How to Deliver an Outstanding Public Lecture

The public presentation of your ideas is an integral part of academia.

It also is a part of academic where we receive minimal training. For many of us, our training in public speaking consists in the opportunity to present research in graduate seminars, and, if we are lucky, the chance to have our “job talk” critiqued by esteemed members of our department.

In a previous post, I provided guidelines on how to deliver an effective presentation. In this post, I will focus on how to deliver an outstanding public lecture.



Why, you might ask, would an academic want to learn to give a memorable public lecture? I can only speak for myself. From my perspective, I work hard at coming up with ideas that I hope will change the way people think about social issues. If these ideas are only shared with other academics, then my work will have limited value. In contrast, if I can learn to translate my ideas into more widely-read pieces, then, perhaps I will have a chance to actually change the way we talk about social issues I think are important. That is the reason I decided to learn how to write OpEds. (By the way, I have had some success this year publishing OpEds!!)

My desire to be relevant is also the reason I decided to work on becoming a better public speaker.

For me, becoming an outstanding public speaker is still a work in progress. I continue to hone my skills and to look for examples of ways to become exceptional. Along the way, I have learned a few things that I will share with you.

Becoming an Outstanding Public Speaker: Style and Content

First of all, I have learned that there are two separate areas you have to work on: 1) Learning to be an engaging speaker; and 2) Having something memorable to say.

I will deal with each of these separately.

Style

Your presentation style is important. An excellent public lecture will have many of the following qualities.

• Evocative images. One of the best presentations I ever saw was about social isolation in Chicago. I saw this presentation over ten years ago and can still remember the photos of children playing in empty lots.
• Don’t read your paper. Or if you do read your paper, make sure no one can tell you are reading. It can be very difficult for audience members to listen to you read a paper.
• Add in some humor. This can be difficult when you are talking about depressing topics, but a joke or two can do a lot to keep your audience listening.
• Tell a story. This can be a story about yourself, about the data, or from anywhere else. The point is that stories are engaging and you should tell one or more. You can organize your whole talk as a story. You can begin with a story. You can use stories to demonstrate points.
• Practice your presentation until you are completely comfortable with it.
• When you go to public lectures yourself, take note of what works and what doesn’t work. And, emulate those talks you find most provocative.

Content

Presentation style is important, but you will not impress an audience if you do not also have substance. This is a bit trickier to describe, but you should aim to make your presentation memorable. Here are a few ideas.

• Your presentation must include information that no one in the audience already knows. If you are presenting based on a book you have already written and some people may have read, then include something extra that did not make it into the book. Or include a backstory. No one should leave the room and think they learned nothing.
• Your presentation should make people think. The audience wants to be engaged. They want to know more. You have made them think about things in new ways. This is awesome.
• Your presentation should have a clear argument. When people leave, they should be able to say: “I went to this outstanding public lecture, where the speaker argued ….”

Those are my thoughts on what makes an outstanding public lecture. I have given dozens of public lectures, yet I continue to hone my skills.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts and seeing the resources you are aware of for giving great talks. Please let us know in the comments section.

PS: I recently came across this post on Lifehacker that has some great tips on giving a public lecture.

How To Avoid Spending All of Your Time Teaching: Seven Tips for Efficient Teaching

Do you spend all of your time teaching?

For all professors, teaching is an important part of our job. However, for most professors, it is not the only important part of what we do. Most of us have other obligations and we risk putting those in jeopardy when we spend all of our time preparing for class and grading.

Me - teaching - in my first year on the tenure-track!

In a recent post, I explained that I spend about six hours a week preparing for each class I teach. As a caveat, I will say that number is a guesstimate, and the number of hours varies depending on the class.

When I teach a graduate-level seminar, I usually have to spend about four hours reading the book I assigned, another two hours taking notes on it, and another hour writing out discussion questions and reading students’ responses. In graduate seminars, I usually spend about five to ten minutes at the beginning of the class laying out the importance of the book to the field and then we spend the rest of the class engaging in discussion. Typically, I ask one student to lead class discussion each week.

