Mark Vega
Another excellent Profhacker piece that comes along at the right time, this one suggesting that we need to treat the voice of our self-critic, not to mention the proliferating productivity pundits, a little less reverently when it comes to being or feeling productive. As a graduate student who, ideally, should have more dissertation chapters to show for his efforts over these past years, it's all too easy to beat myself up for not writing as much as I should on a day to day basis. Feeling unproductive, moreover, feeds and amplifies the intellectual anxiety and insecurity that nearly all graduate students have from time to time. A missed day of exercise, a journal article that goes unread, even a messy apartment can lead to feeling as if one is not living up to the an ideals of the discipline or performing the lifestyle of a productive academic. As has taken me all to long to realize, however, the academic cyborg who moves seamlessly from intellectual activity to intellectual activity--while miraculously attending to all required maintenance of home and health--doesn't exist. Nels Highberg suggests, in advice applicable to academics or those who chronically identify as underachievers, that perhaps we need to give ourselves a collective break.
It’s extremely easy to focus on what we could be doing to make our lives easier. We would have to sit alone in silence in the dark to avoid encountering advice on how we can make our lives better, whether it’s a story on the local news, CNN, Oprah, NPR, Google News, or something atop the New York Times bestseller lists. The fact is that we want to do things more easily and effectively, but we can’t expect ourselves to get it right all the time (even if we could figure what what exactly counts as “right”).via profhacker.com
