This is Episode #13 of the A-KID-EMIA podcast, the home for parent-scholars looking to balance personal and professional goals. This is the fourth of an eight-part monthly series generously funded by the American Philosophical Association.

Today, we welcome Christina Hinton, a Research Associate at the Human Flourishing Program and faculty member of the Graduate School of Education at Harvard University. She is also the founder and CEO of Research Schools International, and a single mom. In this episode, she shares her wisdom on turning business tactics into organizational tools for family life. She also shares her secrets on blending student engagement with domestic delegation, with the aim of reframing ‘outsourcing’ as community building.

Chapters

00:00 – Intro & Guest Overview
Balancing motherhood, academia, company leadership, and single parenting.

02:25 – Evolutionary Parenting & The Myth of Doing It Alone
Why humans evolved to raise children in networks—not in isolation.

03:29 – CEO Mindset Applied to Family Life
Using “outsourcing” principles to focus on what matters most: quality time with kids.

04:42 – The ‘Family Assistant’ Model Explained
Delegating domestic tasks to free up parental energy.

05:06 – Hiring Students as Support (Win-Win System)
How Christina recruits and mentors students while they help with family life.

06:01 – Building Long-Term, Meaningful Relationships
Turning childcare into lasting, family-like connections.

07:39 – How to Find & Choose the Right People
Where to look & how to hire.

09:42 – Traveling with Kids & Support Systems
Bringing assistants along to balance work travel and family life.

10:27 – Creative Community Building
Thinking outside the box to design support networks that actually work.

11:55 – Teaching Kids Responsibility Through Chores
Why chores support development and reduce parental work load.

16:19 – Reflection: Rethinking “Outsourcing”
Reframing support as mentorship, growth, and shared community for transferring parental knowledge across generations.

19:02 – The Role of Humor in Parenting
Why laughter makes challenges more manageable & Christina’s new podcast

This is Episode #12 of the A-KID-EMIA podcast, the home for parent-scholars looking to balance personal and professional goals. This is the third of an eight-part monthly series generously funded by the American Philosophical Association.

When your brain is necessary for your work, pregnancy can feel like a gamble: will my mind be too foggy to research? How long will it take to recover (if ever)? What am I even getting myself into? Worries like these plague a lot of mothers, the experienced and the aspiring alike. In today’s episode, a pioneering researcher on the brain in gestation puts these anxieties to rest. Laura Pritschet is the lead author of the first neuroscientific study of the brain during pregnancy, in contrast to earlier research which focused exclusively on the pre-conception and postpartum periods. She explains in laymen’s terms how the minds of both moms and dads are physically affected by pregnancy and subsequent childcare. She also shares how the short and long-term neurological changes of gestation produce lasting cognitive benefits, including advantages that can specifically help academics. Far from the standard declension narrative, the latest neuroscience shows that pregnancy is in fact a period of rapid finetuning, efficiency, and resilience.

Chapters

0:00-1:03 - Introduction

1:04-8:55 - Background on Laura’s groundbreaking study & why pregnancy neuroscience is understudied

8:56-18:19 - Her study’s findings and what they mean

18:20-20:56 - Brain effects for fathers

20:57-25:52 - Should parents fear ‘baby brain’?

25:53-27:39 - Long-term cognitive benefits of gestation

27:40-34:40 - Cognitive advantages for academic work specifically

36:50-40:29 - The durability of pregnancy-induced anatomical brain changes across time

40:30-42:52 - Pregnancy’s affect on attentional focus

42:53-45:40 - What we know about successive pregnancies

45:46- The importance of neuroscience for parents

This is Episode #11 of the A-KID-EMIA podcast, the home for parent-scholars looking to balance personal and professional goals. This is the second of an eight-part monthly series generously funded by the American Philosophical Association.

Today, we welcome Suzanne Ouyang and Rachel Schroder. Suzanne is the Associate Director of Special Projects for Professor Tyler VanderWeele, who leads the Human Flourishing Program at Harvard University; Rachel is the Executive Assistant to Catherine Pakaluk, Associate Professor of economics at Catholic University of America and Director of the Institute for Human Ecology.

In this episode, Suzanne and Rachel enumerate the academic responsibilities a professor could delegate, and how to find the right person for the job. Looking at all of a professor’s duties, they share how they’ve helped improve the productivity of Professors, Directors, and Deans at several different institutions. From grant applications and syllabi updates, to letters of recommendation and journal submissions, Suzanne and Rachel tell us how academic support on each front generates better work-life balance overall.

Chapters

0:00-3:10 - Introduction

3:11-5:01 - A general list of delegable tasks

5:02-10:37 - Conference hosting and presentation

10:38-15:14 - How long it takes to feel comfortable fully delegating

16:36-19:35 - Scheduling

19:36-21:49 - Conference and meeting attendance/minutes

21:50-22:40 - Meeting action-item follow-up (and other unpleasantries)

22:41-28:13 - Grant application support

28:14-30:34 - Locating new funding sources

30:35-32:55 - Balancing budgets

32:56-40:44 - Job searches/grant and program hiring

40:45-48:22 - Integrating the personal with the professional to improve work-life balance and regularize rest

48:23-53:17- Research assistance

53:18-55:24 - Manuscript submissions

55:25-58:37 - Streamlining teaching logistics

58:38-1:03:02 - Email management & standardizing invitation queries

1:03:03-1:07:02 - Whether assistants should be remote or in-person

1:07:03-1:10:21 - Letters of recommendation

1:10:22-1:11:48 - Committee work assistance

1:11:49-1:13:16 - Things to look for when hiring an assistant

This is Episode #10 of the A-KID-EMIA podcast, the home for parent-scholars looking to balance personal and professional goals. This is the first of an 8-part monthly series generously funded by the American Philosophical Association.

Today, we welcome Catherine Pakaluk, a mom and Associate Professor of economics at Catholic University of America. She tells us how to avoid gaps in your CV while riding the ups and downs of productivity cycles and discerning different academic job types (including negotiating full-rank TT jobs down to part-time).

Chapters

0:00-1:14 - Introduction

1:15-2:52 - Catherine’s background

2:53-6:16 - How parenting can shape research agendas

6:16-10:17 - Identifying tensions between family goals and TT jobs

10:18-13:57 - Tension solution #1: prolonging grad school

13:58-17:27 - Tension solution #2: negotiating a TT job to part-time

17:28-18:30 - Tension solution #3: staggering job applications

18:31-25:05 - Part-time, full-rank jobs (I have followed up with other scholars on the availability of part-time tenure-track jobs here).

25:06-26:45 - Overcoming productivity cycles across the lifespan for men and women

26:46-29:26 - Counterintuitive ways that big families are easier

29:27 - The family-friendliness of SLACs vs. R1s

36:45- The extras needed in life to make everything work

43:40 - How to discern academic jobs

50:50 - Children as a safeguard against hyper-professionalism

52:12-54:06 - CV gaps

That means that for at least the next eight months, you can expect to receive a new episode every month starting in January. So far, the lineup represents an exciting array of scholars holding different ranks, located in diverse departments, at a variety of institutions from elite R1s and state schools to SLACs and more! All of them have thought deeply about time management and work-life balance. Some have also overcome uniquely challenging circumstances from which everyone can learn and find encouragement.

To make further funding possible, please spread the word on your preferred social media platform using the new handle @akidemiapodcast. The associated accounts aren’t very populated yet, but reels and the like will soon be available there, in case you’re interested in more bite-sized insights.

Another new addition is the “Ask Anything” subsection here on Substack, where you’re invited to privately request any topic you’d like to hear more about. Odds are that you’re not the only one wanting answers to your questions, so don’t hesitate to reach out!

This is Episode #9 of the A-KID-EMIA podcast (formerly Anscombe’s Juggle), the home for parent-scholars looking to balance personal and professional goals. In this Fall Semester episode, we welcome Christopher Tollefsen, a father of nine (yes, NINE!), professor of philosophy, and director of the Center for American Civic Leadership and Public Discourse at the University of South Carolina. Married to another academic, he tells us how his family managed the ‘Two-Body Problem’; what home education was like; and how he achieved prolificacy, both while seeking tenure and in later administrative roles as department chair and director of a research center.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction

2:32-4:18 - Tollefsen’s Job and Family Background

4:18-7:45 - Having Kids in Grad School

7:45-9:54 - Bringing Kids on Campus

9:55-12:47 - Living Near Campus and Bringing the Campus Home

12:48-15:49 - The ‘Two-Body Problem’ and Whether Home Education is Possible

15:50-18:25 - Geographic Stability

18:26-20:32 - Productivity Tip #1: Scheduling Specifics

20:33-23:40 - Productivity Tip #2: How to Be More Creative

23:41-24:03 - Productivity Tip #3: Using Teaching as a Research Stepping Stone

24:04-25:09 - Productivity Tip #4: Vertically Integrating Popular Writing into Academic Rough Drafts

25:10-27:00 - Productivity Tip #5: Strategically Random Reading

27:01-29:04 - De-Integrating Family Responsibilities from Work

29:05-33:35 - Administrative Duties as Research Inspiration

33:36-37:19 - Staying Flexible Amid Fixed Administrative Duties

37:20-38:33 - Overcoming Learned Helplessness

38:34-40:05 - Making and Following Lists

40:06-41:12 - Wrap Up

After a long maternity leave and a podcast re-branding, Anscombe’s Juggle is back with a new look and name: a-kid-emia! In this 8th Episode, podcast host and Harvard postdoc Charlotte Duffee shares a trimestered play-by-play of her latest pregnancy. From her nursing chair (rather than her Philosopher’s Armchair), she offers tips and lessons for pulling off pregnancy and publishing.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction: video clips from each trimester

2:56 - Academic-adjacent work as a springboard into research

3:13 - The first trimester: morning sickness

4:06 - Managing peaks and troughs in pregnancy

4:32 - Applying frontloading postpartum strategies to the first trimester

7:38 - The second trimester: baby brain

8:05 - What baby brain feels like

9:34 - Timing work hours around baby brain

10:26 - Staggering projects around baby brain

11:18 - The third trimester: memory problems

11:54 - Turning forgetfulness into a research strategy

12:44 - Baby brain as creativity

13:38 - The fourth trimester: creativity vs. productivity

14:08 - Creativity as a decline in productivity

15:38 - Personal benefits of more creative research

16:24 - Gestation as a natural moderator of overwork

17:55 - Against zero sum games and over-ambition on the job market

19:32 - Benefits of parenthood regarding ambition off the job market

This is Episode #7 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, Georgetown business professor Jason Brennan shares his secrets for publishing a lot in just forty-hour workweeks to free up more time for family and fun.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro and brief daily work schedule

2:16 - Family time schedule

3:52 - Highs and lows of hybrid work

4:25 - Learning productivity through parenting

7:45 - Useful non-monetary resources

12:13 - A warning about academia’s ‘cult of busy’

15:28 - How to prioritize writing and overcoming writer’s block

18:28 - Scheduling emails

19:35 - Regularizing manuscript innovation

22:10 - Determining how many hours you should work

27:50 - Logging hours/project progress

32:00 - Managing multiple projects over time

39:27 - Managing multiple children over time

42:34 - Coping with novelty across family and career stages

46:53 - Business lecture slides to save you time

For more resources from Dr. Brennan, see his book, Good Work If You Can Get It: How to Succeed in Academia as well as his shorter popular pieces in the Philosopher’s Cocoon and Daily Nous.

This is Episode #6 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, Gonzalo Dona, a postdoctoral fellow in economics at UT Austin, tells us how his family managed to make four intercontinental moves with four kids in tow! We explore how to decide whether to move for a job; the ways moves are easier as a family than as an individual; logistics for carting his growing family of six across the whole world; and how having kids early in his career has helped to keep him going.

Chapters

0:00 – Intro and background

3:18 – Principles for selecting places to move to

7:43 – Preserving unity across different locations as individual vs. family

16:07 – Logistics for big moves

21:10 – Finding your groove in a new place

26:34 – Keeping your sanity wherever you are

31:43 – Reasons for having children early

Everyone knows this already, so when I became a parent and went looking for guidance, I was surprised by how little of it I found online or in print. There was one sample itinerary in a NPR article by a Princeton psychologist and mother, some posts here and here on a professional development blog in my discipline, and scarcely much else. Although there is also a considerable body of empirical research on parent-scholars, the parts of it I have read primarily identify the challenges we face rather than provide actionable solutions to overcome them.

What should we conclude from all this? Is everyone unmoored? I think not. Some parent-scholars seem to be getting on just fine: the ones I have interviewed on the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast, for example. Sure their methods might be, shall we say, unorthodox, but they work all the same. Aghast, I have resolved to uncover their secrets, while continuing my blind battle against the chaos in my own life. What I give you now is my dispatch from those trenches.

I have carved it into three parts. In this first post, I will share my current daily schedules as they play out over the course of a week. This routine has worked remarkably well for the past few months. In that respect, it has outlived the predictable lifespan of all my other schedules, few of which survived more than six to eight weeks. But for the instability of schedules with which this post opened, I know to expect change, and so my second post will relay the broader rules of thumb I have discovered for formulating workable schedules. My final post will gather everything I tried that didn’t work, which is just as useful to know.

My Personal Responsibilities

My schedule is not limited to my academic responsibilities but includes all of my duties, since I have learned that I cannot perform any of them well unless I schedule every single one. So, before sharing my schedule, let me first tell you just what the responsibilities are that make up my day:

• My children are aged 3, 2, and almost 1, the last of which is still nursing. We have not sent any of our children to daycare; they spend most of their days with me.

• We homeschool our eldest and plan to continue this form of education long-term, with extracurricular and social supplements.

• With the exception of grocery delivery, we do not outsource any domestic duties; I do all of the cooking, cleaning, and most yardwork. Moreover, we are a little health-nutty, so I make every meal from scratch, as well as many basic items such as butter, yogurt, bread, ice cream, and other specialty health foods like kombucha and bone broth. All that is just to say that cooking is more involved and takes longer.

• We cloth diaper our children, which requires spraying and laundering them (the diapers, that is).

• I have some caregiving responsibilities for a family member. The time commitment is variable but can be significant.

• We operate a dairy business, for which I clean our used milk gallons, process the family’s dairy intake, and organize community events.

• We have daily, weekly, and monthly religious commitments averaging approximately ten hours a week, although sometimes more.

• As you well know, I run Anscombe’s Juggle. This takes a few hours every month.

• We throw very large bi-weekly parties on Sundays at our house, for which I cook and clean.

My Professional Responsibilities

• I am a research postdoc with no teaching responsibilities.

• With the addition of our third child, I moved down to part-time so that I could work from home, since I live 80 miles away in an area accessible only by car. I now voluntarily go into the office once a month on average.

• I belong to a research group and have some co-authoring responsibilities.

• I strive to publish at least two single- or lead-authored papers per year in top-tier journals I know have quick review and production turnaround times. I have a new plan to complete these minimum two papers in the first quarter (or at least the first half) of the calendar year, so that I can reserve the remaining months for bigger projects like book manuscripts. That said, sometimes collaborative work requires me to deviate from this.

• I perform peer-reviews and provide editorial assistance for academic journals.

• I belong to two mentorship programs at my alma maters, but the time commitment is very sporadic and low.

• I am on the job market.

• I attend conferences but am highly selective about them because of the enormous disruption it poses to family life, particularly for nursing infants.

My Weekly Schedule and ‘Micro-Planning’

So, those are all my usual responsibilities. Some will apply to you; others almost certainly will not. Even so, their totality should give you a sense of what I have found to be possible at my career stage.

I schedule my duties down to the hour to give my week structure, which works much better than anything less granular in my experience. For the sake of privacy, I won’t relate how my family and I spend each hour, but I will give you the broad strokes by the day:

• To reduce decision fatigue, I fix daily activities to the same time. That includes meal times and cleanup, personal activities like ablutions and spiritual practices, and homeschooling.

• I am militant about maintaining the same nap and bedtimes for the kids. Once babies can be sleep-trained (usually by the time my mat leave is over), I put them down for naps at 9:30 and 3:30, with bedtime at 6:30. As they age, I consolidate their naps into one starting at 12:00 and push their bedtime to 7.

Each weekday is dedicated to a different responsibility:

• Monday: grocery orders

• Tuesday: grocery arrival; clean cloth diapers

• Wednesday: cook all of our food for the week (with the exception of managing our daily dairy intake)

• Thursday: laundry

• Friday: clean cloth diapers

This order is not random. Cloth diapers need to be laundered every 3-4 days, so I time their washing during the middle of the week, in case we are traveling for holidays (most of which fall on or about a weekend). If we are on the road, the diapers are either done or have time to sit without accumulating too much bacteria. I cook in the middle of the week for the same reason. Since I cook everything in one fell swoop, I stagger freezable meals toward the end of the week so that non-freezable ones will be consumed first. I have groceries delivered the day before I cook so that they don’t spoil before I need them. I do laundry on Thursdays because all the other days are already spoke for by some other major task, which I’ve found it best to space out as much as possible. I fit minor tasks, such as mowing the lawn, into random open windows or on Saturdays, which I reserve as a spill-over for miscellany.

So much for my personal responsibilities. What about my academic ones? Here, too, I have found it best to keep things as regular as possible:

• Four out of five weeknights, I work for three hours after dinner while my husband puts the kids down. That might not seem like a lot, but these hours are intensely productive, in no small part because there are so few of them. Other researchers (at least in my field) have also found the neighborhood of three to four hours to be a reasonable limit, while cutting the remaining hours that only deliver diminishing marginal returns. I work in the evenings because my children naturally wake up so early that to work before they rise, I would have to get up in the middle of the night—something I have tried, and failed, to do.

• My husband and I reserve one weeknight for a date. After all, you have to feed the fire! On that day, I have a sitter come around the beginning of naptime and stay for five hours. Slotting these hours in the middle of the day works best for everyone. With my littlest guys asleep, they don’t experience as much separation anxiety, while I am able to use the hours to schedule meetings whose timing I can control. After all, no one wants to Zoom at 7:30 or 9:00 p.m. (unless they are in a later time zone than me, in which case weeknight work hours are preferable). I also enjoy having one big day a week to accomplish what I’ve been marinating on during the other days. I overlap this big day with my easier personal responsibilities, which I complete before beginning my work.

In addition to my weekly plan, I try to maximize my use of time by mapping out each of my activities beforehand, as far as the nature of the thing in question allows. To give you a personal example: I have an eight-week meal plan, with each week’s recipes printed out in a separate binder. That way on Monday I can order my groceries instantly from a pre-populated list in my grocer’s app, and get right to cooking on Wednesday without having to leaf through multiple cookbooks. An analogous academic example would be my daily, weekly, semester, and academic-year plans. Expect to hear more of this ‘micro-planning’ in future posts.

Phew! That is my Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, our whole family rests together. We are ferociously territorial about this. Religious commitments drive our choice of day, but the principle of committing one day to complete rest is seriously cathartic, whether you are religious or not. Were it not for this day of rest, I doubt I would have been able to sustain my current academic role this past year and a half.

Deviations

I sometimes need to deviate from my schedule, usually for meetings or appointments over whose timing I have limited control. Fortunately, interruptions of this kind are foreseen with enough advance to plan accordingly. There is always my ‘spill-over Saturday’ in reserve as well, should I need to finish up any projects or meet a pressing deadline.

I do not deviate, however, for the sake of squeezing in extra academic work. I have learned to regard that as a temptation it pays dividends to avoid. In my experience, it leads to overwork, then procrastination during designated work hours, and finally schedule abandonment altogether. Under those conditions, I tend to become unmoored, or at least unhappy.

Concluding Thoughts on Tempo

For now, let me close with a brief word about how my schedule feels day-in and day-out. The work week is definitely densely packed, although as time goes on I am finding it more and more manageable. As with all things parenting related, you grow into it. Still, come Friday night the fast clip has exhausted me. One big reason for this is that our family spends very little time relaxing together during the week. We do what we can to mitigate against this—prioritizing shared dinners, for example—but it is tiring nonetheless. To make up for it, we reserve the entire weekend for family activities, with neither I nor my husband working so far as we are able. We have found this replenishes us well enough to face the next week. All in all, the balance is certainly a difficult and delicate one, but it beats having none at all.

This is Episode #5 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, philosophy professor Patrick Lee explains how he persevered on the job market to obtain an endowed chair, all while raising nine—yes, nine—children. From his early days working odd jobs and hours, Patrick tells us what he did (and, just as importantly, what he avoided) to achieve long-term professional and familial stability.

