Tl;dr: I love strategic planning but think resolutions are a dead-end. Here are the top 5 tools I use instead. Also, don't be dead weight; participate actively in both strategic planning/implementation processes and the accountability mechanisms for making sure there is a point to strategic planning at work.
It's not quite far enough into January for your inbox to have emptied of people and businesses suggesting this or that resolution you should make, this game-changer product that will help you with your "new year, new me" habit you'll break before Valentine's Day, or some personal reflection about how much reflection they've been doing, and how they're doing this whole new-year thing differently.
If you're still prepping your class(es) for the semester (I'm with you), just want a break from the "anticipate the future" buzz when the future feels bleak (still with you), or need to focus on the seventeen other things on your to-do list (yep, me, too), then feel free to skip this one.
But, if you have any bandwidth at all for thinking about how you want to frame your approach to the semester/term or this year, I'm going to share a couple of tools that have been incredibly helpful for me as I try to process and leave behind the mind-f*ck of an incredibly challenging personal year that was also one of my best years professionally (which simultaneously had zero material impact on my job). [1]
I really do think strategic planning matters.
We should all be involved with it when it comes up (and/or calling for it/leading it when our own departments/programs avoid it). As I discussed last fall on the Meteor podcast, strategic planning is how a collective of people with diverse interests and motivations articulate shared values, goals, and actionable plans for achieving them, such that we can, collectively create the organization and programs we dream of. The alternative, though, is what most academics I know do on purpose: avoid and shit-talk strategic planning efforts at all levels, then complain endlessly about how there's not enough money, no one cares about what we do, our department/program should be different, and so on.
If that feels on the nose, then I encourage you to sit with why you think you shouldn't need to contribute to the principle mechanisms we have for identifying what needs to change and how to change it...and why someone else in your department or institution should do that labor in your place, then still be subject to your denigration of their efforts.
Do I sound cranky? :)
To be honest, I'm having the best month I've had in ages. I'm sitting in a new-to-me office at work. This one has a window! The first window I've had at work since 2017!! When it's not below-zero degrees outside, I'm going to bring in plants!!!!! Hooray! I have noise-cancelling headphones on with nice piano music playing, so my ADHD-brain can try to ignore the noise of everyone going by in the hallway (my last office was tucked away from a main hall; #tradeoffs). I have a blank calendar on the wall, and I'm gonna do EVERYTHING I can to keep it blank all semester.
So, I'm not actually cranky. I'm asking you these questions from a position of calmness. It is genuinely important for you to consider why other people should have to do the work of making a university a place where you want to work, but you....well, what should you do, if not that?
Anyway...
The point here is that some of us dive right in to every strategic planning effort, while most academics resist them as much as possible.
But I'm that resistant academic when it comes to my own planning.
O.M.G.
Yeah. This hit me just a couple of days ago, as I was reflecting on the reflecting I did at the end of the year and as January started. I happened across a free workbook for thinking through every month. While that might sound like homework when we just wanted to have a longer winter break, it was vital for me in a way I didn't realize it would be until I was about halfway into the (50-page!) workbook.
I'm not going to haul you through my reflecting, except to say that it was enormously helpful for acknowledging that a lot of good things happened, personally and professionally. And the Very Challenging personal things that happened (and some are on-going) are not the only way to remember that year. The workbooks and other reflecting prompts I worked on helped me get to a much better frame of mind, one that I actually want to carry into the future.
But, the truth is: I don't do this stuff for myself. Like really, I don't.
It's kind of wild. I facilitate a lot of strategic planning, even at university/campus-wide levels. I facilitate a lot of reflecting over career motivations, career next steps, and the like, for everyone from undergraduates through faculty and STEM professionals beyond academia.
And I pretty much never do it myself.
Now, arguably one difference here is that I'm not talking trash about anyone else who does this work, and I frequently encourage people to do it. But, it's "do what I say, not what I do."
A few tools for personal reflection & planning, if you're not that into it
I actually think we should be facilitating this level of "personal strategic planning", including articulating our own goals, values, and action plans, for faculty annually. Definitely for all new faculty [2], but also for all faculty. Like, for real. If we all practiced this more for ourselves, we'd probably much better understand the value of it for our departments and institutions (and know how to actually contribute!).
Since we don't, though, here are the top 5 tools that I've been using recently that are helping me revitalize my sense of purpose, articulate very clearly my sense of my values at this stage of my career, and do some real thinking about how to spend my time accordingly.
Susannah Conway's Unravel Your Year workbook (and the accompanying Find Your Word mini-workbook): Susannah is a writer and creativity consultant who's dealt with tragic personal loss and figured out how to move through it. This is the hefty year-end reflection workbook that transformed my perception of my last year and helped me move into the new year with a more positive energy and sense of contentment (vs. the friction and multi-faceted angst of my experience of 2024). It's not super-guru-speak, it's not super woo-woo. It's really a good tool.
