Reader mailbag: Productivity, purpose, and career trajectory

The first in a new "reader mailbag" series

Photo by Liam Truong on Unsplash

Readers – that’s you – are what make working on this newsletter so rewarding week in and week out. I’ve been thinking about productivity and purpose in higher education for a long time, and it would be easy enough just to keep all these ideas to myself and benefit from them. But it’s better to share these ideas, so that we can all learn and grow together.

To get you readers more front and center in what I’m writing, I’m starting a new series today that I’m calling the Reader Mailbag.

A few weeks ago, I solicited questions on social media, related to anything you wanted to know about the topics we deal with here: productivity, purpose, GTD, the Law of the Whole Person, email management, time management – anything that’s on your mind. I received 18 responses with questions that were significant and often deeply personal. Today I’m going to focus on three of the questions that I received, that are all centered on the theme of career trajectories.

Choosing your own adventure

Here’s the first question:

I am a mid-career tenured math faculty member at a community college. What questions should I answer to decide my next career move? I could continue the path ahead, refining my teaching practices for the next ten or twenty years. I could add on small side projects of helping others teach with active learning, some coding projects, and other higher education related side hustles, as I continue to teach. Alternatively I could shift into administration, doing more with assessment and accreditation work at my institution.

All three of the questions I’m answering today have a similar answer: To make this decision, it’s crucial to have absolute clarity on your higher horizons: Horizon 5 (your Life Plan – your overall purpose and direction), Horizon 4 (your 3-5 year goals) and Horizon 3 (your 1-2 year goals). Here specifically, the key elements are Horizons 5 and 4.

In Horizon 5, you’re thinking about the roles that you play in your entire life and the fundamental forces ithat drive who you are and who you want to be. These include your career trajectory, but are not constrained to it. It’s your constitution, written using the Law of the Whole Person. Here you’re not necessarily thinking about career moves you might make — you’re thinking about what moves you.

Your life plan has its own separate existence apart from your career trajectories, so you can use it as a North Star to help you make career or personal choices on a grand scale. If you haven’t written out your Life Plan, that would be a great place to start. If you have, this is a good time to give it a checkup and make modifications, given your own personal evolution.

Once you do that, focus on Horizon 4, your 3-5 year goals that are instantiations of the stuff in your Life Plan. For example, one of your Life Plan items might say that you view being a skilled researcher as one of your primary roles. A Horizon 4 item aligned to that, might be a goal to publish five papers in your discipline by the end of 2031. The main thing here is to get clear on what professional directions you want to pursue that move you closer to the kind of person you want to be as outlined in your life plan. Notice we’re not talking about specific projects here, just goals that are far enough away to be aspirational, but also close enough in time to be concrete.

With a Horizon 5 that’s clear and a Horizon 4 that is in alignment with Horizon 5, you are essentially playing out different scenarios and seeing what resonates with you. Or what doesn’t! You might put something into your Life Plan that sounds great at the time, but then when you start instantiating it into 3-5 year goals, you might lose interest. Or vice versa, some roles that you might play in life might sound a little mundane, but when you think about how they might concretely show up in your life, it might spark a lot of interest that you didn’t realize that you had.

From here, you can begin to get a glimpse of what’s further down the road on each of those branches. You’ll likely also find that there are variables that aren’t strictly professional that also have an impact on these decisions. For example, if you have children, and you have “parent” as one of your primary roles, then you might realize that some of the branch options will make it harder for you to be fully present with your kids as they get older over the next few years, and that can inform your choice. Don’t forget the Law of the Whole Person: every part of you that matters when thinking about these choices.

Different people have different lives and therefore different Life Plans. My decision in your situation is probably going to be different than your decision. But what should guide us is the overarching clarity that we have about who we are, who we want to be, and why we were put on this planet and what that might look like concretely over the near term.

Competing norms

Another question:

I am an assistant professor (R1) and my salary heavily relies on external funding. While a current funding environment is a threat, I don’t think that is the only reason I am constantly feeling anxious about my future. What parameters should I use, beside what is asked in the annual evaluation (number of publications, submission of grant, etc). They are all/mostly productivity related. I feel constantly behind the “productivity” norms.

This is a really good question, primarily because it’s a conundrum: Each of us has our own expectations and hopes for ourselves in terms of who we are and who we become. But the metrics that are used by our employers to do annual evaluations are typically divorced from these things. I cannot think of a single institution where I’ve been employed that has ever asked me if my annual productivity is aligning with my higher horizons. So we have one set of “metrics” that we use for ourselves, and the places that employ us have another, and they don’t always agree.