Chapters

0:00 - Introduction

1:50 – Planning schedules with breaks

2:25 – Working additional jobs as an early career scholar

5:15 – Small towns and cost of living

6:16 – Schedules as a young family (wee-hour work periods and naps)

9:48 – How your children’s development changes your schedule

11:25 – How your own age changes your schedule

13:10 – Schedules as a senior scholar with grown children

15:04 – How far seniority lets you dictate your schedule

16:57 – Schedules during sabbaticals and summers

17:23 – Finding time for recreation and rest

19:22 – Knowing when less effort is more and not teaching too much

21:07 – The importance of rest

22:30 – Discerning how much time to spend with kids

23:54 – Facing financial pressures

30:30 – What having a really big family is like

33:07 – Challenges when both parents work full-time

36:33 – Establishing long-term stability

38:18 – Prioritizing research over extra teaching

39:54 – One last piece of advice on imposter syndrome

But in time, even grocery shopping alone proved a burden. Someone would have to watch the children, which was always a hassle to organize. And I lacked the culinary instinct to overcompensate for ingredients that I learned were out of stock only once I arrived at the store. So there I’d be, lost in the wrong aisle, Googling acceptable substitutions or even new recipes entirely. On easy weeks, I was spending upwards of two hours at the grocery store, not including the commute to and fro or the time it took to find recipes and write up a list—easily another hour, but often more. When I was really trying to get a handle on recipes, I was spending at least four hours a week on all things grocery-related.

Here was an inefficiency I knew I could improve. Although figuring out my fix was itself a time investment, I now spend a total of about thirty minutes on groceries every month. It is glorious and I am proud as a peacock to share it with you. There are three essential parts: building a meal plan; developing a paper and digital list system; and availing oneself of curbside pick-up or grocery delivery services.

While meal planning is really the first step to undertake, building that schedule takes time, which dissuaded me for many years. I presume I am not alone in this. So, in an effort to wet your appetite for meal planning, let me begin with the glories of modern-day lists, which greatly reward those who plan ahead.

I maintain two types of lists. The first is digital and exists in my grocery store’s app. Here, it is important to choose a store that delivers groceries, or that at least does curbside pick-up—anything to avoid bringing the kids into the store! Since I live in a rural area, delivery is well worth the twelve dollars Walmart charges me for it every month (and which I subtract from the cost of the unnecessary goodies I would have been enticed to purchase inside). The Walmart grocery app allows me to build lists, so I built one for each of the eight weeks in my meal plan:

Once you populate each week’s groceries into separate lists, you can simply upload the ingredients of whatever week you’re on into your cart with the click of a button, like the one circled below in red:

That almost takes care of all your grocery needs. There are, however, certain pantry items that also need replenishing from time to time. For these, I keep a separate paper notepad in one spot that everyone knows about. The golden rule in our house is that once an item is half-way done, the last person to use it needs to add it to this list. I have tried to stretch items further than that but have always found it does not work. This notepad is also useful for miscellaneous household items that my grocer offers. Before submitting my order, I simply add the page of my items on the paper list to my digital shopping cart, remove and toss the paper from my notepad, and schedule my delivery.

I keep track of the week I am on in our meal plan using a dry erase board someone gave me, as seen below. I used permanent Sharpie to write the unchanging parts (namely, the ‘we’re on week’ and ‘notes’ headings, which can be removed with rubbing alcohol if need be). But for the changing weeks and notes themselves, I used dry erase marker.

Tacked onto this board is my current meal plan, which I keep in a manila folder with the edges taped together and the face of one side removed. I am presently revising this meal plan and will share the final result in a separate post. My revised plan will include a two-month schedule of recipes (with links!) for every breakfast, lunch, and dinner, plus a rotation of snacks and sides. This particular plan requires cooking three meals a week. (Some meal planners prefer to cook everything at once and freeze it, which I have yet to attempt for fear that freezing will change the texture of some foods).

Were you to live right beside your preferred grocer, I estimate that my system would save you at least an hour each week, supposing you are already really efficient. For people like me, who live at some distance from their grocer, you can expect to recuperate something in the neighborhood of three hours or more each week just on your commute and shop, to say nothing of your planning time.

But it is not only time that matters. It is also energy. Meal plans and lists reduce decision fatigue. Delivery avoids the labor of herding the cats in and out of the car and store. With these methods, so little time and energy are needed as to be tantamount to striking this responsibility altogether. I ask you: what scholar, let alone parent, could not use more of that?

This is Episode #4 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. Here, I share my new interviewing framework for future episodes, ‘The Three Ss.’

Chapters

00:35 – Building unity across interviews & abandoning free-form dialogue

2:19 - New interview structure: the three Ss

2:53 – 1st S: strategies

3:47 - 2nd S: schedules

6:07 - 3rd S: sanity

8:40 – New interview length

This is Episode #3 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Jonathan Rutledge, a Harvard postdoc with two PhDs and three kids aged five and under. He shares how he managed to move across the US and the world with youngsters in tow, and the important lessons about family life he learned along the way. He also reveals the impressive variety of calendars that helped him make it all happen, as well as funny but effective strategies for creating time to rest and exercise.

Chapters

0:00 – Intro

2:49 – Getting married & having kids during grad school & postdoc fellowships

6:14 – Insights on the similarities between grad school and postdocs

7:30 – Moving across The Pond with young children

9:50 – Reflections on long postdocs with kids and ageing parents

11:14 – The nuts and bolts of moving far distances

13:43 – Discerning where to settle

19:30 – Extended family and/or community support

24:05 – Schedule

26:43 – The importance of different calendars

31:56 – Rest and relaxation time

33:35 – Weekends

35:54 – How to work while exercising   

41:50 – Final thoughts: one piece of advice

This is Episode #2 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, we are joined by Dr. Ashley Yarabinec, a mom to two young children, an assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Pittsburg, and a full-time PhD student in education also at UPitt. She tells us how she manages the responsibilities that come with her various roles, what a day in her life looks like, and the important lessons she has learned along the way.

Chapters

0:00 - Intro

1:58 - Summary of Dr. Yarabinec’s responsibilities

6:02 - Increased admin duties and creating a schedule

8:33 - Life as both a faculty member and a PhD student

10:33 - Consolidating responsibilities

11:58 - Dr. Yarabinec’s research

13:30 - Learning how to teach and parent

20:50 - Daily schedule and parent teamwork

26:05 - Tempo and efficiency

31:06 - How kids impact career

32:18 - Self-care

34:33 - Preserving hobbies

37:46 - Final thoughts: one piece of advice

This is Episode #1 of the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast for parent-scholars looking to balance the demands of parenthood and academia. In this episode, Anscombe's Juggle host, Charlotte Duffee (Harvard University, postdoctoral fellow), explains what prompted her to start this podcast, what her vision for it is, and how she thinks you might benefit.

Chapters

0:00 - Summary

0:38 - Introduction

1:57 - Questions about work-life balance

2:41 - Answers before kids

3:21 - Answers after kids

4:19 - Anscombe’s Juggle is born: vision and goals

5:33 - A sample answer: a brief overview of a day in my life before and after having kids

6:35 - How many hours do I work per week?

8:45 - When in the day do I work?

10:57 - When and what other things do I do?

15:13 - The big takeaway: more efficiency, more accomplishment, more availability

So, how did we make it work? We had some support, but mostly we put in a lot of work: hours and hours of online digging, some hindsight, trial-and-error, and dedicated amounts of elbow grease. If I were to sum it all up, I’d say there are three things to know:

1. What to buy that will save you money;

2. What purchases will kill 2+ birds with one stone;

3. What you should not buy that everyone says you need.

I’ll elaborate below, but first let me add a disclaimer. Some money savers require you to overcompensate in other ways; giving up time, for instance. Because of that, my recommendations are probably most feasible for the kind of person I was when discovering them: a graduate student with minimal teaching and administrative duties who had yet to lay down roots, buy a home, and the like. By contrast, the necessary time might be lacking for, say, a researcher also working in industry or a frugal tenured professor in a well-established community.

I should also stress that my focus is only on early parenthood. My eldest is still a toddler, so I can’t speak to costs beyond this stage. Since my little guys are all close in age, as we had hoped they’d be, some of my recommendations have this goal in view. In these cases, what was cheapest for me may not be for you.

#1: The Money-Savers

Diapers

Undoubtedly the greatest recurring material expense is diapers. On the cheaper end of the scale, Amazon sells 30 of their own brand for about $9, which might last you two and a half days with a newborn. More reliable brands will double that cost. And if you’re committed to anything special, such as non-toxic or biodegradable disposables, the options can get really pricey.

Our sympathies were in this direction, but our budget wasn’t. So, we opted for cloth diapers instead (except when travelling, which we learned was a grave error never to be repeated). While I have not kept an accounting, I would estimate that for all three of our children we have probably spent about as much in total as we would have spent on one child in just 3-4 weeks of buying disposables. Yes, the savings are that dramatic. So far, we’re three years in and haven’t had to replace anything yet.

The catches are: 1) that you have to actually deal with solid waste (see below) and; 2) that it can take a very, very long time to wade through all the varieties of cloth diapers (and arguments over them) online. I won’t rehash those debates but will simply get right to the point and tell you which direction we went in after combing through the internet ourselves. We chose to go the prefold route, which is the cheapest option. What this means is that your diaper has two parts, a fabric/plastic outer shell called a ‘cover’ plus a fabric insert, the ‘prefold.’ For the insert, we chose the most absorbent kind of fabric we could find, Grovia’s cotton and bamboo blend. We skipped buying the newborn size, since our pregnancies were normal and so we were expecting babies who could immediately fit into the Size 1s. Originally, we bought Snappi connectors and would fit the prefolds around our baby before putting the shell on, like so:

But Snappis are annoying when you’re doing a diaper change in the dark during the dead of night (and feeling half-dead yourself). So we started following the seams to fold the diaper in thirds and then just laid it in the shell. Witness my sloppy handiwork:

Even barely folded like this, the diaper will be way faster to put on and less prone to leaks if you lay it high up enough towards the front to cover their genitalia. Be sure that no bits of prefold stick out of the cover, either. After the child is something like 1-1.5 years old, we start doubling the diapers at night. To do that, we basically just fold a diaper within a diaper, laying one prefold flat and placing an already folded one in the middle of it before folding the sides of the flat one over. If you’re worried about the bulk of the diapers, don’t be. Babies have wider hips, so these diapers are actually better at maintaining the so-called ‘frog leg position.’

The covers are all functionally similar, if you get the ones with leg gussets (elastics around the leg area). We went with a brand that’s made in America called Thirsties Duo Wraps. Note that most shells, including these ones, have an inner lining that gets destroyed by frequent high heat drying, so you’ll want to air- or sun-dry them most of the time. We hang ours using these space-savers. Thirsties shells, however, require infrequent and short tumbling on low to re-laminate the interior.

Like many brands, Thirsties offers two options, buttons or Velcro, for attaching the shell around your child’s waist. We’ve found the Velcro wears out and doesn’t provide that much more flexibility than the numerous buttons do. Plus, your child can and will tear the Velcro open once they notice it’s within their power to do so. I also recommend resisting the temptation to indulge in all the fun patterns this and other brands offer. Save yourself and buy a solid color that’s different for each size. That way, you won’t need to read the labels to sort your covers when you’re putting them away. Also, be sure to buy a generous amount of dry, reusable wipes, which you can wet with water prior to use. Another money saver—and no endocrine disrupters!

In addition to buying diapers and wipes, you’ll need a few extras to launder them properly. Each cloth diaper brand is compatible with only a specific set of detergents and diaper rash creams. While there’s a lot of overlap across brands, the ones we know work with the abovementioned brands are Tide Free and Gentle detergent and Honest Diaper Rash Cream. Both are widely available at most grocers and pharmacies. When your wee one is a newborn, all you need to do to clean the diapers is toss them in the washer with hot water. You should do this at least every three days; any longer than that and the diapers might develop bacteria that can cause rashes, requiring a bleach treatment.

That means you’ll need at least 3 days worth of prefolds on hand, if not a little more to buy you some leeway. It’s not necessary to purchase the same amount of covers, since you can wipe them down to reuse them if only the prefold has been soiled. That said, I prefer having extra covers on hand to account for the time it takes to air-dry them.

So far, so good. Not much difference at this stage between cloth and disposable diapers. Things get a little more complicated once you transition your child to solid foods. Solid food translates into solid waste, which you’ll have to spray off of the diapers before washing them. For that, you’ll need a bidet sprayer, a spray pail to contain flying feces, and (in our experience) some buckets. We went with this sprayer and have been satisfied with its water pressure. Instead of buying a standard spray pail like this one, we bought a Dollar Tree 2-gallon wastebasket, cut the bottom out, and stored it a slightly larger 2.5-gallon one to catch the liquids that drip from the pail. Note that the wastebaskets should be the same shape so that the smaller one fits inside of its larger counterpart. Also, you should opt for either a rectangular or oval shape; anything that has a flat side against which you can lay the diapers while you spray them. We also have a regular plastic bucket (of any shape) on hand while spraying to carry finished diapers over to our diaper pail or into the washer.

About our diaper pail, we originally purchased an over-priced, extra large one with reusable cloth bags, but it was smelly, leaky, and finicky in the extreme. We have since replaced that system with three 5-gallon Home Depot buckets with lids. Two of the buckets hold the pee diapers, while the third contains the unsprayed poopy ones. The buckets fill up within about 2-3 days between our three kids, one of whom is largely potty trained and another who’s a newborn. When we empty the buckets, we use the sprayer to clean them and then drain that waste into the toilet.

If all of this talk of spraying sounds like too much for you, then I recommend cloth diapering for only the newborn phase or until your child begins solids. It’s as easy as disposables, but a lot cheaper—especially considering that newborns dirty the most diapers. Sure, it adds a bit more laundry, but you’ll already be doing a lot of that anyways with a newborn. You can avoid the tedium of folding by stacking your diapers in plastic bins and throwing your wipes and covers unfolded into separate containers.

Nursing Pads

If your family plans to nurse, the cost of disposable nursing pads can quickly add up. Get yourself reusable ones instead. Like the diapers, we went for a cotton-bamboo blend. This has been the best kind in my experience.

Baby Food

Baby food is highly regulated, which I like to believe is the only reason why an entire cottage industry exists solely to halve the normal proportions of ordinary things and then charge you double for it on the basis that it’s ‘made for babies.’ Indeed, next to diapers baby food is probably the next costliest regular expense. Formula is the worst culprit here, which we used as a supplement only in the very first few weeks with our eldest. For those who need it more regularly, a breastmilk bank is one free option.

Formula is not the industry’s only golden goose. Solid baby food can also get pricey, if you consider how much you’re getting for the amount paid. I have avoided this theft by always making our children’s food. As a consequence, it wasn’t until two of them were toddlers and eating decent portions of regularly sized meals that I started to see a little dent in our grocery bill.

Online, baby recipes for purees, pates, and so on are aplenty. In my experience, at this age kids aren’t that fussy. To get started, all you’ll need is the regular food processor likely already in your possession. To avoid chemical leeching from plastics, I store the food I make in Pyrex glass containers, but you could easily reuse old jam jars and the like for free. If you’re looking for some place to start, nutritionally I recommend this cookbook (some content of which is freely available online here).

