Blog Archives

Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

7/1/2021

I don't know about you, but it seems that for every item I check off my to-do list, there are five more that pop up from various locations. Maybe it's a request from a colleague, an idea I got from reading an article that I'd like to implement in my work, a suggestion from a supervisor or mentor, or a commitment to family or friends that arose from a conversation. Whatever the origin of these tasks, they have a tendency to snowball if we aren't careful about paring them down (or learning to say "no", which is a thing I am very bad at and I promise will someday be a blog post of its very own).

When things pile up, it can quickly feel impossible to accomplish any of them, let alone all of them. If only there were a neat tool to help distinguish between which activities are high priority and which we shouldn't even bother with.

It turns out, there is!

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Goal Reviews

7/1/2021

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You might notice this post is very late this month. I try to get my posts out within a few days of the first of the month. I think consistency is important, and it helps me stay on track. This month, however, I fell into a trap that I have definitely mentioned before and cautioned against: I set some way too ambitious deadlines for myself, and the last three or four weeks I’ve been scrambling to catch up.

It’s total coincidence that this month I was planning to write about goal reviewing, but I am so glad that it worked out that way. Let my late post be an example that this process is not simple or linear, and that you will have to re-evaluate constantly.

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Goal setting: be SMART about it

7/1/2021

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There's more to setting goals than putting check boxes next to your aspirations.

When I was about halfway through my doctoral program, I realized that I was really overwhelmed. I had been stressed for a long time, and I was certainly aware of how the pressures of grad school were feeding into my overall anxiety, but I had been working hard to set goals for myself and try to meet them. I just wasn’t succeeding. What was making me so stuck?

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Time sprinting

7/1/2021

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Batching your time for better focus and reducing procrastination.

One of the biggest barriers to our work-life balance is the amount of time we spend neither working nor playing.

You know the time I mean. It’s when you’re sitting at your desk, dreading some task that feels boring or intimidating or even impossible. You don’t want to start the task, either because you fear you can’t accomplish it in the end or because you just don’t want to do it. So you haven’t started. But instead of using the time not spent on that task to do some other important task or to rest and recover, you spend it worrying, your attention divided between whatever it is you tell yourself you’re focusing on and your dread.

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The Work/Life Divide

7/1/2021

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How do you make space for life when work creeps in everywhere?

The boundary between work and life for knowledge workers has been growing thinner for years; the extended pandemic lockdowns are only accelerating the process. Many of us are finding — to our relief — that we can do our work from our homes. But with this blessing comes a curse: working from home means we lose a very clear physical boundary between our work life and our home life.

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Welcome

7/1/2021

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Welcome to Building Balance! I’m an early-career physics professor and advocate for work-life balance and mental health. I learned the hard way in graduate school that if I didn’t create my own boundaries and find balance in my life, the world would take advantage of that. Now, I pass those lessons on to other knowledge workers who feel besieged by our era of constant connectivity and prescriptive passion.

You can sign up for regular updates by subscribing to my newsletter. I try to post monthly with a tip, a resource, or a book review, and my newsletter will notify you when those are published.

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Prioritization with urgent-important matrices

Goal Reviews

Goal setting: be SMART about it

Time sprinting

The Work/Life Divide

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