When I teach an undergraduate class, the weekly readings usually only take me two hours or less, and I spend more time on grading and preparing PowerPoint slides. For undergraduate classes, I usually spend about 15 minutes of an hour-long class lecturing, and use the rest of the time for discussion and in-class activities.

I have been teaching university for about a decade, and usually teach classes on race, immigration, and sociological writing.

Here are a seven tips to avoid spending all of your time teaching.

Tip #1: Try to minimize new course preps.
Your ability to do this will vary by institution, but many administrators will find your suggestion that you teach no more than one new prep a year reasonable. Personally, I find one new course prep a year just enough to keep things interesting.

Tip #2: Teach classes as closely related to your research as possible.
If your research is on race, offer to teach a graduate seminar on race. When choosing the books, choose those texts you are grappling with in your own work. A graduate seminar should have the classics, of course, but students also need to be familiar with cutting-edge work in your field, and they will benefit immensely with hearing you talk about how you are engaging new ideas in your own work.

For undergraduate teaching, you also often can select readings that are closely related to your own work, and sometimes even pilot your own books or articles in class.

Tip #3: Keep lectures to a minimum.
I hope that all of your classes are not 300-student lectures – where lecturing may be the only option. However, if you have 60 students or less in the room, you should be able to engage students in discussion. For a 50-minute class, I usually lecture for about ten to fifteen minutes. I use this time to make it clear to students what topics they need to be paying attention to and what I hope to accomplish during the class period. Then, I move into discussion and group activities.

Tip #4: Find the schedule that works best for you and ask for it.
Some departments and universities are more flexible about scheduling than others. Knowing what teaching times are best for you is the first step towards getting an ideal teaching time. When works best for you?

In my first job, I was given a teaching schedule of 8am to 10am on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. I taught at those times for the first year, and then asked to change. Over time, I have realized that the ideal teaching time for me is in the afternoon and that I prefer to teach my classes in three-hour blocks. Thus, I ask for this schedule, and, thus far, have been able to make a case for it.

Tip #5: Set aside specific times for class preparation and stick to them.
This semester, I am fortunate to have only one class that I teach on Wednesday afternoons. I read for class on Monday and Tuesday evenings. I prepare my PowerPoint slides from 10am to noon on Wednesdays, and finalize my notes and grade short papers between 2pm and 3pm when class starts. I use Thursday office hours to respond to student inquiries and to deal with other things related to teaching. Since I know I have time set aside for each of these activities, I rarely think about class outside of those times.

Tip #6: Engage the students in discussion from the first day of class.
As I said above, I rarely lecture, and when I do, my lectures are short. Once I have finished conveying information to students, I ask them a series of questions. My class preparation thus involves preparing a short lecture, and then preparing a list of questions to ask students. I go through the questions, asking them one by one. Sometimes it becomes clear that I need to clarify certain points, so I may move back into a brief lecture. Other times students may take class in a direction I had not anticipated, so I try and bring them around. Either way, a discussion-based class is more engaging and requires less preparation than preparing and practicing an hour-long lecture.

Tip #7: Use rubrics for grading.
Grading is another area that can be very field-specific. However, most fields allow for the use of rubrics to grade papers. I assign two five-page papers in each of my 45-student undergraduate classes, and use rubrics to grade them. The rubrics are straightforward and allow me to communicate effectively with students what points they are getting and what points they are missing. That way, I do not have to write extensive comments on their papers.

In fact, unless you are a language teacher, you should not line-edit your students’ work. And, even if you are a language teacher, this guide explains that you should only line-edit the first 20 percent and then let students do the rest of the editing themselves.

There you have it – my seven tips for being a more efficient teacher.

