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.

Begin with what you don’t know: An end of year reflection and meditation for academics

W.S. Merwin, who was recently the Poet Laureate of the United States, grew up in New York City. As a child, he had a recurring nightmare of concrete covering all the green areas of the earth. His whole life, and all his poetry and writing, has had the aim of serving to make sure that this doesn’t happen.

We academics are an anxious group. Will my article be accepted? Will I get tenure? Will my department survive the next round of budget cuts? We can get stuck in endless cycles of worry.

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: