants and away from teaching not how he wanted to spend his time, or emotionally or the stress of the tenure process08:20 “They say, here are the things that are valuable to us and if those don’t align with the things that are valuable to you ... things you don’t want to do are more taxing … if you are at a university where the benchmarks involve things that you don’t what to spend all your time doing… then it can seem very overwhelming”09:00 Thought he was going into industry because he thought academic was two pillars, either research or teaching focussed. Loves doing research but not all the time. Had industry internship and saw good work life balance, didn’t consume them, not their entire identity and this aspect appealed to him. And getting to end of grad school was a grind so it seemed attractive.11:15 After having a kid, shifting own work habits. If he continued his old schedule he would lonely see his son half hour a day. So getting up early and trying to set boundaries on the upper limit.12:42 How to put up boundaries – scheduling wise, almost “put on the calendar, this is when I am done for the day and this is the amount of time I have to get work done and if it doesn’t get done it happens tomorrow and not through dinner”. Priorities becoming much more important and industry seemed more appealing as could see structure in industry. And in appealing places to live. Factors line up.14:15 Very lucky in lab culture and advisor who was very sensitive to family issues, told him to go be with his family; the only he can figure out how to do 3 CHI papers is to work 15 hrs a day, may be different for others.Challenges when you set these boundaries – could be more productive without boundaries but “It’s all trade-offs”. “First level says I’m missing out on something, second level says would I trade it” and no he wouldn’t, helps come to terms with those decisions16:20 Role of supervisor in setting culture, and previous grad students who had children so wasn’t breaking new ground17:15 Comparing self to others – very challenging, easy to compare yourself to the best teacher and the best researcher, very tempting – but remembering they only take one of the jobs18:15 Heading back to liberal arts via advice to apply everywhere, supervisor a wealth of good advice, can always decide you don’t like it later; hoping grad students think about this more in advance; having options and opportunity to figure out priorities on the fly; “I really like my job. Many ways I could have missed it. How could I mitigate this for other people coming on?”20:35 Being more deliberate? Written about in blog post. Perception that things fit cleanly into categories of academia vs industry, research vs teaching school but not does not fit reality. Representation of academia at conferences most visible but not representative. Muddied when you visit these places. Careful to say this is about him, he wouldn’t be able to do all, others he knows can.22:20 “What are the things that I take joy doing?” Knew wherever he went he would want to spend significant time in teaching, loves getting students excited about computer science. “The question was, if I’m spending time in this [teaching] is it going to be rewarded or not? Will the people around me say this is part of you excelling in your job or is it something…that’s an obstruction to your research?”Told at one place the way to succeed was to make sure students don’t hate you but don’t do too much more. Feels like he is doing fewer hours because it is investing in things he wants to be doing.25:00 First year of teaching really taxing but didn’t feel like he was doing as many hours as in his PhD. Something he wanted to invest time in. Towards end of PhD everything felt like a grind, exhausting. If teaching more then getting faster feedback. So the feedback loops are a lot faster but slower feedback loops in research can be tough. Took a long time to get first paper accepted. Can go years without those reward feelings it takes your toll.26:40 The big shift to grad school. Difference in identity between undergrad and grad school; “In Grad School it’s really easy to fall into this trap that your identity is the work you are doing and that’s why these rejections feel so much more personal” because this is what he chose; Handling rejection by keeping on working, but pretty demoralising when rejections start piling up, but also short term thinking so did finally have a year when work comes through. But again a comparison point. An exhausting way to go about things,28:40 Importance of making this message that there are alternatives in Liberal Arts schools. Integrating teaching and research. Saw another lab member to go to a liberal arts and still be able to do research so had a hint.30:00 Making the decision in the end. Thinking about mobility in academia, some directions harder than others. One concern was about moving out of liberal arts to focus on research? And many school sin very rural areas. Big family decisions. Are these places we want to live? Factors that played into decision – visiting the campus and the faculty and getting a sense of people’s lives there. At Bucknell and some others, impressed with seriousness of work and also talking about other aspects of life – sole identity not inside the office.32:35 One of the interesting side benefits of smaller school in a more isolated place is the community that forms around it is very strong, most people live within three miles of each, a real sense of community and that the community values not just you but your family; had meals provided for a month and half after daughter born. Those factors really important on the family side. And not conceding professionally either to deal with family side.35:00 Biggest challenge moving from grad student to faculty member – working on 10 things at once, now time splintered, needing to be much more organised, needing to be productive with small pockets of time, need to be more deliberate about research. Understanding what your strengths are, the rhythm of the semester, being reflective. Different strategies during semester vs during summer. Now uses a calendar. Setting in calendar these are the time to do research, otherwise can always improve lectures. “So have to be deliberate about how you use your time.”37:20 Learning process re being deliberate: Understanding where he can be high impact. Always concessions. “How can I be high impact given I’m not going to publish 4 papers a year, that I don’t have grad students, what topics are more high impact, what resources do I have and voices do I have in the community that other people have?” So in the first year he determined that his time in the classroom most valuable, working to what he was strong at. At some point “I only have this much time. What benefits the students the most? If I only had 2 hrs to prep for this, how am I going to spend those 2 hrs?” A little structure one year helps the next. Slow process getting the pieces that work together.40:15 Always been reflective and strategic thinker to some degree. People around in grad school very reflective. Seeing value on reflecting on the structural pieces that help. More honed now out of necessity. More constrained about his resources and so has to think more about what would be valuable. Letting grad students know there is a huge spectrum of jobs. Could be miserable in grad school but be an excellent professor. Feel like he is a much better professor than a grad student. “Fits me a lot better.” Thought was a one off for a long time, not knowing what the landscape was. After faculty position, talked to senior grad students and same things came up. And they would be amazed that a place like this exists. 43:40 [Option of liberal arts college] should be a liberating thought. In PhD where you start out with big visions about how you are going to change the world and do research and then realise it is only small corner of research and keep working, still excited, but somewhere along the lines think “Oh no, I’ve been working on something for 5, 6, 7 years, and maybe I’m in the wrong profession, or maybe I still love this stuff but the way but the way the jobs line up don’t seem very exciting. That’s just horrifying.”44:45 Goes to a bigger picture of computer science education. All these students at all these universities, computers impact us in all parts of life, and students not at big research schools. All PhDs graduating, passionate about these ideas but not connecting pieces well. The best educators who leave or go to industry, not because it is best fit, but their personal priorities don’t map to the big research schools.47:26 EndRelated LinksEvan Peck: https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~emp017/Evan’s blog post on “The jobs I didn’t see: My misconceptions of the Academic job market”: https://medium.com/bucknell-hci/the-jobs-i-didnt-see-my-misconceptions-of-the-academic-job-market-9cb98b057422Rob Jacob: https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/Liberal Arts College: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_collegeThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~emp017/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Evan Peck</a> is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bucknell University in the US. Evan has a passion for teaching and also wants to do good research but when he was looking around for a faculty position, he decided he didn’t want to trade off family life and life quality to do it all, as he considered he might have to at a top-rated school. He also wasn’t sure about industry where he could have better life quality but would miss teaching. He is now an evangelist for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Liberal Arts Colleges</a>, like Bucknell, as a middle way for PhD students to include when considering career options. Evan talks about his decision processes getting there and his current experiences as a new faculty in learning to be deliberate about his use of time so that he can include teaching, research and time for family. He also has a great <a href="https://medium.com/bucknell-hci/the-jobs-i-didnt-see-my-misconceptions-of-the-academic-job-market-9cb98b057422" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">blog post</a> written on this topic.</h2><h2>"It's all trade-offs."</h2><h2>“Put on the calendar, this is when I am done for the day and this is the amount of time I have to get work done and if it doesn’t get done it happens tomorrow and not through dinner”</h2><h2>“So have to be deliberate about how you use your time.”</h2><h2>“In Grad School it’s really easy to fall into this trap that your identity is the work you are doing and that’s why these rejections feel so much more personal”</h2>He talks about (times approximate) …01:30 Start02:15 Background starting out at a Liberal Arts College and having a broad education, teaching focus, courses capped at 30 students04:30 Path getting to Bucknell  via an UG degree at a Liberal Arts College and a PhD at Tufts Uni with Rob Jacob on Brain Computer Interaction, having a child during Grad School and starting to think about what measures of success and impact means and what he wanted06:00 Up to then a typical grad student perspective re rankings and top school as measures of success; realised “even if I were to be productive at the rate of someone at a top school, I think I would be miserable doing it” – something about the pace, can fit others beautifully but grants and away from teaching not how he wanted to spend his time, or emotionally or the stress of the tenure process08:20 “They say, here are the things that are valuable to us and if those don’t align with the things that are valuable to you ... things you don’t want to do are more taxing … if you are at a university where the benchmarks involve things that you don’t what to spend all your time doing… then it can seem very overwhelming”09:00 Thought he was going into industry because he thought academic was two pillars, either research or teaching focussed. Loves doing research but not all the time. Had industry internship and saw good work life balance, didn’t consume them, not their entire identity and this aspect appealed to him. And getting to end of grad school was a grind so it seemed attractive.11:15 After having a kid, shifting own work habits. If he continued his old schedule he would lonely see his son half hour a day. So getting up early and trying to set boundaries on the upper limit.12:42 How to put up boundaries – scheduling wise, almost “put on the calendar, this is when I am done for the day and this is the amount of time I have to get work done and if it doesn’t get done it happens tomorrow and not through dinner”. Priorities becoming much more important and industry seemed more appealing as could see structure in industry. And in appealing places to live. Factors line up.14:15 Very lucky in lab culture and advisor who was very sensitive to family issues, told him to go be with his family; the only he can figure out how to do 3 CHI papers is to work 15 hrs a day, may be different for others.Challenges when you set these boundaries – could be more productive without boundaries but “It’s all trade-offs”. “First level says I’m missing out on something, second level says would I trade it” and no he wouldn’t, helps come to terms with those decisions16:20 Role of supervisor in setting culture, and previous grad students who had children so wasn’t breaking new ground17:15 Comparing self to others – very challenging, easy to compare yourself to the best teacher and the best researcher, very tempting – but remembering they only take one of the jobs18:15 Heading back to liberal arts via advice to apply everywhere, supervisor a wealth of good advice, can always decide you don’t like it later; hoping grad students think about this more in advance; having options and opportunity to figure out priorities on the fly; “I really like my job. Many ways I could have missed it. How could I mitigate this for other people coming on?”20:35 Being more deliberate? Written about in blog post. Perception that things fit cleanly into categories of academia vs industry, research vs teaching school but not does not fit reality. Representation of academia at conferences most visible but not representative. Muddied when you visit these places. Careful to say this is about him, he wouldn’t be able to do all, others he knows can.22:20 “What are the things that I take joy doing?” Knew wherever he went he would want to spend significant time in teaching, loves getting students excited about computer science. “The question was, if I’m spending time in this [teaching] is it going to be rewarded or not? Will the people around me say this is part of you excelling in your job or is it something…that’s an obstruction to your research?”Told at one place the way to succeed was to make sure students don’t hate you but don’t do too much more. Feels like he is doing fewer hours because it is investing in things he wants to be doing.25:00 First year of teaching really taxing but didn’t feel like he was doing as many hours as in his PhD. Something he wanted to invest time in. Towards end of PhD everything felt like a grind, exhausting. If teaching more then getting faster feedback. So the feedback loops are a lot faster but slower feedback loops in research can be tough. Took a long time to get first paper accepted. Can go years without those reward feelings it takes your toll.26:40 The big shift to grad school. Difference in identity between undergrad and grad school; “In Grad School it’s really easy to fall into this trap that your identity is the work you are doing and that’s why these rejections feel so much more personal” because this is what he chose; Handling rejection by keeping on working, but pretty demoralising when rejections start piling up, but also short term thinking so did finally have a year when work comes through. But again a comparison point. An exhausting way to go about things,28:40 Importance of making this message that there are alternatives in Liberal Arts schools. Integrating teaching and research. Saw another lab member to go to a liberal arts and still be able to do research so had a hint.30:00 Making the decision in the end. Thinking about mobility in academia, some directions harder than others. One concern was about moving out of liberal arts to focus on research? And many school sin very rural areas. Big family decisions. Are these places we want to live? Factors that played into decision – visiting the campus and the faculty and getting a sense of people’s lives there. At Bucknell and some others, impressed with seriousness of work and also talking about other aspects of life – sole identity not inside the office.32:35 One of the interesting side benefits of smaller school in a more isolated place is the community that forms around it is very strong, most people live within three miles of each, a real sense of community and that the community values not just you but your family; had meals provided for a month and half after daughter born. Those factors really important on the family side. And not conceding professionally either to deal with family side.35:00 Biggest challenge moving from grad student to faculty member – working on 10 things at once, now time splintered, needing to be much more organised, needing to be productive with small pockets of time, need to be more deliberate about research. Understanding what your strengths are, the rhythm of the semester, being reflective. Different strategies during semester vs during summer. Now uses a calendar. Setting in calendar these are the time to do research, otherwise can always improve lectures. “So have to be deliberate about how you use your time.”37:20 Learning process re being deliberate: Understanding where he can be high impact. Always concessions. “How can I be high impact given I’m not going to publish 4 papers a year, that I don’t have grad students, what topics are more high impact, what resources do I have and voices do I have in the community that other people have?” So in the first year he determined that his time in the classroom most valuable, working to what he was strong at. At some point “I only have this much time. What benefits the students the most? If I only had 2 hrs to prep for this, how am I going to spend those 2 hrs?” A little structure one year helps the next. Slow process getting the pieces that work together.40:15 Always been reflective and strategic thinker to some degree. People around in grad school very reflective. Seeing value on reflecting on the structural pieces that help. More honed now out of necessity. More constrained about his resources and so has to think more about what would be valuable. Letting grad students know there is a huge spectrum of jobs. Could be miserable in grad school but be an excellent professor. Feel like he is a much better professor than a grad student. “Fits me a lot better.” Thought was a one off for a long time, not knowing what the landscape was. After faculty position, talked to senior grad students and same things came up. And they would be amazed that a place like this exists. 43:40 [Option of liberal arts college] should be a liberating thought. In PhD where you start out with big visions about how you are going to change the world and do research and then realise it is only small corner of research and keep working, still excited, but somewhere along the lines think “Oh no, I’ve been working on something for 5, 6, 7 years, and maybe I’m in the wrong profession, or maybe I still love this stuff but the way but the way the jobs line up don’t seem very exciting. That’s just horrifying.”44:45 Goes to a bigger picture of computer science education. All these students at all these universities, computers impact us in all parts of life, and students not at big research schools. All PhDs graduating, passionate about these ideas but not connecting pieces well. The best educators who leave or go to industry, not because it is best fit, but their personal priorities don’t map to the big research schools.47:26 EndRelated LinksEvan Peck: <a href="https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~emp017/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.eg.bucknell.edu/~emp017/</a>Evan’s blog post on “The jobs I didn’t see: My misconceptions of the Academic job market”: <a href="https://medium.com/bucknell-hci/the-jobs-i-didnt-see-my-misconceptions-of-the-academic-job-market-9cb98b057422" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://medium.com/bucknell-hci/the-jobs-i-didnt-see-my-misconceptions-of-the-academic-job-market-9cb98b057422</a>Rob Jacob: <a href="https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.cs.tufts.edu/~jacob/</a>Liberal Arts College: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_arts_college</a>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Evan Peck on making choices, accepting trade-offs, and liberal arts as a great middle way

Amy Ko

For more information and related links see http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2017/6/18/amy-koThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

For more information and related links see <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2017/6/18/amy-ko" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2017/6/18/amy-ko</a>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Amy Ko on being reflectively self-aware, deliberately structured, & amazingly productive

Rowena Murray

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/7/11/rowena-murray for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/</a> 2018/7/11/rowena-murray for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Rowena Murray on writing retreats, academic friendships and dealing with discrimination

Gloria Mark

Gloria Mark is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California Irvine. Gloria talks about her experiences as chair of a major conference, not just the work but also the rewards. She talks about how she moved from a Fine Arts background, painting murals on buildings, to a PhD in cognitive science and now studying the relationship between media use, attention and stress, but still being able to be creative in work. She also reflects honestly on her own struggles to manage her screen time and stress but above all she reminds us of the importance of fun and fulfilment in work.“There are opportunities all around us and very often we are blind to them. … You have to be willing to give up a particular path that you might think you are on.” “Email is a symbol of work… a reminder there is work there” “You can practice creativity in so many ways, in conversations, in writing, in just thinking of ideas.”“It’s important to keep some kind of fun in what you do because otherwise it’s not worth doing and it’s very important to have fulfilment.”She talks about (times approximate) … (and full transcript can be downloaded here)1:30 Organising a major conference as a tremendous amount of work but being fulfilling, and value of CHI stories for understanding who are the people behind the research4:50 Taking on a big service role as conference chair, its fit to her ‘big picture thinking’ strengths, growing into the role and learning about people8:40 Greatest moment seeing it come together walking around the exhibit hall10:10 Everyone has a particular talent they can contribute, encouraging volunteers and matching skills/interests and what they can contribute11:00 Career path starting with a fine arts degree, painting and drawing, painting building murals … but not being able to see a future painting in a studio14:00 Decision to do something practical using her maths skills, but finding bio-statistics boring, needing to earn a living and applying for a research assistant position17:20 Being asked: “Do you think you can do research on the discovery process of artists?” Of course! Loving reading on cognitive psychology and being yelled at at her first conference20:00 Getting into cognitive psychology PhD in decision making20:30 “One philosophy that guides my life - it’s what Einstein says, chance favours the prepared mind. I love that. There are opportunities all around us and very often we are blind to them. But if you are really aware and open, important to be open.” “You have to be willing to give up a particular path that you might think you are on and you have to be willing to change, to veer away from it or to change completely.  And of course … you have to do it intelligently and weigh the risks and the benefits of whatever choice you can make.”“If it connects to something that is really a part of you that is worth the risk. Because you can’t do something that you feel is not who you are or is against your belief system.”22:50 Themes from research studying issues around multi-tasking, stress etc. How this research strand started from a personal experience, moving in 2000 from Germany working in a research institute doing only research, to an assistant professor position in the US to do teaching, writing grants, committees, service work … “to what extent am I the only one [multi-tasking]?”25:20 Patterns seen in studying multi-tasking – sped up and intensified through use of digital media, and the more people switch attention through different screens, the higher their stress because of limited capacity of attentional resources and not replenishing resources29:30 Extra stress in re-orienting to a new context, every email involves some new topic - “Email is a symbol of work… a reminder there is work there”; online a lot, reading email at breakfast,32:50 Measured average duration of attention for people on any computer screen is a little over 40 secs, a cost when switching so frequently33:40 Knowing this from research but making a difference to personal patterns? More insight – as habits are hard to break34:40 First habit to break? To be more aware of physical environment, going outside more, interacting with people more, shifting attention from screen; but hard to break away because there are rewards for being online –the Las Vegas phenomena and random reward hits37:30 “Another reason it is hard to pull away is because we are all caught up in this web of interconnections” – have to solve the problem on a macro level, need to think about organizational policies eg batch email times40:25 Study cutting off people’s email in the workplace for 5 days – stress down, screen attention duration longer … variety of individual responses but at the end of the 5 day period realised life went on. But Information is too seductive42:40 Looking after herself, honouring the art piece of her? Discovered she can be creative in different mediums not just visual and art training good for science “because I learned how to do lateral thinking” – “you can practice creativity in so many ways, in conversations, in writing, in just thinking of ideas”46:20 Not good at pulling away from work. Too stressed and manifest in sleep patterns. Take vacations but sometimes vacations can be stressful. Don’t do enough of trying to alleviate stress. One thing that helps – “try to take care of a task as soon as possible because delaying on a task makes stress worse”. ... “It’s like a treadmill”50:00 Final thoughts? Important to do things that are fun and interesting.52:43 EndRelated LinksGloria's home page: https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.htmlCHI2017 conference chaired by Gloria with Sue Fussell - https://chi2017.acm.orgThis podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Gloria Mark</a> is a Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at University of California Irvine. Gloria talks about her experiences as chair of a major conference, not just the work but also the rewards. She talks about how she moved from a Fine Arts background, painting murals on buildings, to a PhD in cognitive science and now studying the relationship between media use, attention and stress, but still being able to be creative in work. She also reflects honestly on her own struggles to manage her screen time and stress but above all she reminds us of the importance of fun and fulfilment in work.</h2><h2>“There are opportunities all around us and very often we are blind to them. … You have to be willing to give up a particular path that you might think you are on.”</h2><h2> “Email is a symbol of work… a reminder there is work there” </h2><h2>“You can practice creativity in so many ways, in conversations, in writing, in just thinking of ideas.”</h2><h2>“It’s important to keep some kind of fun in what you do because otherwise it’s not worth doing and it’s very important to have fulfilment.”</h2>She talks about (times approximate) … (and <a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/s/TRANSCRIPT_CAL19_Gloria_Mark.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">full transcript can </a><a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/s/TRANSCRIPT_CAL19_Gloria_Mark.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">be</a><a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/s/TRANSCRIPT_CAL19_Gloria_Mark.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> downloaded here</a>)1:30 Organising a major conference as a tremendous amount of work but being fulfilling, and value of CHI stories for understanding who are the people behind the research4:50 Taking on a big service role as conference chair, its fit to her ‘big picture thinking’ strengths, growing into the role and learning about people8:40 Greatest moment seeing it come together walking around the exhibit hall10:10 Everyone has a particular talent they can contribute, encouraging volunteers and matching skills/interests and what they can contribute11:00 Career path starting with a fine arts degree, painting and drawing, painting building murals … but not being able to see a future painting in a studio14:00 Decision to do something practical using her maths skills, but finding bio-statistics boring, needing to earn a living and applying for a research assistant position17:20 Being asked: “Do you think you can do research on the discovery process of artists?” Of course! Loving reading on cognitive psychology and being yelled at at her first conference20:00 Getting into cognitive psychology PhD in decision making20:30 “One philosophy that guides my life - it’s what Einstein says, chance favours the prepared mind. I love that. There are opportunities all around us and very often we are blind to them. But if you are really aware and open, important to be open.” “You have to be willing to give up a particular path that you might think you are on and you have to be willing to change, to veer away from it or to change completely.  And of course … you have to do it intelligently and weigh the risks and the benefits of whatever choice you can make.”“If it connects to something that is really a part of you that is worth the risk. Because you can’t do something that you feel is not who you are or is against your belief system.”22:50 Themes from research studying issues around multi-tasking, stress etc. How this research strand started from a personal experience, moving in 2000 from Germany working in a research institute doing only research, to an assistant professor position in the US to do teaching, writing grants, committees, service work … “to what extent am I the only one [multi-tasking]?”25:20 Patterns seen in studying multi-tasking – sped up and intensified through use of digital media, and the more people switch attention through different screens, the higher their stress because of limited capacity of attentional resources and not replenishing resources29:30 Extra stress in re-orienting to a new context, every email involves some new topic - “Email is a symbol of work… a reminder there is work there”; online a lot, reading email at breakfast,32:50 Measured average duration of attention for people on any computer screen is a little over 40 secs, a cost when switching so frequently33:40 Knowing this from research but making a difference to personal patterns? More insight – as habits are hard to break34:40 First habit to break? To be more aware of physical environment, going outside more, interacting with people more, shifting attention from screen; but hard to break away because there are rewards for being online –the Las Vegas phenomena and random reward hits37:30 “Another reason it is hard to pull away is because we are all caught up in this web of interconnections” – have to solve the problem on a macro level, need to think about organizational policies eg batch email times40:25 Study cutting off people’s email in the workplace for 5 days – stress down, screen attention duration longer … variety of individual responses but at the end of the 5 day period realised life went on. But Information is too seductive42:40 Looking after herself, honouring the art piece of her? Discovered she can be creative in different mediums not just visual and art training good for science “because I learned how to do lateral thinking” – “you can practice creativity in so many ways, in conversations, in writing, in just thinking of ideas”46:20 Not good at pulling away from work. Too stressed and manifest in sleep patterns. Take vacations but sometimes vacations can be stressful. Don’t do enough of trying to alleviate stress. One thing that helps – “try to take care of a task as soon as possible because delaying on a task makes stress worse”. ... “It’s like a treadmill”50:00 Final thoughts? Important to do things that are fun and interesting.52:43 EndRelated LinksGloria's home page: <a href="https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.ics.uci.edu/~gmark/Home_page/Welcome.html</a>CHI2017 conference chaired by Gloria with Sue Fussell - <a href="https://chi2017.acm.org" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chi2017.acm.org</a>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Gloria Mark on service, multitasking, creativity and fun 