So let me start with the personal criteria. A lot like my answer to the previous question, this is really a matter of your higher horizons: Horizons 5 and 4, and in this case I would also include Horizon 3, which consists of your 1-2 year goals. (Actual projects and areas of responsibility live in Horizon 2, and I don’t think those necessarily show up here.) If you have, as I described above, gotten clear on your Life Plan, Horizon 4, and Horizon 3, then I think an appropriate set of criteria for determining your own professional success is the degree to which you are accomplishing those goals and moving towards the kind of life you have in your Life Plan.

A good venue for determining this, is the review processes that are baked into the GTD system. However you don’t have to be a GTD person to have those reviews. Once a year (I like to do this on New Years Eve day), you can sit down with your higher horizons and honestly evaluate whether you are moving toward your short-term and longer-term goals and the description of yourself that you have in your Life Plan. If you’re like me, you’re going to have some wins and you’re going to have some misses. For the wins, where you are accomplishing your goals and moving toward your Life Plan, you can think about what’s working and what you need to double down on, moving forward. For the misses, you can ask yourself what’s blocking you and then make plans accordingly. Honestly, this ought to be what our professional annual evaluations look like. But since that almost never happens, we can at least do it for ourselves.

And remember the Law of the Whole Person states that you are not just a professional. You are a whole human being with a family, friends, hobbies, physical health, and more. Those are as much of a contributor to your professional success as any amount of papers or grants you get or teaching evaluations. So those should factor into your annual personal checkup as well.

Insofar as the metrics for your actual job go, I’m afraid there may not be much you can do about that — the tenure/promotion/salary adjustment metrics are what they are. But perhaps you can make some strategic decisions using the process that I described in this post about frameworks for saying no to things. I’ll be honest here, if you find yourself in a job situation where keeping up with the productivity norms of your institution is incompatible with your purpose as a human being, you might have some difficult career decisions to make in the near future because working in a job that constantly pulls you from your humanity is not sustainable.

But it’s also possible that you can find ways to meet the criteria that are on paper for your institution, in ways that are in alignment with your higher horizons. I don’t know your particular situation, but for instance: If you find teaching to be of primary importance in your life and your institution is open to counting scholarship of teaching and learning as research along with your disciplinary research, then perhaps you can branch out and start writing papers about teaching, which would be in alignment with your higher horizons and count toward your publications that you need. You might still be on the hook for writing 5 papers a year, but at least a couple of those would be about something fresh that energizes you¹.

Doing all the things

The final question is:

I love my job as a professor of History (recently promoted to Full Professor), and I am very productive. Yet I consistently put too much on my plate. I say yes to every exciting publication request that comes my way. I constantly reinvent my courses. I dedicate many hours each week to office hours because of the active pedagogies I use. I attend multiple conferences per year. As a result, I live in a constant state of feeling behind, which prevents me from fully feeling happy or satisfied. [At the moment, I am working on several books, edited collections, and articles, all at different stages of completion—projects for which I often need to request extensions. I have an ever-growing inbox, partly due to administrative roles that I genuinely enjoy and would not want to give up. I often end the day with the feeling that, even if I worked 12 hours a day, seven days a week, what remains undone far outweighs what I accomplished—even when I accomplished a great deal. How do you hit reset in this situation? Should I learn to prioritize more strictly and say no—even to wonderful opportunities like fabulous book proposals? Should I revise my expectations of myself? Should I change my attitude toward being behind or late on deadlines?

First of all, you’re right about the amount of time in the day. If we woke up one morning and the day magically had 36 hours in it, we would all probably put 48 hours worth of work into it and start saying “If only the day had 48 hours in it!” This is known as Parkinson’s Law and it’s really annoying because it’s true.

You are bumping up against the absolute limit on time and energy that every human being has to put into commitments. If you try to push past those limits, you may think that you enjoy what you’re doing, but on the wide scale, the enjoyment is dwarfed by exhaustion and regret. So we have to make choices, in your case among things that all provide some value to you.

I’m going to answer this similarly to what I said above: When faced with these choices, I think the right place to go is Horizons 5, 4, and 3 — starting with Horizon 5. Forget for a moment about all the things that you have the opportunity to do or are doing, and zoom way out and ask some big questions: Who are you as a person? Why do you think you were put on this planet? What are the most important roles that you play in your life? What are the driving forces that make you who you are? If it all ended today, what would you like people to say about you as a person, in the future?

I think you understand that if you said yes to all of these things, you would be basically saying yes to none of them, because you would be so thinly spread, you would have zero presence in any single one of them. Whatever value a single one of these things might provide for you or other people will be wasted. You’d end up in a situation where you’ve made commitments to other people, but you’re breaking your commitments, which makes you feel terrible.

For a situation like this, there are two sets of “things” you have to deal with: The things you have already said yes to, and the things that are in your inbox that you haven’t said yes to, yet.

