Hybrid Pedagogy’s Jesse Stommel and our very own Charlotte Frost rethink academic life and writing productivity in this on-going series of hints, tips and hacks.
STAY AWAKE. Learn to live with getting less sleep. If you have children you’ll already be familiar with this feature of adulthood. It’s all well and good insisting that you need eight hours sleep to get stuff done, but how on earth can you get everything done in the sixteen hours you have left if some of that time is taken up by eating, washing and doing chores? Your years of pulling all-nighters are over, but so too are your years of long uninterrupted sleep – if you want to be really successful that is. Two solutions to this can be either getting up just half an hour earlier and/or going to bed half an hour later and using that extra pocket of time to race through email correspondence, thus freeing up more of your day for more productive work. Alternatively, try an afternoon nap. This of course won’t work if you’re supposed to be teaching or seeing students in your office, but many people find just twenty minutes of sleep in the afternoon reinvigorates them like no double espresso ever could, resulting in an afternoon/evening of faster and more targeted work. Pulled too many all-nighters already? Starting to lose the ability to string a sentence together, let alone write a book? Maybe you’re better off with this tip.
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