Although readers have often asked for this post, I have waited a long time to write it, in part because it seems a bit taboo to suggest that we try and minimize the amount of time we spend teaching. We are professors after all! On the other hand, I should say that I consistently get very high teaching evaluations and students regularly communicate to me that they learn a lot in my classes. On my most recent set of student evaluations, my teaching scores were an average of 6.7 out of 7. Student evaluations are only one measure of teaching success – but I thought I would share that with you as further evidence that you do not have to spend 40 hours each week preparing for one class for that class to be successful.

I recognize that these tips may be best suited to someone in a situation similar to mine – teaching in the social sciences at a large public institution. However, I imagine that any professor would find at least some of these suggestions helpful.

Let me know what works for you in your quest to be an effective and efficient teacher.

How to Overcome Writer’s Block: Seven Strategies that Work

It happens to the best of us. We wake up. We go to the computer. We intend to write. Two hours later, we have put 0 words on the page. What happened?



You know what happened, so I won’t go into detail. Instead, let’s focus on a few ways to get words on the page (or the screen) even when it seems we’d rather do almost anything else. For many writers, the trick is to get started, because once we get started, there’s no stopping us!

If you are having trouble getting started with your writing, try one (or more) of these seven strategies to overcome your writer's block.

Strategy #1) Meditate for five minutes

As soon as you realize it is your writing time and you are not writing, stop whatever you are doing, set a timer for five minutes and meditate. I am not an expert on meditation, but I can say that you don’t have to be to do a five-minute meditation. Simply set a timer for five minutes, close your eyes, and focus on your breathing for five minutes. Pay attention to the thoughts that come to your mind, and bid them farewell as you focus on your breathing. I find it easy to bid thoughts farewell as I breathe out, as it feels cleansing.

Strategy #2) Cut off the Internet.

Unplug. Open up your Word Processing program. Don’t allow yourself to turn it back on until you have 500 new words on the page. The Internet can be an amazing tool. However, no matter what writing project you are working on, once you have your document in front of you, I am sure there is something you can do to move the document forward without the Internet.

Strategy #3) Call a friend.

Tell her you are having trouble writing, but promise to spend the next 60 minutes writing. Ask her to call you back in 60 minutes to tell her how many words you have written. It is amazing what accountability can do.

Strategy #4) Do some exercise.

Do 100 jumping jacks or 20 pushups. Walk around the block. My personal favorite is to power up my Xbox and put on a zumba song. I rock out to one song, which takes just five minutes (and burns about 100 calories) and then get back to writing.

Strategy #5) Go old school.

Turn off the computer. Pull out a pad of paper and a pen and get to writing. Draw figures to conceptualize your project. Write about why you don’t feel like writing. Write and think through a theoretical puzzle. Write up your methods section. Whatever you do, spend at least 20 minutes with a pen and paper and watch how your writing is reinvigorated.

Strategy #6) Have a healthy snack.

Go to the kitchen. Grab an apple. Do something fancy to it, like peel it and cut it into pieces. Or, taken a mango and cut it restaurant-style. Do something methodical and creative with a healthy snack and then eat it. You will be amazed at how that little bit of left-brain activity and a sweet reward can fuel your writing.

Strategy #7) Change your location.

If you are working on a laptop or with a pen and paper, move yourself to another room. If you work at a university, try going to the library or a study room. If you are at home, try out the dining room table or the living room. If you live in a studio, try facing a different window. Move yourself to a new location and tell yourself that this is your writing spot for the day.

I hope one of these seven strategies works for you. I wouldn’t be surprised if you found it useful to work one or two of these strategies into your everyday writing routine.

Just imagine yourself getting up, preparing a quick, but artful breakfast, then meditating for five minutes, sitting down and writing for 30 minutes before getting up and doing 25 pushups and writing for another 30 minutes. What a rocking morning that would be!



Best of luck with your writing, and let me know which of these (or other) strategies help you move through writer’s block.

How Are You Spending Your Time?

