Your best plan can be brilliant—and still collapse if the basics aren’t secured. In academic careers, we often optimize for the ideal next step: the perfect lab, the right project, the clean narrative. But sometimes everything depends on something far less glamorous: legal status, funding, health, income stability, family obligations. The unglamorous stuff. Not exciting. But decisive.
If you’re building an academic career, you’re also building a network—whether you like it or not.
Not a network in the LinkedIn sense. A real network: the people who co-author with you, invite you, recommend you, review you fairly, warn you quietly, or decide you’re not worth the risk.
This article is about academic networking as relationship management: how to choose collaborators wisely, how to protect trust once you’ve earned it, and how to avoid the surprisingly small social missteps that can cost you years.
Reading is a silent competitive advantage in academia. Learn a simple, realistic reading system that boosts your academic productivity without adding more pressure.
When researchers ask me how to design their ideal day for academic writing, they often expect a recipe:
Find your peak performance time.
Block two or three hours of uninterrupted writing.
Turn off email, close the door, done.
This can help—but only up to a point.
The real problem usually sits one step earlier:
when your calendar says “writing”, you probably don’t actually know what that means for the specific project in front of you.
And if you are unclear, your brain will respond with the familiar mix of resistance, procrastination, and low-grade guilt.
So before you optimise your routine, let’s do something much more fundamental:
clarify what “academic writing” actually includes in your work, and who you need to be for each part of it.
Discover the crucial difference between writing-to-think and writing-to-publish — and how separating them can transform your academic writing workflow.
Academic productivity isn't about how much you get done—it's about doing what matters. Here's how to escape the busywork trap and realign your work with your values.
Wondering what to do after your PhD? Discover why leaving the academic ladder isn’t failure — it can be the smartest move of your career.
Every morning, thousands of PhD students wake up with the best intentions. They open their laptops, review their endless to-do lists, and dive headfirst into what they believe is academic productivity. Yet by evening, they feel depleted, behind schedule, and…
So, you’ve decided to take back some control of your time — and maybe even carve out a little space for focused work.
But how?
If your calendar already feels like a battlefield of back-to-back classes, spontaneous student emails, grading marathons, and unexpected admin “asks,” it’s not easy to just “make time.”
That’s where time blocking comes in. It’s one of the most powerful tools to help teaching-focused faculty actually get deep work done — even in a schedule that feels packed from dawn to dusk.