Welcome! So glad you’re here. After more than fifteen years in academia, listening to my peers and my former students, I’ve realized two things:

1. Everyone wants to write more, but can’t find the time (or don’t know where to start).
2. Everyone wants more balance—more life in the work/life mix, but they can’t quite figure out how to find it.

That’s why I started this blog.

There are so many awesome things about academia: relative time flexibility, being surrounded by endless opportunities for collaborations, projects, and further study, the ability to really craft the career you want.

But all of these advantages have a dark side, too. That relative time flexibility is hard to manage when you’re pulled in a million directions—and work starts to creep into your nights and weekends. It’s hard to find focus when there are so many opportunities for worthy projects. Sometimes instead of crafting our careers we end up bumped and bustled along a path that is not always of our own making. And before we know it our tenure review is looming, and what have we accomplished, really?

It took me an adjustment period, but I was able to develop a method of focusing my academic path that helped me to craft the career I wanted. Once I developed that laser focus I learned how to say no. I was strategic in my choice of projects, making sure they always took me one step closer down my chosen path. I eliminated distraction. I found time to write. I found balance.

I’m an academic with three children (9, 6, and 1 year). I published two books during my last baby’s first year of life. While breastfeeding full time. I exercise and cook. I would get eight hours of sleep a night if there wasn’t a little one waking me up! Academia has not taken over my life. I have a life, and I am an academic.

Here on this blog, my mission is to teach you the actual, hands-on strategies and techniques I use to find balance and write more. I break this academic life into actionable steps to increase your productivity (reading, writing, publishing, presenting more) and at the same time maintain balance.

You deserve to create the career (and life) you want in academia. In fact, your unique, once-ever-on-earth perspective on your field must be heard. That’s how we make (and share) knowledge. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

I would love to hear the one thing that is your biggest obstacle to having the academic career you want. Comment below and let’s get the conversation started! I have so much to share with you!!

Best (just kidding—that sounds so academic ;)),

Cathy