Time is our most valuable resource, and we must be careful with how we spend it. This is particularly true when you are on the tenure track and have a set amount of time to reach specific goals.

How are you spending your time? Are you making the best use of your time to reach your goals?

I recently met two Assistant Professors who told me that they had not written anything this year. Both of these Assistant Professors work at research-intensive institutions. One told me she spent all her time preparing for two new courses. The other told me he was spending all of his time working on several major committees.

Both of these professors seem to have their priorities out of balance. As faculty, our job includes research, teaching, and service. At a research institution, you will be evaluated primarily on the basis of your research, although you also have to engage in teaching and service to meet your job requirements. I think that the best way to ensure balance is to engage in all three of these activities each week.

Let’s presume for now that you are working a 40-hour week – although I know many of you insist you are not. How should you be spending your work week?

When I worked at the University of Kansas, my department made it clear that I would be evaluated based on my research, teaching, and service. My chair also told me specifically that I would be evaluated with the following formula: 40% teaching, 40% research, and 20% service. At the end of each year, we had to fill out merit forms that used this same formula.

It became clear to me that I needed to align my time with my priorities. Thus, I made a little chart for myself and decided that I would spend my time according to those priorities. I would spend at least 16 hours a week on research, 16 on teaching, and no more than 8 on service.

Let’s look at 16 hours on teaching. With two courses, I was spending 6 hours in the classroom, and had 2 hours of office hours a week. That left me with 8 hours to prepare class and grade. Thus, I scheduled that amount of time into my week to accomplish those tasks.

Next up was 16 hours of research. For me, that translated into 2 hours a day of writing and one hour a day of reading, searching for literature, and other tasks related to research.

I had 8 hours a week left over for service. As an Assistant Professor, I rarely spent 8 hours a week on service. I often had about 3-4 hours a week in meetings. Some weeks I had to spend extra hours outside of meetings reading files. But, usually, I used that time to respond to emails.

My schedule looked something like this:

To keep to this schedule, I do my best to avoid scheduling meetings in the morning – time I have set aside for research and writing. These activities are an important part of my job and I do them best in the morning. Thus, I don’t schedule any other activities during this time.

When students ask to meet with me, I encourage them to come to my office hours. If they can’t make that time, I schedule a time with them that fits into my teaching time.

When I get Doodle polls about meeting, I try and schedule those in the afternoon – when I have set aside time for service and email.

Of course, I often have to rearrange my schedule. However, when that happens, I just move things around. Let’s say someone wants to schedule a meeting during my teaching prep time. I simply switch those two times around. The most important thing is that I am spending the appropriate amount of time on each aspect of my job.

What about you? How much time do you spend on research, teaching, and service each week? Is the amount of time you spend in line with the priorities of your institution?

Do you have an overwork problem?

Are you an academic who works more than 40 hours a week? Would you like to work fewer hours? If you answered “yes” to both of these questions, this post is for you.



In this post, I am trying to be as practical as possible. I am also responding to the omnipresent myth that all academics work 80 hours a week. I am committed to working 40 hours myself and to helping those who wish to do the same be able to do so.

I understand that there are both individual and structural barriers to academics being able to lead healthy, balanced lives. In this post, I will focus on the individual barriers, because we need to work through those in order to get to the structural issues.

There are three possible reasons you are working more than 40 hours a week:

1. You have too many tasks you need to complete each week and it is impossible to complete them within 40 hours.
2. You spend more time than you need to on each task.
3. You are less efficient than you could be with your work hours and spend too much time doing non-work related things during your work day, thus stretching out the time you think you are working.

It may be difficult for you to figure out which of these three reasons is your primary problem. But, a careful, non-judgmental evaluation might be helpful.