Carman Neustaedter

Carman Neustaedter is an Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Arts and Technology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada and is also Director of the Connections Lab (cLab) research group. He talks about the importance for him of taking time to reconnect with his identity and values, and building in regular time for reflection, both on the bigger issues of where he is going and also on day to day work like writing challenges. He also discusses feeling overwhelmed and deciding to track his work time over a whole year, which led to surprising findings about how he actually spent his time and how he worked fewer hours than he thought he did. He also touches on issues around handling reviewer critique, managing his email inbox and how he structures time and prioritises family. A thread through a couple of stories is also the importance of being able to take on the perspective of others, whether these are the critical reviewers or colleagues.“It’s really hard to figure out who you are because you’re often so focused…, you don’t stop to step back and say who am I and what is my path. But it’s so valuable to do.”“It’s easy to slip into the habit of doing work at all sorts of hours. … It’s about choice and recognizing ahead of time what my priority is and making sure that priority is my family in the evening and at the weekend.”“When I’m working, I’m really on and working really hard but then I purposely stop and say you know what it’s family time now, they deserve my time.”“It’s really valuable for all walks of life just to empathise and understand others.”He talks about (times approximate) …2:09 Start2:39 Current position, PhD from Calgary, experience working in Kodak Research Labs for three years before moving back to academia; how he got to the industry position as a post doc; finding it routine, and the decision to come back to academia and loving it.5:02 Trigger for coming into academia – working with students, the agency and flexibility. Considered thinking to come back. Lucky to land something back in Canada, close to family. Obvious move back. Now in academia 8 years.6:19 Experience of shifting back into academia – a struggle, paid far less, working way harder, so many things coming at him, hard to transition back into. Having the break allowed him to understand the situation a lot more, more reflection on own lifestyle and work-life balance. At Kodak, emails stopped coming in at 5pm on Fri and not much at weekend and as an academic getting emails from students at all hours. Had to adjust to it.8:04 Other challenges in trying to set up as a new prof – establishing his identity and setting up a research group, what to focus on and how to present it to the world; critical to have a web page early; trying to establish identity and use that as framing for everything else he was trying to do. Finding the focus tricky but the job hunt helped as had to figure out ‘who are you, what’s your vision for the next few years’. “It’s an especially challenging task… it’s really hard to figure out who you are because you’re often so focused with your head down on your work, you don’t stop to step back and say who am I and what is my path. But it’s so valuable to do.”9:54 How to do that practically? “It’s time. I can work on another paper or spend a half day thinking about what my identity is and how I want to project myself… it’s important to reassess that identity.” Example of using a hike or run on sabbatical last year to do this figuring out. Answer was realizing he had actually accomplished a lot and pretty proud of it and to continue on the same track, with tweaks. “Being happy with what I accomplished was really key.”; talking of being, purpose; “About what’s important and that thread weaves through the work we do, what we choose to do for [service, teaching, research] and weaves through how we balance work and family life and the personal endeavours we want.12:09 Values as a researcher – being real, true to yourself and what you do. Talks about example of writing papers in a certain way, telling people what you did and why and not being afraid of the scrutiny. A tough profession when we have so many people critiquing us but it’s ok to show you and what you’re doing and stand up for it.13:29 Handling the critiques – a long process but now tries to empathise with the reviewer and think about where they are coming from. Trying to connect with the reviewer, sees it as a conversation, understanding their perspective. More often than not getting critiqued rather than praised about the work we do. Probably not a lot of professions that get critiqued that much.15:59 Other ways for helping handle this? Likes to go running, several times a week early morning, time to get out there and gives chance for reflection on what I’m doing, think up new ideas, and reconnect with myself”.16:54 Other routines? Particular about when he works, tries hard not to work on evenings or weekends. Family and evening routines makes it easier to achieve. Weekends are family time with wife and kids. “When I’m working I’m really on and working really hard but then I purposely stop and say you know what it’s family time now, they deserve my time and so I’ll spend it with them.” Not like that before he had family. Notices he works more when he is away at conferences. “It’s easy to slip into the habit of doing work at all sorts of hours.”  “It’s about choice and recognizing ahead of time what my priority is and making sure that priority is my family in the evening and at the weekend.”18:59 Hard when requests for stuff keep coming in.  Gives example of email on weekend with a request. Has a habit of inbox at zero 80% of the time. So if something comes in at the weekend it bothers him. Needs to handle it by getting it out of his inbox and onto a to-do then he can leave it for Monday. But if it sits in email he will think about it. Didn’t always do this but helps to keep his weekend to himself. Other email strategies – touching email only once;21:49 Talks about tracking his work for a year. 2014, approaching tenure time, felt he was working tons of hours, feeling overwhelmed. Decided to figure out where he spent his time. Used a spreadsheet and recorded in 15 min time blocks. Tracked tasks, time of day, weekend. Tracked for a year. What time of day, who it was spent on, and how the numbers came out.23:19 How tracking for a year was a pain but why he kept doing and the slivers of insight he got on the way.26:00 Results surprising. Thought he did way more service and teaching than research but not the case. Research time was actually 67% over the year. Teaching was only 15% and only 18% was service. “So it was way different than what I thought. I was spending most of the doing the research stuff I really loved and not a lot time doing the teaching things that I thought was taking up a lot of my time.” On average worked about 39 hours a week. Felt over 50 hours. “It felt like I was completely overwhelmed and working all the time.” Didn’t realise how many hours he was actually working.26:50 Flexible way of handling his day, on campus between 4-8 hours, will work from home when he can. Works early morning time. Helps kids. Finish up in the afternoon. Email in the evening. Some days only 4 hours. Flexibility of the job to let him do this lifestyle structure. Balances out with 10 hr day.28:22 What contributes to it feeling so much more? Asked himself some tough questions about why feeling overwhelmed, exhausted. Maybe a lot of it comes down to choice.  So many demands on attention can be overwhelming, A lot of contact points. So many things coming at him overwhelming. The sense of responsibility and loving helping people. Feeling obligated and wanting to help.  Lack of getting to what he wants to do, don’t feel he has as much as choice as he wants to. Teaching feels a little more like work, less control over it. Loves teaching, reinvigorates but freedom of choice issue.32:09 How does it feel now with requests? Looking through time makes it easy to recognize this is happening and use it to leverage different choices, and also figuring out when he works best and how to adjust his schedule. Talks about how he structures his work now. Also gives example of writing the discussion section that he finds hard, and timing it before a run or a break (drive into work) so he can then think back on what he just wrote and see if new insights come up.  Works well except for keeping notes. Wouldn’t have tracked that as work time. 34:54 “Work is on my brain a lot of the time. It’s hard to get it off my brain.” Think best ideas come when he is not working. Never know what you are going to see that is going to spawn a great idea. Fluid work and locations makes it even muddier. Even though ideas flow in non-work time, easy enough to separate them and not linger. Gets a note down and then get back to the personal stuff.38:19 Not managed so well … when family visiting, guests, etc. But also forces you to engage with family and friends more.39:09 Criteria for making choices, saying no? “Doing what I know I love to do”. Gives example of telepresence chair service role. “It’s stuff I love doing so it’s not really like work.”40:34 Sabbatical experience. Three months recognized missed his normal job and couldn’t do research full on. Needed the breaks. Realised how much he valued them when gone. Feeling of guilt for not working. Tension of should and wants. Wanting to get away from the job but then realizing he really loved it. His choice to re-engage with some teaching and service while on sabbatical. Still mental turmoil, would he wish he stepped back more. But felt good at the end of the year. Accomplished more than planned. Happy with what he did because he was making choices, saying no and also saying yes to things he really loved.44:54 “It was a turning point, and I realized moving forward - get back that choice. Really think about what I want to do and don’t be afraid to do that.”45:29 Seeing career moving forward. Knows research direction, more admin work in department coming up, understanding internal politics. Talks about getting to know people more now and seeing where they are coming from. Tries hard to understand people from their perspective. Easiest way of getting policies through is understanding people’s perspectives and incorporating them. Talks a lot with people, prep work, understanding people. Came out of empathy training some years ago (in context of running a study) but “it’s really valuable for all walks of life just to empathise and understand others.”. Created less butting heads, faster to get on same page, accomplish more. But takes time/work.50:51 Gives other examples of other situations where empathy helps, from family/kids to co-author/grad student and teasing out what is going on. Involves a lot of listening. Aim to get the best work, mutual goals.52:59 Tries to foster a lab culture, about being dependent on each other, helping each other. Learnt from advisor Saul Greenberg. Shared responsibility in helping people out, a team, a family.54:49 Final thoughts – “I think so much of our time is spent with our heads down and trying to get things done. I still really struggle with lifting my head up and getting that broader perspective. But I really think scheduling in even a little bit of time every once in a while to get that perspective back is super important.”. Advice from Joanna McGrenere – schedule time on sabbatical for personal reflection. Applicable beyond sabbatical. Schedule that time block eg for a run, walk, or silent drive. Making it a point of your regular routine is so incredibly invaluable. Recognise you are doing good stuff and how to keep that path going forward and how to have time for yourself.57:35 My reflections on harmonious passion.59:55 EndRelated LinksSaul Greenberg podcast – on supervising, building a lab, creating good work life balanceSheelagh Carpendale - http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.phpJoanna McGrenere - http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~joanna/Jolanta Burke podcast – on burnout, harmonious passion, positive workplaces &amp; helping othersSome articles on passion, obsessive passion and harmonious passion:Vallerand et al, 2003, Les Passions de l’Aˆ me: On Obsessive and Harmonious Passion, J Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, 85:4, 756-767Kaufmann, Why Your Passion for Work Could Ruin Your Career, Harvard Business Review, Aug. 2011Kaufman, Increase Your Passion for Work Without Becoming Obsessed, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2011This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="http://carmster.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Carman Neustaedter</a> is an Associate Professor in the <a href="http://siat.sfu.ca" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">School of Interactive Arts and Technology</a> at <a href="http://www.sfu.ca" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Simon Fraser University</a> in Vancouver, Canada and is also Director of the <a href="http://clab.iat.sfu.ca" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Connections Lab (cLab)</a> research group. He talks about the importance for him of taking time to reconnect with his identity and values, and building in regular time for reflection, both on the bigger issues of where he is going and also on day to day work like writing challenges. He also discusses feeling overwhelmed and deciding to track his work time over a whole year, which led to surprising findings about how he actually spent his time and how he worked fewer hours than he thought he did. He also touches on issues around handling reviewer critique, managing his email inbox and how he structures time and prioritises family. A thread through a couple of stories is also the importance of being able to take on the perspective of others, whether these are the critical reviewers or colleagues.