Healthy & Sustainable Productivity Habits for Academics
As academics, we often grapple with an overwhelming workload and a multitude of roles. Our responsibilities span teaching, research group management, student supervision, funding acquisition, paper writing, and complex administrative duties—all while striving to maintain a private life and mental well-being. This challenge is exacerbated by an avalanche of emails and a seemingly endless stream of meetings that consume a significant portion of our time.
Unfortunately, we receive little guidance on how to manage these demands effectively. Many of us default to strategies that served us well during our student and PhD years: being primarily driven by deadlines and extending our hours into evenings and weekends. This approach is unsustainable, leading to an unhealthy work-life balance and, ultimately, burnout. The consequences are severe: frustration, demotivation, and disillusionment with our academic work. Moreover, as research group leaders, we inadvertently transmit this toxic work culture to our teams and students.
This workshop aims to break this negative cycle and help you establish healthy, sustainable productivity habits. We will give you an alternative approach how to think about your role in academia. We will provide you with proven tools to define your own, sustainable working style so that you can be highly successful, while at the same time be happy and fall in love again with your academic work.
DESCRIPTION
General
This is a productivity workshop that helps participants to gain insights into their own personal points of friction and to teach them modern productivity tools to implement positive changes. The goal is to help members of the Soft Robotics community to be highly successful over a longer period of time without out burning out.
Objectives
The objectives of the productivity workshop are to
Provide participants through practical exercises with a profound understanding of what the underlying friction points are in their own personal academic experience
Provide participants with modern productivity tools to implement positive change
Establish a community beyond the workshop that help and support each other
Structure
The first part consists of introductions and discussion of common issues. It also teaches a shift in understanding what productivity means in the academic context and what the friction points are. The largest part however is guided practical work where people individually assess their own pressure points.
The second part after the coffee break teaches practical modern productivity tools that help to achieve sustainable productivity. Sharing expertise and experiences from all is actively encouraged.
At the end everyone is deciding on future steps.
To cement the learnt techniques, I will offer online follow-up meetings, where people can join and ask questions. In addition, to strengthen community I will establish a productivity channel in the soft robotics discord server.
Background and History
I developed an early version of this workshop in 2016. Since then, I have been given it regularly and, using the obtained feedback, improved it step by step.
The workshop was part of the mandatory staff development programme at the University of Bristol. I have given the workshops to departments, research groups, doctoral and postdoctoral training programmes, staff development for research pathways, leadership development programmes, and many others.
So far, over 600 people have participated with consistently extremely positive feedback including “has changed my life”, "this workshop was the reason I got finally my promotion”, “extremely useful”, “helped me to get my dream job”, etc.
Impact
The workshop has consistently proven to have a highly positive impact on the participants (see quotes above). I believe it can be similarly transformative for people in the soft robotics community.
Empowering members in our community with better tools to deal with the highly competitive academic environment will have several positive outcomes:
First, academics equipped with modern sustainable productivity tools are more likely to be successful (getting funding, acquire prestigious positions, obtain tenure and promotions)
Second, well-balanced academics are more capable to produce highly innovative solutions and approaches.
Third, group leads are role models for their group members and providing them with tools to work sustainably will help to break the negative cycle of toxic working culture.
Fourth, providing a community around soft skills will help to engage members of the soft robotics community beyond their own subgroup of expertise