Let’s work backwards – starting with the third possibility: Are you inefficient with your work time? The best way to figure this out is to track your time for a week. Kerry Ann Rockquemore explains how to do this here. Track every waking hour that includes some work. If you begin your day by checking your email, start then. If you end your day grading papers, end then. Track your time in 15-minute increments. If, at the end of the week, you find that you only actually “worked” – responded to emails, graded papers, read manuscripts, wrote, ran experiments, attended meetings – for 40 hours, then you have found your answer. In this case, it may be helpful to work on improving your focus so that you can have conscious work and non-work time that will permit you to both work 40 hour and not feel overworked. (Here is one strategy you may find useful.)

If, however, you tracked every minute and are still coming in at over 40 hours, move on to the next question: Are you spending more time than you should on each task? How long do you spend reviewing articles for journals? How many hours do you spend preparing class? How long does it take you to grade papers? How much time do you spend reading each job application? There are no set-in-stone answers to these questions, but there are ways to figure it out. You can ask your colleagues how long they spend on each of these tasks and figure out what expectations are. You can post the question on Facebook. I asked people on Facebook how long they spend reviewing articles and the answers varied between 2 and 6 hours – you can decide if you want to be on the higher or lower end of the spectrum. And, Robert Boice recommends that you spend no more than 1 to 2 hours preparing per hour of class.

Once you do all of this, and you still realize that you are coming in at over 40 hours, then it is time to move on to the next step: What tasks are you going to cut? To figure out what to cut, you have to figure out what the norms are and whether you are in the low or high range compared to your colleagues. Do you have 55 advisees when all of your colleagues have 10 each? Are you reviewing 16 articles for journals a year when most people in your field review 6? Are you directing ten dissertations when your colleagues each have no more than five students? Are you on every single grant panel you have been asked to be on? Are there committee responsibilities you can let go of? Are you assigning five papers a semester in your class when all of your colleagues have multiple-choice exams?

I don’t know what would happen if all academics insisted on working only 40 hours a week. But, we can’t find out until academics make it a priority to try working reasonable hours instead of working hard to convince everyone that we actually work 80 hours a week and thus deserve our median salary of $62,000.

I am posting this article with a bit of trepidation because I am wary of blaming faculty woes on faculty. However, I am also aware of the fact that all academic jobs are not created equally. I am completely certain that some faculty are unable to accomplish everything expected of them in a 40-hour week. I am equally certain that there are many academics who could have healthy, balanced lives if they implemented a few of the strategies suggested by the myriad of academic productivity experts out there.

A Time for Pause and Celebration: 2012 in Review

At the end of each annual year, I like to step back and take stock of what I have accomplished during the year. This permits me to acknowledge all I am doing, to take pride in what I have accomplished, and to relieve some of the anxiety of the never-ending pressure to do more. When I review all I have accomplished it becomes apparent that I do not need to work any faster or harder, as I have accomplished so much during the year. It also becomes clear that my end of the year break is well-deserved.



This past year has been very fast-paced. I gave fourteen public lectures or presentations at universities around the country. I spent two months of the summer traveling and researching in Peru. I moved to a new university and a new town. And, I took over as chair of the Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities of the American Sociological Association.

I was usually able to maintain my pace of writing for two hours a day when I was not on the road, and about 30 minutes a day when I was. Let’s look at what I was able to accomplish over the past year.

Rewards in academia are rare, and are often long in the making. I will begin with the most tangible outcomes, even though these are largely the product of previous years’ work.

Books!

I have two new books in print, and my first book was released in paperback. This, of course, is the result of effort in prior years, but it is important to take note of the final products.

2012. Due Process Denied: Detentions and Deportations in United States. Routledge: New York.

2012. Immigration Nation: Raids, Detentions and Deportations in Post-911 America. Paradigm Publishers: Boulder, CO.

My book that originally appeared in 2011 – Yo Soy Negro: Blackness in Peru – came out in paperback and received positive reviews in two major journals.