</h2><h2>“It’s really hard to figure out who you are because you’re often so focused…, you don’t stop to step back and say who am I and what is my path. But it’s so valuable to do.”</h2><h2>“It’s easy to slip into the habit of doing work at all sorts of hours. … It’s about choice and recognizing ahead of time what my priority is and making sure that priority is my family in the evening and at the weekend.”</h2><h2>“When I’m working, I’m really on and working really hard but then I purposely stop and say you know what it’s family time now, they deserve my time.”</h2><h2>“It’s really valuable for all walks of life just to empathise and understand others.”</h2>He talks about (times approximate) …2:09 Start2:39 Current position, PhD from Calgary, experience working in Kodak Research Labs for three years before moving back to academia; how he got to the industry position as a post doc; finding it routine, and the decision to come back to academia and loving it.5:02 Trigger for coming into academia – working with students, the agency and flexibility. Considered thinking to come back. Lucky to land something back in Canada, close to family. Obvious move back. Now in academia 8 years.6:19 Experience of shifting back into academia – a struggle, paid far less, working way harder, so many things coming at him, hard to transition back into. Having the break allowed him to understand the situation a lot more, more reflection on own lifestyle and work-life balance. At Kodak, emails stopped coming in at 5pm on Fri and not much at weekend and as an academic getting emails from students at all hours. Had to adjust to it.8:04 Other challenges in trying to set up as a new prof – establishing his identity and setting up a research group, what to focus on and how to present it to the world; critical to have a web page early; trying to establish identity and use that as framing for everything else he was trying to do. Finding the focus tricky but the job hunt helped as had to figure out ‘who are you, what’s your vision for the next few years’. “It’s an especially challenging task… it’s really hard to figure out who you are because you’re often so focused with your head down on your work, you don’t stop to step back and say who am I and what is my path. But it’s so valuable to do.”9:54 How to do that practically? “It’s time. I can work on another paper or spend a half day thinking about what my identity is and how I want to project myself… it’s important to reassess that identity.” Example of using a hike or run on sabbatical last year to do this figuring out. Answer was realizing he had actually accomplished a lot and pretty proud of it and to continue on the same track, with tweaks. “Being happy with what I accomplished was really key.”; talking of being, purpose; “About what’s important and that thread weaves through the work we do, what we choose to do for [service, teaching, research] and weaves through how we balance work and family life and the personal endeavours we want.12:09 Values as a researcher – being real, true to yourself and what you do. Talks about example of writing papers in a certain way, telling people what you did and why and not being afraid of the scrutiny. A tough profession when we have so many people critiquing us but it’s ok to show you and what you’re doing and stand up for it.13:29 Handling the critiques – a long process but now tries to empathise with the reviewer and think about where they are coming from. Trying to connect with the reviewer, sees it as a conversation, understanding their perspective. More often than not getting critiqued rather than praised about the work we do. Probably not a lot of professions that get critiqued that much.15:59 Other ways for helping handle this? Likes to go running, several times a week early morning, time to get out there and gives chance for reflection on what I’m doing, think up new ideas, and reconnect with myself”.16:54 Other routines? Particular about when he works, tries hard not to work on evenings or weekends. Family and evening routines makes it easier to achieve. Weekends are family time with wife and kids. “When I’m working I’m really on and working really hard but then I purposely stop and say you know what it’s family time now, they deserve my time and so I’ll spend it with them.” Not like that before he had family. Notices he works more when he is away at conferences. “It’s easy to slip into the habit of doing work at all sorts of hours.”  “It’s about choice and recognizing ahead of time what my priority is and making sure that priority is my family in the evening and at the weekend.”18:59 Hard when requests for stuff keep coming in.  Gives example of email on weekend with a request. Has a habit of inbox at zero 80% of the time. So if something comes in at the weekend it bothers him. Needs to handle it by getting it out of his inbox and onto a to-do then he can leave it for Monday. But if it sits in email he will think about it. Didn’t always do this but helps to keep his weekend to himself. Other email strategies – touching email only once;21:49 Talks about tracking his work for a year. 2014, approaching tenure time, felt he was working tons of hours, feeling overwhelmed. Decided to figure out where he spent his time. Used a spreadsheet and recorded in 15 min time blocks. Tracked tasks, time of day, weekend. Tracked for a year. What time of day, who it was spent on, and how the numbers came out.23:19 How tracking for a year was a pain but why he kept doing and the slivers of insight he got on the way.26:00 Results surprising. Thought he did way more service and teaching than research but not the case. Research time was actually 67% over the year. Teaching was only 15% and only 18% was service. “So it was way different than what I thought. I was spending most of the doing the research stuff I really loved and not a lot time doing the teaching things that I thought was taking up a lot of my time.” On average worked about 39 hours a week. Felt over 50 hours. “It felt like I was completely overwhelmed and working all the time.” Didn’t realise how many hours he was actually working.26:50 Flexible way of handling his day, on campus between 4-8 hours, will work from home when he can. Works early morning time. Helps kids. Finish up in the afternoon. Email in the evening. Some days only 4 hours. Flexibility of the job to let him do this lifestyle structure. Balances out with 10 hr day.28:22 What contributes to it feeling so much more? Asked himself some tough questions about why feeling overwhelmed, exhausted. Maybe a lot of it comes down to choice.  So many demands on attention can be overwhelming, A lot of contact points. So many things coming at him overwhelming. The sense of responsibility and loving helping people. Feeling obligated and wanting to help.  Lack of getting to what he wants to do, don’t feel he has as much as choice as he wants to. Teaching feels a little more like work, less control over it. Loves teaching, reinvigorates but freedom of choice issue.32:09 How does it feel now with requests? Looking through time makes it easy to recognize this is happening and use it to leverage different choices, and also figuring out when he works best and how to adjust his schedule. Talks about how he structures his work now. Also gives example of writing the discussion section that he finds hard, and timing it before a run or a break (drive into work) so he can then think back on what he just wrote and see if new insights come up.  Works well except for keeping notes. Wouldn’t have tracked that as work time. 34:54 “Work is on my brain a lot of the time. It’s hard to get it off my brain.” Think best ideas come when he is not working. Never know what you are going to see that is going to spawn a great idea. Fluid work and locations makes it even muddier. Even though ideas flow in non-work time, easy enough to separate them and not linger. Gets a note down and then get back to the personal stuff.38:19 Not managed so well … when family visiting, guests, etc. But also forces you to engage with family and friends more.39:09 Criteria for making choices, saying no? “Doing what I know I love to do”. Gives example of telepresence chair service role. “It’s stuff I love doing so it’s not really like work.”40:34 Sabbatical experience. Three months recognized missed his normal job and couldn’t do research full on. Needed the breaks. Realised how much he valued them when gone. Feeling of guilt for not working. Tension of should and wants. Wanting to get away from the job but then realizing he really loved it. His choice to re-engage with some teaching and service while on sabbatical. Still mental turmoil, would he wish he stepped back more. But felt good at the end of the year. Accomplished more than planned. Happy with what he did because he was making choices, saying no and also saying yes to things he really loved.44:54 “It was a turning point, and I realized moving forward - get back that choice. Really think about what I want to do and don’t be afraid to do that.”45:29 Seeing career moving forward. Knows research direction, more admin work in department coming up, understanding internal politics. Talks about getting to know people more now and seeing where they are coming from. Tries hard to understand people from their perspective. Easiest way of getting policies through is understanding people’s perspectives and incorporating them. Talks a lot with people, prep work, understanding people. Came out of empathy training some years ago (in context of running a study) but “it’s really valuable for all walks of life just to empathise and understand others.”. Created less butting heads, faster to get on same page, accomplish more. But takes time/work.50:51 Gives other examples of other situations where empathy helps, from family/kids to co-author/grad student and teasing out what is going on. Involves a lot of listening. Aim to get the best work, mutual goals.52:59 Tries to foster a lab culture, about being dependent on each other, helping each other. Learnt from advisor Saul Greenberg. Shared responsibility in helping people out, a team, a family.54:49 Final thoughts – “I think so much of our time is spent with our heads down and trying to get things done. I still really struggle with lifting my head up and getting that broader perspective. But I really think scheduling in even a little bit of time every once in a while to get that perspective back is super important.”. Advice from Joanna McGrenere – schedule time on sabbatical for personal reflection. Applicable beyond sabbatical. Schedule that time block eg for a run, walk, or silent drive. Making it a point of your regular routine is so incredibly invaluable. Recognise you are doing good stuff and how to keep that path going forward and how to have time for yourself.57:35 My reflections on harmonious passion.59:55 EndRelated LinksSaul Greenberg podcast – <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2016/10/18/saul-greenberg" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">on supervising, building a lab, creating good work life balance</a>Sheelagh Carpendale - <a href="http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://pages.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~sheelagh/wiki/pmwiki.php</a>Joanna McGrenere - <a href="http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~joanna/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~joanna/</a>Jolanta Burke podcast – <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2017/11/11/jolanta-burke" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">on burnout, harmonious passion, positive workplaces &amp; helping others</a>Some articles on passion, obsessive passion and harmonious passion:<ul><li>Vallerand et al, 2003, <a href="https://selfdeterminationtheory.org/SDT/documents/2003_VallerancBlanchardMageauKoesnterRatelleLeonardGagneMacolais_JPSP.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Les Passions de l’Aˆ me: On Obsessive and Harmonious Passion</a>, J Personality and Social Psychology, 2003, 85:4, 756-767</li><li>Kaufmann, <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/08/why-your-passion-for-work-coul" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Why Your Passion for Work Could Ruin Your Career</a>, Harvard Business Review, Aug. 2011</li><li>Kaufman, <a href="https://hbr.org/2011/09/increase-your-passion-for-work" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Increase Your Passion for Work Without Becoming Obsessed</a>, Harvard Business Review, Sept. 2011</li></ul>This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Carman Neustaedter on research identity, work tracking surprises, and taking perspective

