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2 ways to think about professional opportunities before tenure
Pre-tenure faculty need to conserve their limited time and energy for high impact activities that matter most for tenure and promotion. Here’s how to choose professional opportunities more wisely.
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Managing fear of failure on the tenure track
One of the best things you can do for your professional career and your chances of getting tenure is to accept fear as a part of life on the tenure track, but eject it from the driver’s seat.
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5 must-read books for pre-tenure faculty
Feeling like a fish out of water in your first couple of years as an assistant professor is completely normal. But if you’d like to feel a little more like you know what you’re doing (by the way, you’re doing great!), these five books are a good place to start.
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Want to get tenure? Prioritize deep, promotable work
The best strategy for earning tenure is deceptively simple: do deep work on promotable tasks on a regular basis. It’s simple because it’s fairly easy to understand why those who employ this strategy tend to have strong tenure files. It’s deceptive because implementing this strategy is hard.
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What assistant professors can learn from elite athletes
Instead of viewing rest as something that gets in the way of their success, faculty should take a cue from professional athletes who view high performance and rest as two sides of the same coin.
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Why pre-tenure faculty must learn to say “no”
Teaching and service are gaseous in the sense that they will take up as much space as you give them. If you aren’t careful, you won’t have enough left over to devote to research, or you’ll end up working around the clock to fit it all in.
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You don’t need to be a workaholic to get tenure
Being productive does mean maximizing activity, it means optimizing activity. It’s less about how many hours you work, and more about how you use your working hours. Instead of doing more things, focus on doing the right things in the right way.
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Want work-life balance on the tenure track?
Most assistant professors think that the only way to succeed on the tenure track is by working around the clock. But faculty who use the 80/20 rule know that you can get better results by working smarter, not harder.
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Want to achieve more on the tenure track? Focus on systems, not goals
Success isn’t just about setting goals. Goals are important, but without a system for achieving them, you’re less likely to succeed.
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2 reasons why pre-tenure faculty should downsize their syllabi
There are real cognitive constraints on how much new information students can remember and for how long. Covering a high volume of material at a break-neck pace stacks the deck against knowledge retention by producing learning conditions that favor forgetting.
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How to take control of your faculty inbox
The average knowledge worker spends about 28% of their workweek managing email. How do you save yourself from drowning in a rising tide of email messages? Here are six strategies.
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How pre-tenure faculty can use time blocking to work less
Time blocking is a way of intentionally structuring your daily and weekly schedule so that specific “blocks” of time are dedicated to completing a specific task or group of tasks.
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Are you spending too much time on grading as a new professor?
If you’re devoting a disproportionate amount of your limited time to teaching, and you are at an institution where research productivity is the most important factor in tenure and promotion decisions, you’re basically working yourself out of a job. Can we all just agree that this is not the way to go?
Tenure and the Arrival Fallacy
Wasn’t tenure the Holy Grail of academe?
I had made it. Why wasn’t I overjoyed?
