Reflections
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Reaching Out
→: Reaching OutYesterday Sacha Chua put up a blogpost entitled “What can I help you learn? Looking for mentees“. I’d been following her blog for a while now, and got out of the lurking stage and started commenting periodically, so of course I was like, “me me me!”. If you don’t read Sacha’s blog, go and grab…
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Of Snap Judgments and Sexism
→: Of Snap Judgments and SexismFascinating post today in CopyBlogger – Why James Chartrand Wears Women’s Underpants. It’s a female writer outing herself; she’s been writing under a male pseudonym for the last three years. She’d tried under her real name, but started working under a second name because she didn’t want her own name to be associated with a…
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20% of the Time, 80% of the Value
→: 20% of the Time, 80% of the ValueIf you look, you’ll see the Pareto Principle everywhere. Last week, I saw it in grad school. I was having my 20% – and it was awesome! But it does make me sad about the 80% of my time – this is the time that I spend marking, doing assignments that seem pointless and reading…
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Delegating
→: DelegatingAs a student, you don’t really learn how to delegate. It’s one of those crucial life skills that doesn’t seem to make it onto the curriculum, and when we think about it – how would it? There are opportunities, but you have to go out and find them. Volunteer to team lead on a group…
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Scheduling at 80% of Capacity
→: Scheduling at 80% of CapacityLately, things have been somewhat chaotic. I don’t like it. It makes me stressed, overwhelmed, and unproductive. On Saturday, Treena and I headed out of town for breakfast and a chat. We caught up, and I was talking about how I had just hit this point where I was so overwhelmed I was having a…
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Productivity for Minions
→: Productivity for MinionsGoogle this, there’s nothing useful. Someone needs to write a book on this! I’d buy it, would you? If not, hopefully it’s because you’re not a minion. Grad students are basically minions. I am the minion of my supervisor (luckily he’s nice), the minion of any prof whose course I take (to a lesser extent)…
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How to be Crazy-Busy Without Losing Your Mind
→: How to be Crazy-Busy Without Losing Your MindThis post is for my friend Rachelle, who emailed me earlier this week saying, How do you stay sane with all that you do? Is the trick to carve out mini-relaxations/blow off steam whenever you can? Maybe I just haven’t given myself permission to do that enough and created a bigger problem now. First off,…