Katie Siek

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/12/8/katie-siek for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/</a> 2018/12/8/katie-siek for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Katie Siek on dual careers & children, mentoring & lobbying, & dealing with illness

Luigina Ciolfi

Luigina Ciolfi is a full Professor of Human Centred Computing at C3RI – The Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute  and member of the Communication and Computing Research Centre at Sheffield Hallam University (UK). A common theme of the conversation is her passion for giving back. We talk about peer service organising a conference, and about her early career experiences as a junior faculty with responsibilities for a program, and what sorts of training and support were or could have been useful for her. In giving back now to junior faculty, she also talks about recent training experiences to take a coaching/mentoring approach and the value of this. We then talk about some of her recent research studying how nomadic workers and how work-life balance plays out for them and how there is no one strategy that suits everyone. She reflects on her own strategies here and also on the challenges of working in a different country to your families.BONUS full transcript available here“To keep the good work [of the research community] going it’s only fair that I contribute to it”“Junior faculty struggles are for both men and women.”“Mentoring is just supporting someone to make decisions.”“Balance is not something that everyone aspires to…There’s no strategy that fits everybody.”“Knowing yourself is part of being confident about your strategy and it takes time to know yourself as a professional, to know what you can achieve. It’s a learning curve.”In summary, she talks about (times approximate) …02:00 Discussing the experience of chairing the ECSCW conference and losing a good friend who was going to be the papers co-chair09:15 Talking about her Masters in Siena, Italy and moving to Limerick, Ireland for PhD15:22 Transitioning from student into a faculty position, role of mentors, experience of submitting proposals; early demanding lifestyle of teaching, research etc as an young faculty; early teaching experiences a lot work; wishing she had some shadowing opportunitiesExperiences around learning curve to be a teacher and program director; advice re handling problematic people; wish for training, e.g., mediation training, respectful training language; the meta skills of academia26:45 Most recent course on coaching techniques and mentoring skills; the people skills being important; discussion of most interesting skill/technique – ‘what will happen if’ scenarios to help decision making, helping them think but not giving direct input; how to answer to ‘what would you do’ questions from coaches/mentees32:00 Discusses research on work life balance, the research project that led to this, and the most recent work.  Everyone having different strategies and giving examples of these strategies. Blurring, balance and boundaries.40:50 Discusses differences with academics compared to other professions. Having a lot of freedom, less bound by constraints, having strong ambition and passion, but also a lot of similarities with other knowledge workers. One person’s story about a revelation moment listening to ‘Cats in the cradle’ song, recognising himself in the song, and the trigger to be quit his job and be a freelancer. Rather than giving instruments for balancing we could be giving instruments for re-arranging.47:40 Reflecting on working ‘more than is healthy’; partner support and weekends for more than work, though can be exceptions. Working less weekends and evenings now than used to as junior academic. Reflections on working more as a junior academic and why and what she might have done differently. Discusses strategies now eg stopping when she is tired, knowing yourself.53:55 Structuring own time. Not a morning person so leaves menial tasks until the morning. Being reflective about own patterns and practices. Tends to schedule meetings in the morning. Upsides and downsides of a mainly research position.55:05 Being active on social media and how she uses different social media tools. The support of others in the same situation. Use of scheduled posts. And the cats.59:10 Discussing other strategies, eg one day of a weekend completely work-free, role of partner, visiting mother, downside of not having any scheduled hobbies but doing other things. And not working in the evenings unless a good reason. Not ever having email notifications or social media notifications on phone.1:01:30 Final thoughts – having part of your family in different countries. Common, complicated. Making choice of staying in Europe even though heart might say going somewhere else, as a conscious choice to be closer to family. Feeling the tension of being far away from family. Common situation but not a common strategy. Distributed roots and always difficult to think of the very long term, just accepting you are at home in more than one place.1:06:49 EndRelated LinksLui’s home page - https://luiginaciolfi.net ; https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiginaciolfiECSCW2017 - https://ecscw2017.org.ukDave Martin - https://ecscw2017.org.uk/2017/02/21/announcing-the-david-b-martin-best-paper-award/Charlotte Lee - https://www.hcde.washington.edu/leeLiam Bannon - http://www.idc.ul.ie/people/liam-bannon/Daniela Petrelli - https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-petrelli-518b1658Fabiano Pinatti - http://www.wineme.uni-siegen.de/en/team/pinatti/‘Cats in the cradle’ lyrics - https://genius.com/Harry-chapin-cats-in-the-cradle-lyricsNomadic Work Life project - https://luiginaciolfi.net/projects/Managing Technology Around Work and Life project - https://techworkandlife.wordpress.com/Choosing an Academic Publication Venue: A Short Guide for Beginners - https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CcqRitAeUEuTJRiGAtWSPFVDoJZh7JAz/view This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

