Alex is president of Athabasca University. Bailey is associate vice-president of planning, quality and assessment at Athabasca University. They are both founders of The Effective, Successful, Happy Academic, and the authors of "How to Be a Happy Academic" (Sage: London, 2018), they share a passion for effectiveness and aspiration in academic work.
None of us are perfect, and we need to be able to acknowledge that to improve.
How to embrace fear and courage in your work.
Good ones don’t happen by magic. Aligning expectations in advance and being intentional can help.
Canadian academics are prolific, but we must reverse a 60-year trend towards progressively less challenging work.
Exercise your core skills to clear the hurdles of a growing workload.
It offers a vital perspective for career and life decisions.
Your ego makes you too certain about everything – but this is most harmful when least obvious.
Even though it may be the last thing you want to do: burnout can be an impetus for important personal reflection and action.
A call to stop the collective and damaging madness where we may publish more, but are falling more behind.
As you contemplate 2022, move your learning zone from that which is easy to what is hard: learning about yourself.
It’s what you do each day and ultimately contribute that matters most, not how much you do, or how long it takes.
