Featured Member Meggin McIntosh – Deliberate strategies to improve your productivity and sanity

Meggin McIntosh is a Professor and Director Emerita of the Excellence in Teaching Program at University of Nevada, Reno. In 1996 she founded Emphasis on Excellence, Inc., a company dedicated to providing productivity and organizational resources to faculty, individuals, and the private sector. With topics ranging from writing productivity and professional development to children’s and young adult literature, McIntosh is widely published with nearly 50 scholarly articles, two academic books, 29 curriculum publications, 14 instructional guides, textbook and scholarly book chapters, a teaching guide, and more than 1,500 blog and online articles.

Here McIntosh shares deliberate strategies to help improve your productivity and sanity.

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Holiday strategies to honor your all-important academic project

The holidays can be wonderful times for reconnecting with family and friends, taking breathers from the daily-weekly-yearly chase of accomplishment, kindling or rekindling feelings of love, warmth, and generosity even to those who have published much more than you, and indulging in delectable seasonal goodies. But we academics often feel conflicted about how much time to “take off.” Maybe we’re feeling the pressure of having to participate in holiday events. Maybe we’re worried about being grilled by well-intentioned family or friends about the progress of our dissertation, article, or book. Maybe we’re very aware of the dangerous loss of momentum from our work. Maybe we just don’t like all those jolly gatherings.

Here, from clients who have suffered through such “maybes,” I suggest three holiday strategies you can apply, depending on the severity of your “maybes” and your fortitude. We don’t have to be at the mercy of the holidays!

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How to build effective collaboration

As a graduate student or early career academic you likely have a packed schedule. Trying to get published can be a daunting task, especially when you feel you have to do it alone. But maybe you don’t have to. If you can find the right person or persons to collaborate with, say doctoral students Tracey S. Hodges and Katherine Landau Wright, you are less likely to be stressed, and more likely to be productive and on the path to publishing success. Hodges and Wright share the following advice for effective collaboration:

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How to be an effective writing accountability partner

Has a colleague asked you to be their writing accountability partner? Accountability partners provide guidance, support, and motivation for a writer to forge ahead and stay on course with their writing. They also have a general interest in the writing success of the other person and can offer their own, different experiences, perspectives and ideas. All these things combined will help a writer overcome their challenges and barriers to writing success so they can be more productive, motivated, and able to reach their writing goals. To be an effective writing accountability partner, you need to be able to do these four things:

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