<h2><a href="https://luiginaciolfi.net" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Luigina Ciolfi</a> is a full Professor of Human Centred Computing at <a href="https://www.shu.ac.uk/research/specialisms/cultural-communication-and-computing-research-institute" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">C3RI – The Cultural, Communication and Computing Research Institute</a>  and member of the Communication and Computing Research Centre at <a href="http://www.shu.ac.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Sheffield Hallam University</a> (UK). A common theme of the conversation is her passion for giving back. We talk about peer service organising a conference, and about her early career experiences as a junior faculty with responsibilities for a program, and what sorts of training and support were or could have been useful for her. In giving back now to junior faculty, she also talks about recent training experiences to take a coaching/mentoring approach and the value of this. We then talk about some of her recent research studying how nomadic workers and how work-life balance plays out for them and how there is no one strategy that suits everyone. She reflects on her own strategies here and also on the challenges of working in a different country to your families.</h2><h2>BONUS full transcript available <a href="https://www.changingacademiclife.com/s/CAL27_Luigina_Ciolfi_Transcript.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">here</a></h2><h2></h2><h2>“To keep the good work [of the research community] going it’s only fair that I contribute to it”</h2><h2>“Junior faculty struggles are for both men and women.”</h2><h2>“Mentoring is just supporting someone to make decisions.”</h2><h2>“Balance is not something that everyone aspires to…There’s no strategy that fits everybody.”</h2><h2>“Knowing yourself is part of being confident about your strategy and it takes time to know yourself as a professional, to know what you can achieve. It’s a learning curve.”</h2>In summary, she talks about (times approximate) …02:00 Discussing the experience of chairing the ECSCW conference and losing a good friend who was going to be the papers co-chair09:15 Talking about her Masters in Siena, Italy and moving to Limerick, Ireland for PhD15:22 Transitioning from student into a faculty position, role of mentors, experience of submitting proposals; early demanding lifestyle of teaching, research etc as an young faculty; early teaching experiences a lot work; wishing she had some shadowing opportunitiesExperiences around learning curve to be a teacher and program director; advice re handling problematic people; wish for training, e.g., mediation training, respectful training language; the meta skills of academia26:45 Most recent course on coaching techniques and mentoring skills; the people skills being important; discussion of most interesting skill/technique – ‘what will happen if’ scenarios to help decision making, helping them think but not giving direct input; how to answer to ‘what would you do’ questions from coaches/mentees32:00 Discusses research on work life balance, the research project that led to this, and the most recent work.  Everyone having different strategies and giving examples of these strategies. Blurring, balance and boundaries.40:50 Discusses differences with academics compared to other professions. Having a lot of freedom, less bound by constraints, having strong ambition and passion, but also a lot of similarities with other knowledge workers. One person’s story about a revelation moment listening to ‘Cats in the cradle’ song, recognising himself in the song, and the trigger to be quit his job and be a freelancer. Rather than giving instruments for balancing we could be giving instruments for re-arranging.47:40 Reflecting on working ‘more than is healthy’; partner support and weekends for more than work, though can be exceptions. Working less weekends and evenings now than used to as junior academic. Reflections on working more as a junior academic and why and what she might have done differently. Discusses strategies now eg stopping when she is tired, knowing yourself.53:55 Structuring own time. Not a morning person so leaves menial tasks until the morning. Being reflective about own patterns and practices. Tends to schedule meetings in the morning. Upsides and downsides of a mainly research position.55:05 Being active on social media and how she uses different social media tools. The support of others in the same situation. Use of scheduled posts. And the cats.59:10 Discussing other strategies, eg one day of a weekend completely work-free, role of partner, visiting mother, downside of not having any scheduled hobbies but doing other things. And not working in the evenings unless a good reason. Not ever having email notifications or social media notifications on phone.1:01:30 Final thoughts – having part of your family in different countries. Common, complicated. Making choice of staying in Europe even though heart might say going somewhere else, as a conscious choice to be closer to family. Feeling the tension of being far away from family. Common situation but not a common strategy. Distributed roots and always difficult to think of the very long term, just accepting you are at home in more than one place.1:06:49 EndRelated LinksLui’s home page - <a href="https://luiginaciolfi.net/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://luiginaciolfi.net</a> ; <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiginaciolfi" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/luiginaciolfi</a>ECSCW2017 - <a href="https://ecscw2017.org.uk/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://ecscw2017.org.uk</a>Dave Martin - <a href="https://ecscw2017.org.uk/2017/02/21/announcing-the-david-b-martin-best-paper-award/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://ecscw2017.org.uk/2017/02/21/announcing-the-david-b-martin-best-paper-award/</a>Charlotte Lee - <a href="https://www.hcde.washington.edu/lee" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.hcde.washington.edu/lee</a>Liam Bannon - <a href="http://www.idc.ul.ie/people/liam-bannon/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.idc.ul.ie/people/liam-bannon/</a>Daniela Petrelli - <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-petrelli-518b1658" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://www.linkedin.com/in/daniela-petrelli-518b1658</a>Fabiano Pinatti - <a href="http://www.wineme.uni-siegen.de/en/team/pinatti/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.wineme.uni-siegen.de/en/team/pinatti/</a>‘Cats in the cradle’ lyrics - <a href="https://genius.com/Harry-chapin-cats-in-the-cradle-lyrics" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://genius.com/Harry-chapin-cats-in-the-cradle-lyrics</a>Nomadic Work Life project - <a href="https://luiginaciolfi.net/projects/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://luiginaciolfi.net/projects/</a>Managing Technology Around Work and Life project - <a href="https://techworkandlife.wordpress.com/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://techworkandlife.wordpress.com/</a>Choosing an Academic Publication Venue: A Short Guide for Beginners - <a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CcqRitAeUEuTJRiGAtWSPFVDoJZh7JAz/view" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CcqRitAeUEuTJRiGAtWSPFVDoJZh7JAz/view</a> This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Luigina Ciolfi on giving back, mentoring, and finding your own work-life strategies

Kirsten Ellis

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/6/18/kirsten-ellis for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/6/18/kirsten-ellis" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/ 2018/6/18/kirsten-ellis</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Kirsten Ellis on shifting goalposts, motivation, flying & being a working mum with a disabled child

Moshe Vardi

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/3/19/moshe-vardi-part1 for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/3/19/moshe-vardi-part1" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/3/19/moshe-vardi-part1</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Moshe Vardi (Part 1) on social implications of technology & our responsibility as academics

Janet Read

Janet Read is a Professor in Child Computer Interaction at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. Janet’s path to academia was via maths teaching, and then falling into a PhD after she had a family. Our discussions are wide ranging and throughout she is incredibly thoughtful, reflective and proactive in how she goes about unentangling processes and challenges, always striving to understand and develop, not just herself but also those around her. Because this ends up being a long conversation, the high level topics are below, along with more detailed notes, and has two parts - see below.We have a problem right through the whole system, understanding what the academic does.So the complete academic probably collapses on a Friday evening with a glass of wine. And gets up on a Saturday and starts doing work again.Daughter (9yr old) said “Mum when you are working at home, the children don’t know if you are being a mum or not.”.Deep work is the valuable work for academics... A really hard thing for academics is finding that deep work space.[Management ideal] It’s the encouragement, understanding individual needs, motivate, say well done. Wouldn’t it be nice to get “a well done”!In the first part, up to about the hour, she explores her own journey learning how to do research, how to supervise students, and how to support good learning experiences. She has some really interesting things to say about today’s university process-driven culture and argues that we need to do much better at understanding students and how to better support the learning experience, not equating attendance with learning.In the second part, she talks about being a complete academic, that one of the challenges is that no-one really knows what an academic actually does. She talks about how she deals with the demands on her time, the potential costs of being too efficient, being proactive and looking after your own needs, creating a collaborative group culture, wishing for encouraging and supportive leadership and saying ‘well done’.  PART 1:02:40 Path via teaching to a PhD, and into academia18:50 Learning to supervise PhD students32:45 Getting to understand processes, value of reflective writing39:08 University culture, process management, monitoring attendance, supporting the student learning processPART 2:1:01:09: The complete academic1:06:05: Understanding what the academic does, being efficient1:14:20 Speaking up, looking after yourself, managing time1:22:45 People management &amp; leadershipWith more detailed notes, she talks about (times approximate) …PART 1: Path via teaching to PhD and Academia:02:40 Janet talks about her unusual path to a research/academic career via a maths degree and high school teaching, wanting to have children and working part-time, having to change schools to do this, resigning in response to an unreasonable unfair workload demand compared to male colleagues, moving to a local college as an IT lecturer, and landing in university by pure chance to cover classes when someone went off for an operation, so never had an interview for her current job!09:10 Moving on to do a PhD part-time while working, with four kids, cats. Well supported but no-one on university team did research. Advised to go out and meet people, get work published. First experience at Sunderland HCI conference, heard Leon Watts ask a good question and thought ‘I want to be that guy’. He was gentle, constructive, and clearly coming with deep knowledge. Dead cool!13:25 Got PhD. And got the bug (not the book :-)). Got into child-computer interaction at the right time when it was accelerating. Wrote a book with Panos [Markopoulos] while doing PhD. Quite a lot of luck but also some of it active on her part going out travelling and doing things.14:36 Every single time she asked for money for travel she got it because no-one else was asking for it. So had opportunities. Sad thing now about how PhD work is funded in the UK as doesn’t typically come with travel funding so doesn’t support the process of delivering a really useful researcher at the end of. So was lucky, met some great people, made friends with everybody.15:40 Lots of networking, mainly with men, over beers; much less good at networking with women. Went to a couple of women meetings and they felt a bit like moan fests and didn’t want to be somewhere with just women but lot of women in academia felt they could only go in women spaces. Networks better with women who don’t have a gendered position.16:34 And British HCI Community was really good to her. Joined committee, went to conferences. But the changing academic situation means that regional things like this become less important and people don’t publish there so much and then the community I lost which is a shame. When she first started, BHCI was well regarded. Now they go to one conference a year and send students to regional conferences but they don’t get to meet senior people.Learning to supervise PhD students:18:50 Now been trying to run PhD schools at their university to invite PhD students from the UK as networking for the students. PhD system in the UK is broken. Can’t get PhD students from EPSRC grant money and push for doctoral training centres (DTC) so puts all students in one place, turns out cloned set of PhD students, any uni that doesn’t have a DTC becomes second rated. What you want is a student working with a supervisor who is passionate to get that work done. Ultimate success story. If you have a supervisor with 10 students they’re not getting s good experience from that. Once read you can’t supervise more than 6 students at the one time ideally. At times she has had 14! Crazy. Currently has four. Would like to have 3 full-timers and a couple of part-timers. Currently 1 full-time, 1 part-time, 2 overseas, and named on a couple of others.21:40 Learning to supervise students? Back when she did her PhD, had a dedicated supervisor. At time her PhD finished he quit and department had just Janet left to take on supervisions as she had a PhD and was research active. So she took on being director of studies of three other PhD students he was supervising, felt a rookie. Happy to take them on. At the uni, was supposed to put people on teams so they could get some experience. But didn’t want to get people put on teams if they couldn’t do the work. A tension there. Wrote an essay on this: ‘Supervise to fit or fit to supervise?’