The second set is easier to work with because you can just say no to those things. My recent post about frameworks for saying no basically says that we should never just say yes mindlessly, even if (especially if) the thing you’re deciding about has some positive value, but instead determine the degree to which the thing aligns with your higher horizons and your capacity to actually get it done. So first of all, like I said, make sure you’re clear on these higher horizons — and your capacity.

Since you currently have a buffer that is overflowing, it’s a good idea to apply that framework very stringently to anything that you haven’t committed to yet. It wouldn’t be completely wrong to simply tell yourself and your colleagues: I’m going to say no to everything until I get my current list of commitments under control. You’re a Full Professor now, so as long as you do this with professionalism you are incurring minimal risk. You are in fact at a much greater professional risk by missing deadlines and otherwise not fulfilling commitments to colleagues or yourself. There seem to be a lot of good opportunities coming your way, so I wouldn’t worry about missing out on any of them by saying no.

If you don’t feel like saying no to everything, then apply the framework to screen out roughly 90% of what you’re getting opportunities to do, and only focus on the one or two items a semester that might provide the greatest value — or which makes your existing slate of work easier or obsolete². You have an overflowing buffer, and the first thing to do is shut the spigot off so that more stuff is not flowing in.

For items that you have already said yes to, you can do a couple of things.

The first thing that I would do is make a list of the commitments that I’ve already made: projects, one-off tasks, and so on. Then go through that list and see if it’s possible to renegotiate the “yes” that was given. Is it really necessary for me to complete this right now, or can I park it on my Someday/Maybe list and get to it later? Am I actually the right person to do this, or do I have the option to delegate it? Is there a way for me to politely and professionally back out of this commitment without harming myself professionally? In other words, it’s a good idea to at least look into the possibility of de-committing from at least some of the commitments that are eating up your time. I don’t like this option, but it doesn’t hurt to explore it. You certainly wouldn’t want to de-commit too often because it is a bad professional look. On the other hand, it’s also a bad professional look to consistently fail to complete commitments.

For the commitments that you have made and must complete, I recommend a process similar to what Dave Ramsey calls the “snowball method” for paying off financial debt. Go through your list of commitments and triage them, putting them in order based on priority and “cost” in terms of the amount of overhead they are requiring. A project that is high priority and which requires a large amount of time or headspace would be very high on this list. For example, writing a chapter in a scholarly textbook would probably be higher on this list than an op-ed piece for a magazine, because the former is more “expensive” in terms of time, research, concentration, and so on.

Having triaged your list, start blocking off dedicated time to knock out those projects, one by one in decreasing order of priority, meaning the highest one goes first. Don’t work on any other projects until that one is done³.

This likely will look like time blocking, where you set aside, for example, three dedicated hours once a week where nothing in your universe exists within that time block except that project. Life is not allowed to get in the way. You stick to that time block as an inviolable part of your life, like a class that you’re teaching, no matter what. You work on that one project every week until it’s done. Then you move on to the next one, reinvesting the time and headspace from the previous project to double down on the new one. Then move on to the next one, and so on. Like a snowball effect, every “expensive” project you complete makes it easier to complete each next one.

This is not how I would recommend handling your projects on a regular basis if your workload is normal. But if you have so many commitments that you are failing to get traction on any of them, and all of them are starting to slip away from you, then it’s time for extreme measures.

If you happen to have a large chunk of time where your day-to-day commitments are more flexible — for example, summer break or sabbatical — then I would be eyeing every minute of that time to devote to these heads-down time blocks where you knock off one project at a time greedily in order of priority. This may be the reset that you’re looking for — along with the commitment you make to yourself to say no to things unless they align with your higher horizons and your personal capacity.

Conclusion

There were 15 other questions in my list that I received from you that were every bit as substantive as the three that I just answered. I have this feature planned to show up every two months, and so I will get to these questions in time. In the meanwhile, if you’d like to submit your own question for a future reader mailbag, you can just use the form that’s linked here (https://forms.gle/3REYnbHJftgLvF6i8).

I will check it at intervals, I will do my best to give honest answers and start honest conversations about what’s on your mind. Thank you again for being so awesome.

1. I'd also add that this is an issue that's well worth talking about with your supervisors (department chair, dean, etc.). I've been in these positions, and I can absolutely say that it's to the supervisor's benefit to have people under their supervision who are happy and feeling like they are working with purpose. If you feel like you aren't — you're anxious about meeting the criteria for annual evaluation — then this is not only harming you, it's also harming the organization, and I would think a supervisor would be open to talking about how to make things better.

2. I would include learning how to leverage AI tools to handle some of your existing work, among items that make work easier or obsolete.

3. If it’s a truly large project, like writing a big book, you can consider breaking it up into smaller subprojects and working with those.