Everyone has probably heard the saying “You have to spend money to make money”. After all, examples of this are all around us. You invest in an education to learn the skills you need for a career. You might take out a loan or buy specialist equipment to start a

Why is my business called Academic Smartcuts? Well, there are no shortcuts to success in academia. There are, however, smartcuts that can make things a little easier to help you get from where you are now to where you want to be. The first one I want to mention is:

This is probably one of the most challenging smartcuts to implement: what is actually within your power to do something about? We often spend time and energy worrying about things that are completely beyond our ability to impact. For example, we cannot control the outcome of the grant proposal, conference

The third smartcut can be boiled down to one word: PLAN. Productivity guru Brian Tracy MBA wrote that every minute spent planning saves ten minutes of work. I don’t know where he got the statistic, but I tend to agree that taking the time to plan can help accomplish two

There are a myriad of different tools available to help streamline the work process. Need to arrange a meeting with multiple people? Send a Doodle poll or use another booking system instead of having emails flying back and forth. And don’t forget to use an agenda with set timings when

One of my favourite non-fiction books is Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit. He highlights that nearly 40% of the actions we perform each day are habits. This allows the brain to save valuable energy because tasks are done on autopilot, giving us a framework or scaffolding to build our

I will freely admit that I may have a conflict of interest towards Smartcut #6—TRAINING— because it’s a core part of what I do. In many ways, training is simply another tool (Smartcut #4) to help you get ahead by learning from others (Smartcut #7). What skills do you really want to

Eleanor Roosevelt is said to have written, “Learn from the mistakes of others, you can’t live long enough to make them all yourself.” This brings me to Smartcut #7: LEARN FROM OTHERS. Speaking to someone who can tell you in advance about the obstacles and pitfalls you may be facing

I have to admit the last three smartcuts are probably the hardest to implement. Starting with Smartcut #8:  ASK FOR HELP. It is incredibly common in academia to think we have to do everything ourselves. But instead of demonstrating independence and self-reliance, this is typically a recipe for feeling overwhelmed

Academics and researchers are often stereotyped as being lost in their own thoughts. However, the penultimate smartcut is all about trying to tackle this tendency: GET OUT OF YOUR OWN HEAD. This is important on a few levels. Take writing for example. When I was a post-doc, colleagues would often

The last smartcut is perhaps the hardest to hear: GET OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY. This is a dose of tough love because many of the speedbumps and pitfalls we encounter along the way were actually built by us. We often tell ourselves the same story so many times that