. Also read papers on supervision, and so not going to be beaten down on decision not to put people on just for their ‘tick’ box.24:43 So went out and found three friends, experienced professors in the UK, to help out on these supervisions. They did this for free. Great. They were all different and she learnt from them. One was like a butterfly thinker. Absolutely brilliant at the beginning of a PhD, though less brilliant these days. Would work with a part-time PhD more than a full-time. Others were better at sitting back and letting the student say what they wanted to do and gently pushing them back to where they thought they should go. Some more hands off, some more hands on. Students all different too so might be different for different students. Learn as you go along. Supervision changes.26:40 Core lessons around supervision? Maybe a bit of a dinosaur but still maintain that you should be supervised by someone who is an active researcher, who is publishing, and who knows the community you are publishing in. Should be no supervision under that line. Need to know methods, how they publish, what others are doing. But prevalent in universities. Many years ago made a ‘Doing a PhD with me’ booklet, saying here’s what you can expect. When she was first supervised didn’t know what her supervision team brought, how she worked with the, publishing protocols, their limitations. Will tell them what her experience and style is. Lays it out. They also have to express what they think they’re getting. It’s kind of like a contract, as a trigger for a conversation. Where you start from important. Was asked to reflect by Head of Department on PhD success, what made some more successful than others, what they were doing as a team, about supervision process. Had a big conversation about that. One of the key things was also understanding what skills the student brought.30:50 Got to do a Doctoral Consortium when she did her PhD. And they asked them to line in order of how far into PhD. Struck her though that years into a PhD is not a good measure. Was about understanding your maturity. So how do you figure out how far you are in PhD? And how to know you are finished? Has another booklet on ‘How do I know I’m ready to be examined for a PhD’. Has a checklist. And has a cosy model around progress. Written up somewhere. About assessing how much you know, how famous you are, how significant your work is, against learning outcomes for a PhD.Getting to understand processes, reflective writing practice:32:45 Influence of teaching background? Early days could teach without a lot of paperwork, but now unis are doing this too. Quite analytical because a mathematician at heart. So likes to understand processes. Knows they’re noise but likes to try to tidy them up. Detangling problems, step-by-step as you do in teaching maths. So says build a website, being published, meeting your community, identifying your heroes. And from this had a charm bracelet, could win charms. Has used this in Doctoral Consortium. What students want there are your pearls, your wisdom, the nuggets. So used the charm bracelet in a BHCI consortium to try to help them understand the low/high points, that it is a journey, understanding that others have done it. So has a gun for the night when you felt like shooting yourself, a rope when you have untangled a really complex problem. Used as props to help people understand the process. If only there were props for academic writing. All academics should have charm bracelet. When started PhD had a fight to get topic agreed at the uni. Wrote an essay about being in the tunnel and not coming out (reflecting a Thomas the Tank Engine story).37:45 Reflective writing? Comes and goes. One of aims is to build a blog page. But then thinks has to write something. Had done the 750 words/day challenge, spent a week reflecting on teaching with students (teaching in Hanoi). Good to express. Sometimes have to rant but not to the wrong people.University culture, process management, monitoring attendance, understanding the student learning process: 39:08 Don’t work in the greatest university in the world, ok, a modern university so has modern uni behaviours, like no confidence in itself or its academics, doesn’t trust the academics, everything has to be double checked, quality audited. Creeping to old ones too. But in that space has great colleagues, who will stop her when she gets to the ‘quit’ moments. Have honest conversations. Gets grumpy about justice issues, wants things to be adequately explainable. Gets angry about things in the background, shady dealing. Believes we should be entirely transparent, justify what we do. A lot in many universities is decided by a little gaggle of men in the corridor, sometimes women. A lot of decision making without reasonable or adequate awareness of other people and not being involved in the decisions.41:30 Interesting thing about women, not just women, a family thing going on. Putting in for an Athena Swan thing. About realizing people with any caring responsibilities – sometimes less likely to get involved in these peripheral things but this is where things happen. Even promotions, promoting people they feel are safe. Would be interesting to turn it upside down and let the professors run the place. Would have happier staff, people feeling that someone actually understood what they wanted to do, a set of processes. The amount of process management has probably doubled in the last four years. Gone crazy. And the responsibility devolved down to staff from above a tragedy, nobody has thought about the quality of teaching or student experience. Equate student experience with attendance and grades. Who cares if they are attending if they are engaged with the learning process in any way that suits them. Instead have an attendance rule. Had a rule they had to sign in to classes. She would say ‘sign in and leave’ if it was clear they didn’t want to be there. Can’t do that anymore. Have to swipe in with electric cards. All pretend activities that make someone in uni think the students are engaged. What happens when your managers don’t understand education and the modern student. The modern student is not the student the academics were when they were at uni. She used to go to only 4 classes a week herself, got to the end of the year, crammed, got through. Top 5% can get away with this. Wrong approach, how can we give our students good experiences they can learn from.47:05 Talks of own kids going through uni. Eye opener to see the other side of the learning process - given powerpoints, Moodle, then exam at the end of the year. How do you find what you want to revise when they are all on Moodle. Can’t search. She now chooses to stack her ppt slides so one set of slides at the end so they can search on it. Other thing is student email. No student reads email. But we talk to them via email. So we completely misunderstand them. Doesn’t know the answer. Communication is a challenge. The answer is not to not understand the student.49:20 Deadlines at midnight Sunday. Then they get sick Sunday afternoon but can’t contact the tutor. Deadlines should be on a weekday. Only come to that knowledge by observing, saw this with her own daughter who got a migraine at the weekend and couldn’t email the tutor. Universities typically lag behind the school system. Predictive scoring, personalized learning trajectory. Can criticize. Uni just starting, trying to show student at risk. These work in schools where you have a relationship with your teacher but doesn’t map to the uni environment.53:14 Brought in originally to deal with Tier 4 students on visa who have to be in attendance – government made it the university problem, they have a legal requirement to mark attendance. Now mark everyone to not discriminate. Stephen Fry, one of the smartest guys on the planet, he never attended at Cambridge. Think in the future unis will start to credit learning from somewhere else, dual role in giving out knowledge. An interesting way to think of unis. Has read history of unis. First unis in Germany. Prof would announce a lecture on topic. People came to listen. People access their education because they are curious. Now end up with a curriculum. John Ruskin, great philosopher’s story. Once with a curriculum, hard to get credits. Versus making your own curriculum.57:30 Quality – remember being shown a graph of number of first class degrees awarded by competitors. They were lower. Drive about not giving out enough firsts. Policy changes. Now give out more firsts. In the UK, 70 was a first. Now closer to 80. Classification of degrees an interesting space. A tool for governments. Same with PhDs. Can be a broad difference but considered enough. Also does external examining of courses. I do believe you have to be a complete academic. And will say about standards and say “you are overmarking”. PART 2: The complete academic:1:01:09 What makes a complete academic? Teaching, research, administration, outreach. Have to teach some of the time. Have to do research. Good friend Scott MacKenzie says research isn’t research until it is published. Some outreach. Just finished doing 5 weeks in a school. STEM important. Innovation strand because if only writing papers, not making a difference. By making or changing something. Likes the impact agenda of the REF. The REF in the UK (research excellence framework) a lot wrong with it, have to capture publications that are ranked, just gone through a big review, the Stern Review. Downside of ranking that uni equates whether a publication is ref-able so if you want to go to the British Computer Society can’t go because it isn’t counted (though REF doesn’t say this).  National conferences low in the ratings. Impact agenda – have to tell a story. Likes that. Hard but it says your research does more than just an academic paper. People can play the game too.1:04:26 Has to write two impact cases in next two days. In her group, all say together, brainstormed, came down to four, now wanting to invest in these. But need money. Great work with children in India, Mumbai, in Africa. Put in for money to do this but didn’t get it. If in a big institution have lots of people behind her. Also discusses lead in time that no-one notices.Understanding what the academic does, being efficient:1:06:05 We do have a problem right through the whole system understanding what the academic does. So the complete academic probably collapses on a Friday evening with a glass of wine. And get up on a Saturday and start doing work. Has spent a lot of time reading time management books. Has conversations in her group, most have young families, she now has young grandchildren. Sometimes just want to have coffee with a daughter. Nice to be able to do those things. Has four children, when two youngest were little, older ones noticed, 9yr old said “Mum when you are working at home, the children don’t know if you are being a mum or not.”. Says to group don’t work at home when you are being a parent. Look after the kids or work from home. Productivity Ninja book – says there are different types of work you can do. Can decide to delete your inbox as low effort job. And another great book called Deep Work. Talks about how people do deep work. Deep work is the valuable work...

