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Tuesday, July 13, 2010

The Management of Everyday Life

Everyday life means laundry, groceries, driving your kids places, interacting with family members, conducting personal business, eating, shaving, and sleeping. The management of everyday life has an impact on your scholarship because everyday life can easily take over all of your time. For me, during the summer, I find that not being in my office very much allows everyday life to encroach on more and more hours of the day. Compared to work, everyday life often seems rather difficult to me, because I am very bad at a lot of it.

If I were going to do a scholarly "check-up" on you (which I will be happy to do for a modest fee of $500), I would look at your scholarly base, your management of everyday life, the design of your work time and space, your mental attitudes toward work, and, finally, what it is you want to accomplish in very concrete terms: write 3 articles in the next 2 years, finish the book or dissertation.

2 comments:

Dame Eleanor Hull said...

So as part of your check-up, will you also provide prescriptions for improving areas that come up short?

Jonathan said...

Well, yes, but the point is to get you to identify strengths and weaknesses. It may be that someone is not leveraging their advantages, or making too much of shortcomings.