Articles, Book Chapters and Shorter Pieces

I also had an article, a book chapter and two short pieces appear in print this year. I wrote the book chapter over a year ago. I started the article in 2011, but had to revise it for resubmission this year. Finally, I have two short pieces that I wrote and submitted this year, and that also came out this year. Here is what I have in print in 2012:

2012. “Causes and Consequences of International Migration: Sociological Evidence for the Right to Mobility” (Cecilia Menjívar, second author) International Journal of Human Rights.

2012. “International Migration” Handbook of Sociology and Human Rights, edited by David L. Brunsma, Keri E. Iyall Smith, and Brian K. Gran. Paradigm Publishers.

2012. “Ethnopoetics: A Jamaican Deportee Tells His Story” Societies without Borders 7:3.

2012. “What does a Sociology without Borders Look Like?” Societies without Borders 7:4.

Forthcoming

I also have six pieces that are forthcoming in 2013: two articles, two book chapters, and two short essays. I began writing all of them in 2011. I did some work on them in 2012, and received confirmation that they would be forthcoming this year.

Forthcoming. “Forced Transnationalism: Transnational Coping Strategies and Gendered Stigma among Jamaican Deportees” Global Networks.

Forthcoming. “‘It Was Only a Joke’: How Racial Humor Fuels Race-blind Ideologies in Mexico and Peru” Sue, Christina and Tanya Golash-Boza. Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Forthcoming. “Fourteen Months, Four Countries, and Three Kids: Tales from the Field” In: Artificial Divide: Family and Work in Everyday Ethnography. Editors: Tamara Mose Brown and Joanna Dreby. Temple University Press.

Forthcoming. “From Legal to “Illegal”: The Deportation of Legal Permanent Residents from the United States” In Immigrant Illegality: Constructions, Critiques, and Resistance. Edited by: Cecilia Menjívar and Daniel Kanstroom. Cambridge University Press.

Forthcoming. “More Than ‘A Hidden Race’: The Complexities of Blackness in Mexico and Peru” Review Essay of Black in Latin America Film by Henry Louis Gates. (Christina A. Sue, first author). Latin American and Caribbean Ethnic Studies.

Forthcoming. “Does Racial Formation Theory Lack the Conceptual Tools to Understand Racism?” Ethnic and Racial Studies.

Under Review

I have one article that I submitted in 2012 that is still under review. This is an article that my co-author and I were able to write, submit, and resubmit all in this calendar year.

Under Review. “Latino Immigrant Men and the Deportation Crisis: A Gendered Racial Removal Program?” Golash-Boza, Tanya and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Revise and Resubmit from Latino Studies.

In-Progress

Finally, I have two books that I continue to work on. These are a bit hard to quantify as I seem to always be writing, revising, cutting, and sending things to my editors. However, I suppose I can say that I wrote five chapters of the race book this year and have moved four chapters of the deportee book into final version.

2014. Race and Racisms: A Critical Approach Oxford University Press: New York. (Under contract – 9 of 15 chapters completed).

In progress: Deported: Controlling Global Flows of Labor and Capital (Introduction plus 3 of 7 chapters completed).

Wow. That’s a lot. I wonder if I can quantify what I have done this year. I think there are two main categories of writing – drafting and revising.

I drafted 41,000 new words.
- 4 chapters of Race: 4*8000 = 32000 words.
- 3 short pieces = 5000 words
- ½ of a co-authored article: 4000 words

I revised substantially 40,000 words.
- 4 chapters of the Deported book = 32000 words
- ½ of a co-authored article = 4000 words
- ½ of another co-authored article = 4000 words

I also wrote about 30 blog entries for an additional 24,000 words. Whew. That’s a lot of words. As always, however, I almost never write for more than two hours a day. And, I took several writing-free breaks while traveling.

If I can write 40,000 words in a year and revise another 40,000 that means it would probably take me about 2 and a half years to write a book that is 100,000 words if that were the only writing project I focused on. Or, I could write and revise four articles or book chapters a year. The catch is, of course, that these things also come back for revision again and again. So, I might write and submit an article in three months. But, it will come back and I will have to spend another 2-4 weeks revising it for resubmission.