<h2><a href="https://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/professor_janet_read.php" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Janet Read</a> is a Professor in Child Computer Interaction at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. Janet’s path to academia was via maths teaching, and then falling into a PhD after she had a family. Our discussions are wide ranging and throughout she is incredibly thoughtful, reflective and proactive in how she goes about unentangling processes and challenges, always striving to understand and develop, not just herself but also those around her. Because this ends up being a long conversation, the high level topics are below, along with more detailed notes, and has two parts - see below.</h2><h2>We have a problem right through the whole system, understanding what the academic does.</h2><h2>So the complete academic probably collapses on a Friday evening with a glass of wine. And gets up on a Saturday and starts doing work again.</h2><h2>Daughter (9yr old) said “Mum when you are working at home, the children don’t know if you are being a mum or not.”.</h2><h2>Deep work is the valuable work for academics... A really hard thing for academics is finding that deep work space.</h2><h2>[Management ideal] It’s the encouragement, understanding individual needs, motivate, say well done. Wouldn’t it be nice to get “a well done”!</h2>In the first part, up to about the hour, she explores her own journey learning how to do research, how to supervise students, and how to support good learning experiences. She has some really interesting things to say about today’s university process-driven culture and argues that we need to do much better at understanding students and how to better support the learning experience, not equating attendance with learning.In the second part, she talks about being a complete academic, that one of the challenges is that no-one really knows what an academic actually does. She talks about how she deals with the demands on her time, the potential costs of being too efficient, being proactive and looking after your own needs, creating a collaborative group culture, wishing for encouraging and supportive leadership and saying ‘well done’.  <ul><li>PART 1:<ul><li>02:40 Path via teaching to a PhD, and into academia</li><li>18:50 Learning to supervise PhD students</li><li>32:45 Getting to understand processes, value of reflective writing</li><li>39:08 University culture, process management, monitoring attendance, supporting the student learning process</li></ul></li><li>PART 2:<ul><li>1:01:09: The complete academic</li><li>1:06:05: Understanding what the academic does, being efficient</li><li>1:14:20 Speaking up, looking after yourself, managing time</li><li>1:22:45 People management &amp; leadership</li></ul></li></ul>With more detailed notes, she talks about (times approximate) …PART 1: Path via teaching to PhD and Academia:02:40 Janet talks about her unusual path to a research/academic career via a maths degree and high school teaching, wanting to have children and working part-time, having to change schools to do this, resigning in response to an unreasonable unfair workload demand compared to male colleagues, moving to a local college as an IT lecturer, and landing in university by pure chance to cover classes when someone went off for an operation, so never had an interview for her current job!09:10 Moving on to do a PhD part-time while working, with four kids, cats. Well supported but no-one on university team did research. Advised to go out and meet people, get work published. First experience at Sunderland HCI conference, heard <a href="http://www.cs.bath.ac.uk/leon/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Leon Watts</a> ask a good question and thought ‘I want to be that guy’. He was gentle, constructive, and clearly coming with deep knowledge. Dead cool!13:25 Got PhD. And got the bug (not the book :-)). Got into child-computer interaction at the right time when it was accelerating. Wrote a <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10111-007-0065-0" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">book</a> with Panos [Markopoulos] while doing PhD. Quite a lot of luck but also some of it active on her part going out travelling and doing things.14:36 Every single time she asked for money for travel she got it because no-one else was asking for it. So had opportunities. Sad thing now about how PhD work is funded in the UK as doesn’t typically come with travel funding so doesn’t support the process of delivering a really useful researcher at the end of. So was lucky, met some great people, made friends with everybody.15:40 Lots of networking, mainly with men, over beers; much less good at networking with women. Went to a couple of women meetings and they felt a bit like moan fests and didn’t want to be somewhere with just women but lot of women in academia felt they could only go in women spaces. Networks better with women who don’t have a gendered position.16:34 And British HCI Community was really good to her. Joined committee, went to conferences. But the changing academic situation means that regional things like this become less important and people don’t publish there so much and then the community I lost which is a shame. When she first started, BHCI was well regarded. Now they go to one conference a year and send students to regional conferences but they don’t get to meet senior people.Learning to supervise PhD students:18:50 Now been trying to run PhD schools at their university to invite PhD students from the UK as networking for the students. PhD system in the UK is broken. Can’t get PhD students from EPSRC grant money and push for doctoral training centres (DTC) so puts all students in one place, turns out cloned set of PhD students, any uni that doesn’t have a DTC becomes second rated. What you want is a student working with a supervisor who is passionate to get that work done. Ultimate success story. If you have a supervisor with 10 students they’re not getting s good experience from that. Once read you can’t supervise more than 6 students at the one time ideally. At times she has had 14! Crazy. Currently has four. Would like to have 3 full-timers and a couple of part-timers. Currently 1 full-time, 1 part-time, 2 overseas, and named on a couple of others.21:40 Learning to supervise students? Back when she did her PhD, had a dedicated supervisor. At time her PhD finished he quit and department had just Janet left to take on supervisions as she had a PhD and was research active. So she took on being director of studies of three other PhD students he was supervising, felt a rookie. Happy to take them on. At the uni, was supposed to put people on teams so they could get some experience. But didn’t want to get people put on teams if they couldn’t do the work. A tension there. Wrote an essay on this: ‘Supervise to fit or fit to supervise?’. Also read papers on supervision, and so not going to be beaten down on decision not to put people on just for their ‘tick’ box.24:43 So went out and found three friends, experienced professors in the UK, to help out on these supervisions. They did this for free. Great. They were all different and she learnt from them. One was like a butterfly thinker. Absolutely brilliant at the beginning of a PhD, though less brilliant these days. Would work with a part-time PhD more than a full-time. Others were better at sitting back and letting the student say what they wanted to do and gently pushing them back to where they thought they should go. Some more hands off, some more hands on. Students all different too so might be different for different students. Learn as you go along. Supervision changes.26:40 Core lessons around supervision? Maybe a bit of a dinosaur but still maintain that you should be supervised by someone who is an active researcher, who is publishing, and who knows the community you are publishing in. Should be no supervision under that line. Need to know methods, how they publish, what others are doing. But prevalent in universities. Many years ago made a ‘Doing a PhD with me’ booklet, saying here’s what you can expect. When she was first supervised didn’t know what her supervision team brought, how she worked with the, publishing protocols, their limitations. Will tell them what her experience and style is. Lays it out. They also have to express what they think they’re getting. It’s kind of like a contract, as a trigger for a conversation. Where you start from important. Was asked to reflect by Head of Department on PhD success, what made some more successful than others, what they were doing as a team, about supervision process. Had a big conversation about that. One of the key things was also understanding what skills the student brought.30:50 Got to do a Doctoral Consortium when she did her PhD. And they asked them to line in order of how far into PhD. Struck her though that years into a PhD is not a good measure. Was about understanding your maturity. So how do you figure out how far you are in PhD? And how to know you are finished? Has another booklet on ‘How do I know I’m ready to be examined for a PhD’. Has a checklist. And has a cosy model around progress. Written up somewhere. About assessing how much you know, how famous you are, how significant your work is, against learning outcomes for a PhD.Getting to understand processes, reflective writing practice:32:45 Influence of teaching background? Early days could teach without a lot of paperwork, but now unis are doing this too. Quite analytical because a mathematician at heart. So likes to understand processes. Knows they’re noise but likes to try to tidy them up. Detangling problems, step-by-step as you do in teaching maths. So says build a website, being published, meeting your community, identifying your heroes. And from this had a charm bracelet, could win charms. Has used this in Doctoral Consortium. What students want there are your pearls, your wisdom, the nuggets. So used the charm bracelet in a BHCI consortium to try to help them understand the low/high points, that it is a journey, understanding that others have done it. So has a gun for the night when you felt like shooting yourself, a rope when you have untangled a really complex problem. Used as props to help people understand the process. If only there were props for academic writing. All academics should have charm bracelet. When started PhD had a fight to get topic agreed at the uni. Wrote an essay about being in the tunnel and not coming out (reflecting a Thomas the Tank Engine story).37:45 Reflective writing? Comes and goes. One of aims is to build a blog page. But then thinks has to write something. Had done the 750 words/day challenge, spent a week reflecting on teaching with students (teaching in Hanoi). Good to express. Sometimes have to rant but not to the wrong people.University culture, process management, monitoring attendance, understanding the student learning process: 39:08 Don’t work in the greatest university in the world, ok, a modern university so has modern uni behaviours, like no confidence in itself or its academics, doesn’t trust the academics, everything has to be double checked, quality audited. Creeping to old ones too. But in that space has great colleagues, who will stop her when she gets to the ‘quit’ moments. Have honest conversations. Gets grumpy about justice issues, wants things to be adequately explainable. Gets angry about things in the background, shady dealing. Believes we should be entirely transparent, justify what we do. A lot in many universities is decided by a little gaggle of men in the corridor, sometimes women. A lot of decision making without reasonable or adequate awareness of other people and not being involved in the decisions.41:30 Interesting thing about women, not just women, a family thing going on. Putting in for an Athena Swan thing. About realizing people with any caring responsibilities – sometimes less likely to get involved in these peripheral things but this is where things happen. Even promotions, promoting people they feel are safe. Would be interesting to turn it upside down and let the professors run the place. Would have happier staff, people feeling that someone actually understood what they wanted to do, a set of processes. The amount of process management has probably doubled in the last four years. Gone crazy. And the responsibility devolved down to staff from above a tragedy, nobody has thought about the quality of teaching or student experience. Equate student experience with attendance and grades. Who cares if they are attending if they are engaged with the learning process in any way that suits them. Instead have an attendance rule. Had a rule they had to sign in to classes. She would say ‘sign in and leave’ if it was clear they didn’t want to be there. Can’t do that anymore. Have to swipe in with electric cards. All pretend activities that make someone in uni think the students are engaged. What happens when your managers don’t understand education and the modern student. The modern student is not the student the academics were when they were at uni. She used to go to only 4 classes a week herself, got to the end of the year, crammed, got through. Top 5% can get away with this. Wrong approach, how can we give our students good experiences they can learn from.47:05 Talks of own kids going through uni. Eye opener to see the other side of the learning process - given powerpoints, Moodle, then exam at the end of the year. How do you find what you want to revise when they are all on Moodle. Can’t search. She now chooses to stack her ppt slides so one set of slides at the end so they can search on it. Other thing is student email. No student reads email. But we talk to them via email. So we completely misunderstand them. Doesn’t know the answer. Communication is a challenge. The answer is not to not understand the student.49:20 Deadlines at midnight Sunday. Then they get sick Sunday afternoon but can’t contact the tutor. Deadlines should be on a weekday. Only come to that knowledge by observing, saw this with her own daughter who got a migraine at the weekend and couldn’t email the tutor. Universities typically lag behind the school system. Predictive scoring, personalized learning trajectory. Can criticize. Uni just starting, trying to show student at risk. These work in schools where you have a relationship with your teacher but doesn’t map to the uni environment.53:14 Brought in originally to deal with Tier 4 students on visa who have to be in attendance – government made it the university problem, they have a legal requirement to mark attendance. Now mark everyone to not discriminate. Stephen Fry, one of the smartest guys on the planet, he never attended at Cambridge. Think in the future unis will start to credit learning from somewhere else, dual role in giving out knowledge. An interesting way to think of unis. Has read history of unis. First unis in Germany. Prof would announce a lecture on topic. People came to listen. People access their education because they are curious. Now end up with a curriculum. John Ruskin, great philosopher’s story. Once with a curriculum, hard to get credits. Versus making your own curriculum.57:30 Quality – remember being shown a graph of number of first class degrees awarded by competitors. They were lower. Drive about not giving out enough firsts. Policy changes. Now give out more firsts. In the UK, 70 was a first. Now closer to 80. Classification of degrees an interesting space. A tool for governments. Same with PhDs. Can be a broad difference but considered enough. Also does external examining of courses. I do believe you have to be a complete academic. And will say about standards and say “you are overmarking”. PART 2: The complete academic:1:01:09 What makes a complete academic? Teaching, research, administration, outreach. Have to teach some of the time. Have to do research. Good friend <a href="http://www.yorku.ca/mack/" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Scott MacKenzie</a> says research isn’t research until it is published. Some outreach. Just finished doing 5 weeks in a school. STEM important. Innovation strand because if only writing papers, not making a difference. By making or changing something. Likes the impact agenda of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_Excellence_Framework" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">REF</a>. The REF in the UK (research excellence framework) a lot wrong with it, have to capture publications that are ranked, just gone through a big review, the <a href=":%20https:/www.bisa.ac.uk/files/Consultations/ind-16-9-ref-stern-review.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Stern Review</a>. Downside of ranking that uni equates whether a publication is ref-able so if you want to go to the British Computer Society can’t go because it isn’t counted (though REF doesn’t say this).  National conferences low in the ratings. Impact agenda – have to tell a story. Likes that. Hard but it says your research does more than just an academic paper. People can play the game too.1:04:26 Has to write two impact cases in next two days. In her group, all say together, brainstormed, came down to four, now wanting to invest in these. But need money. Great work with children in India, Mumbai, in Africa. Put in for money to do this but didn’t get it. If in a big institution have lots of people behind her. Also discusses lead in time that no-one notices.Understanding what the academic does, being efficient:1:06:05 We do have a problem right through the whole system understanding what the academic does. So the complete academic probably collapses on a Friday evening with a glass of wine. And get up on a Saturday and start doing work. Has spent a lot of time reading time management books. Has conversations in her group, most have young families, she now has young grandchildren. Sometimes just want to have coffee with a daughter. Nice to be able to do those things. Has four children, when two youngest were little, older ones noticed, 9yr old said “Mum when you are working at home, the children don’t know if you are being a mum or not.”. Says to group don’t work at home when you are being a parent. Look after the kids or work from home. <a href="https://www.amazon.com/How-Productivity-Ninja-Worry-Achieve/dp/1848316836" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Productivity Ninja book</a> – says there are different types of work you can do. Can decide to delete your inbox as low effort job. And another great <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">book called Deep Work</a>. Talks about how people do deep work. Deep work is the valuable work...

Janet Read on charm bracelets, finish tape & the work to be a complete academic

Jen Mankoff

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/4/23/jen-mankoff for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/4/23/jen-mankoff" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2019/4/23/jen-mankoff</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Jen Mankoff on managing an academic career with a disability & finding good ways forward 

Mike Twidale

See http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/10/12/mike-twidale for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - https://chartable.com/privacy

See <a href="http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/10/12/mike-twidale" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">http://www.changingacademiclife.com/blog/2018/10/12/mike-twidale</a> for a time-stamped overview of the conversation and related links.This podcast uses the following third-party services for analysis: Chartable - <a href="https://chartable.com/privacy" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://chartable.com/privacy</a>

Mike Twidale on agile research, leading from strengths, and story-telling

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