Find Your Word workbook: use the link above. This one is GREAT for folks like me. I don't think I've ever made a real resolution in my life (I have no memory of even a vague, long-gone habit of this). Likely this is because I understand that I don't change my habits just because I say I will. For an ADHD-brain like mine, it just doesn't work that way. But a word that can be a guiding principle or theme, a reminder of what I value and want to foster. A conscious reminder of what I don't intend to get subconsciously sucked back into? That felt really useful. And for me, novel. (Maybe you're up to speed on the "my word this year is..." trend, but I'd never heard of it til December. I'll write more about it and how it's going to shape my work this year later. But for now, I suggest to you that if you can't fathom doing the whole unravel workbook, at least try out this. It offered me some very useful insight into my priorities right now.
Loleen Berdahl's "Academia Made Easier": Loleen has been an academic (researcher, teacher, administrator, change-maker) for decades. Her weekly AMEs include brilliantly simple time savers (auto-file all email that cc-s you into a folder that you maybe-never check; if they don't need to send it to you, it doesn't warrant your time). These tips are mixed in with essential reflection guides (1-page, usually) to help you think through your academic workload and what you actually control and how to calibrate it towards a sustainable balance. Subscribe now, seriously.
Jorden Cumming's "Rebel Scholar Dispatch": Jorden has also run the academic gauntlet. In addition to RSD, which is loaded with great advice and reflection prompts, you should also check out Dr. Cummings's book Sustaining Your Well-Being in Higher Education: Values-Based Self-Care for Work and Life. We should be giving this to absolutely every new faculty member, when they accept our job offers, not when they hit camps. They need time to read it, reflect on it, and initiate systems of well-being in advance. In the absence of doing so, though, we all need to read this now, at whatever career stage we are in. Better yet, let's have a department reading project, and encourage all our colleagues to read it, too. For real. The advice, reflection prompts, and reality checks that Dr. Cummings offers are urgently needed if we're ever going to have the bandwidth to invest beyond our own CVs and classrooms.
Deepa Iyer's Social Change Now: A Guide for Reflection and Connection: Deepa is a lawyer, policy strategist, and social change organizer with decades of experience figuring out how we can all live and work better together. If you're feeling solid about where you're sitting with yourself, as I finally feel like I am right now, then this one's for you. I'm thinking through a very different scale of service and change-making efforts than I've been committed to for most of my career. And, Deepa's workbook offers an incredibly useful, straightforward framework for thinking through what you care about, what you're good at, and how to use the convergence of those things in positive ways in your personal and professional life. This is another book we should be giving every new hire, and should get for everyone in our department in the meantime.
This sounds a lot like homework. And I'm swamped already.
Yup. It's true -- it takes time to reflect. It takes emotional energy to look at where we are and how we're doing. It takes all that (and a favorite beverage/snack!) to think directly about how we feel about it all and what it would take to get to where we feel like various aspects of our live are more harmonious or balanced.
But even if it takes you weeks or months, at a pace of 15 minutes or an hour at a time, it's SO FREAKING WORTH IT to get a grip on what you care about and how to align your life with that.
Nothing about academia makes time and space for us to prioritize that kind of reflection. We're told to care about publications (and where, and how many, and who cites them). We're told to care about what institution employs us, and where or if we secure external funding. We're told to care about looking smart, seeming impervious, and all this other prestige paradigm bullshit that serves only to isolate us from each other. And lonely people are often angry, grieving their isolation, resentful of anyone who doesn't seem to be similarly miserable, and all-too-often feel totally trapped in their isolation. (Loneliness has also been documented as more of a health risk than most of the big-bad-habit stuff we're warned against all the time.)
In my experience, the only way to rise above the loneliness of the prestige paradigm is to flip it the bird [3], define what aspects of being an academic serve me [4], and find people to spend time with. Doesn't matter if you're eating soup or planning a revolution; spending time in community with people who care about your well-being as a complete human is vital to finding and sustaining joy and interest in life (never mind work, but also, it helps for/at work).
Bottom line: If we take care of ourselves, and then take care of each other, we have a ghost of a chance of creating an academic environment that is actually a good place for us to work in.
How about you?
Do you do personal strategic planning and reflection as part of your professional practice? What kinds of tools do you find useful? What kind of support for reflection-towards-action might you want if your department, institution, or some other entity provided it?
NOTES
[1] See my series on my ESA Early Career Fellow award for a loooot of thinking through of how a big award can be a big deal and also change nothing, particularly for faculty like me who are non-tenure-track, work in an environment where tenure-track expectations of productivity and impact are the norm, but we don't have access to most of the resources that make TT-level productivity possible.
[2] Ask me what all I'd do with new faculty orientation if someone made me queen. 😈 (And, to be honest, this is only one part of what I think we should be doing with those orientations instead.)
[3] I know, it takes a lot of privilege to say this. And also, I'm a contingent faculty member with a salary a good $20k lower than my next-closest-compensated colleague. My reliable-job privilege is a thin thread. I grew up on food stamps and have used them as an adult, too, and have loved ones who still do. I understand financial precarity. I respect what it takes to thread that needle. And, I adamantly believe we all need to have a safety net that enables us to take the parts of academia that nurture us and ditch the rest.
[4] As always, I will refer you to Dr. Beronda Montgomery's essential wisdom on defining what academia should be for you, not the other way around.
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