At any rate, I continue to be impressed with all one can do by writing two hours a day!

What about you? Have you taken stock of your accomplishments for 2012? Why or why not?

Either way, I wish you a great rest of 2012 and a happy holiday season.

As for me, I am winding things down and in terms of work and gearing up for my two-week vacation from work! I hope to return rested, renewed, and ready for 2013.

Give yourself a break - a real one!

How do you plan to spend the upcoming holidays?

No matter how busy your Fall semester was nor how busy your Spring semester will be, one of the most important things you can do during this winter break is to take a real break.

It’s the end of the year. Heck, it may well be the end of the world after December 21, 2012. So, take a break.

If you haven’t taken a break in a while, and have forgotten how to do so, don’t worry: I can explain to you how to do it.

Taking a break - in four simple steps.

Step 1: Choose a date to start your break.

When will you begin your break? This Friday? December 24? Before then? Or, perhaps you’ve already started? Whenever it is, choose a date and plan to stop working on that date. At a very minimum, you should plan to take 4 days off. I hope you will at least take off the week between December 25 and January 2. If you are taking off more days, please let me know in the comments section, as I am always pleased to hear about people taking long vacations.

Step 2: Figure out what will and will not get done in the remainder of this semester (Use the 4 D's)

What tasks will and will not get done this semester? Which tasks will never get done? Which ones can be deferred or delegated? Anyone who has read David Allen's Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity will know that there are four options for any task: do, defer, delete, or delegate.

To be able to take a break over the winter holiday, you will have to look at your remaining tasks and decide if you will do them this Fall, defer them to a later date, decide they are not important and delete them, or delegate them. These decisions can be hard, but it is ideal to decide now what will and will not get done to avoid feeling guilty later.

All of your pending tasks for the remainder of 2012 should fall into these four categories:

1. DO:  Prioritize all of the tasks and projects you actually can and will do before you take a break.
2. DEFER: If the project is something you really would like to do, but can wait until the Spring, defer it.
3. DELETE: If you take a good look at your to-do list, I am sure you can find at least one task - perhaps more - that you can delete. (If you are deleting more than two, let me know in the comments section!)
4. DELEGATE: Delegation is often particularly hard for academics, but there are things that can be delegated, such as organizing your office, transcribing your interviews, cleaning your data, and formatting your endnotes.

Go easy on yourself and only choose “do” for those items that must be done by you and must be done by the end of the year. Those items might include: grading, ordering books for next semester, finishing an overdue review or paper. Everything that is non-essential can either be deleted or at least deferred to next year.

Step 3: Finish what’s left on your list by your chosen end date.

Once you have a manageable lists of tasks on your plate, it will be easier to focus on those and get those done. Once you finish them, you will be ready for your guilt-free break.

Step 4: Take a real break

A real break means no work. It means taking care of yourself, relaxing, and allowing yourself luxuries that you don't normally take. A real break feels good and is good for your health.

During your break, I encourage you to:

• Avoid email: Email will just remind you of work, which is not the point of taking a break.
• Exercise daily: You don't have to run six miles a day. You can walk around the block, go ice skating, or take a bike ride. Exercise makes you feel good and is good for you. Win-win!
• Read a novel.
• Watch a film or television show you enjoy.
• Cook healthy meals for yourself.
• Eat lots of fruits and veggies.
• Talk to your friends and family – in person and over the phone.
• Dance, sing, play the guitar, write poetry: get in touch with your creative side.

Once you’ve finished your break, you will be rejuvenated and ready to start work again. Make sure you take enough time off to be refreshed when you return.

And, make sure that when you take a break, you really take a break. Doing so can actually do wonders for your productivity and creativity. Scientists have found that four days in nature enhances creativity. Spending time in nature, completely unplugged can enhance your emotional and physical health. Try it!