How do we act in alignment with what’s most important?
Last week, I spoke (online) at a Lunch and Learn session for faculty at the University of Maine at Presque Isle. The talk was called “The Coherent Professor: Finding Productivity and Purpose in a Whole Faculty Life” and synthesized many of the themes you will read about here. I presented three principles for a coherent life within academia and applied it to a couple of real life examples, including email management. Here are the slides and here is a resource page that goes with them.
As usual, the Q&A session at the end was more interesting than the talk itself. I was given some questions to address before the talk began, by some folks who weren’t able to attend. I thought they were so compelling that I wanted to turn them into today’s post. So here they are, with my responses (that go into more detail than I had time for last week).
Full responses available here. Excerpts below.
The first question was: If you could go back and give your younger academic self one piece of advice about finding coherence and purpose, what would it be?
… take advantage of the relative simplicity of your life, now, to build coherent systems that will scale up to what’s coming when you start your career.
How do we regularly show up for our most important work when that is defined and redefined multiple times over? How does this advice change for tenured, pre-tenured tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty?
… to navigate volatile situations where everything is in constant flux, you need fixed points. Once you establish fixed points that do not change, you’re in a much better position to navigate the things that do because you can triangulate your position.
In order to consistently show up for your most important work, you first have to decide what actually is important at all. What are your core values in life? What are the primary roles that you play, and how do you want those to play out? In GTD language, we call this Horizon 5. If you’ve never actually taken a notebook or a Google Doc and written out the answers to those questions in a Life Plan, start there.
What happens when or if we discover what is most important has nothing to do with our jobs in academia?
It usually requires that you allocate resources appropriately. And how do you know how to allocate your resources appropriately? You have to be crystal clear on your core values and your primary roles. You have to know what your fixed points are — the non-negotiables in your life that don’t change no matter what you discover.