You can also save money but making certain ingredients from scratch. Take yogurt for example, a good but relatively expensive baby food item. Making your own yogurt is significantly cheaper than buying it—about five times cheaper, even with an expensive organic and grass-fed milk brand. It’s surprisingly easy to do. If you’re using pasteurized milk, this is a decent recipe. (On the question of how to keep the yogurt warm enough during the incubation period, I have had success with: my mini oven’s dehydrator or the yogurt mode on this Instant Pot at 100 F; my regular oven’s ‘warm’ function; and the oven off but with the light turned on. Only the first of these three options has worked for raw milk, which should be initially heated at or above 110 but not past 118 F). You can also find some bread machines that double as yogurt makers.

After the yogurt is made, I then like to turn it into Greek yogurt by straining it through big cheesecloth bags wrapped around the edges of a deep colander insert that I place inside of a regular stock pot, similar to this contraption—although one could also suspend the cheesecloth in other ways or rest it in a colander. Be sure to drain the whey periodically or else it will rise into the colander. Straining for around 4-6 hours will give you store-bought consistency, although you can always go longer and then add more whey back to make it runnier again. Note that regular yogurt will produce as much milk as you started out with, but Greek yogurt will make roughly 3/4 to 1/2 of that depending on the amount of whey removed.

Although that does make homemade Greek yogurt more expensive, there are ways to make up the cost. Chief among them using whey as starter for your next batch, rather than reserving yogurt or buying more from the store. To do that, simply substitute whey in equal portions for a regular yogurt starter, as called for in your recipe. You can also use whey in other recipes to boost protein content, accelerate fermentation, and the like. For example, I replace water with whey when making homemade breads with my bread machine. The whey’s tanginess preserves the freshness of the bread and gives it a sourdough flavor, making my loaves last longer and cost less than the real stuff! You can also use yogurt whey to make ricotta, referred to in the cheesemaking world as ‘whey ricotta.’ A decent recipe can be found here, although I recommend substituting the milk in this recipe for whey and, if desired, adding cream back afterwards. As the making of whey ricotta also requires straining, you can catch your whey a second time and reuse it in the ways listed above.

Car Seats

You can buy different car seats for each size, or you can get a ‘grow’ car seat to use for all ages. We did the latter, purchasing this one. For the most part, we do not regret it. But I would say that having a regular bucket car seat is really useful for transporting newborns when they’re already asleep, especially if your child isn’t the best sleeper. So, with our second child we added the Uppa Baby Mesa car seat to our collection. We specifically chose this one because it attaches with this connector to the Uppa Baby Vista stroller, which can carry multiple children. When doing that, we put the car seat on the top, a kid in a bucket seat on the bottom, and our eldest on the piggyback board that attaches to the back of the stroller. For reference, here’s a mom from the internet loading her toddler onto the piggyback board:

Now, if you know anything about this brand, you might be wondering why we chose it. After all, it’s notoriously expensive. Even so, let me explain why it might still be the cheapest option for families with multiple young children.

Stroller

We planned on having many children close in age, so we were angling for a stroller for multiples. I calculated that it’d be about the same cost if not cheaper to begin with a ‘grow’ stroller—the kind to which seats can be added—instead of buying decent new strollers with each additional child. Also, I wanted a stroller that could fit comfortably through standard sized doors and steer easily (as opposed to really wide double/triple strollers or really long caboose options). If your goal is to fit as many kids as possible, then 3 is the highest number of seats you can obtain while also meeting the abovementioned goals. That leaves you with Uppa and very few alternatives. The cheapest colors the Uppa comes in are $1000 USD. Over time, there will be another $435 in extras to scale the stroller up to a three-seater, which include the following: the second, lower bucket chair ‘Rumble seat’ ($220) and its lower adaptor ($30); the upper adaptor for the bucket seat and/or car seat ($50); and the piggyback board ($135).

The best alternative stroller is the Joovy Qool, which is about half the cost: $500-$650 depending on the model you choose. Here’s the thing, if you buy all the analogues to Uppa’s adaptors plus the accessories with it that are automatically included in the Uppa, it’s $1300 or $1450 (again depending on your model of choice). So they’re comparable, except that Uppa also comes with rain and mosquito covers for each seat, which Joovy doesn’t offer. Additionally, my impression from extensive reviewing is that Joovy doesn’t fold shut very well and is otherwise inferior to Uppa. But if cost is your only consideration, know that you can opt out of some of the Joovy accessories, such as the bassinet, that you can’t with Uppa. Having said that, here’s why you might not want to do that…

#2: Doubling Up Where You Can

If you’re counting costs, then it’s important to prioritize purchases that can cover many bases for you at once.

Bassinet

The Uppa stroller comes with a really nice bassinet that attaches to the stroller, but that can also be freely kept on the floor or laid on a bassinet base ($160—but there might be knock-offs that are cheaper than this). Since you may find the Uppa worthwhile for the reasons already described, consider subtracting the cost of what you would’ve spent on a bassinet from the amount of the stroller.

Nursing-Maternity Clothes

If you or the mother in your family plans to nurse, you should only buy maternity clothes that have nursing capabilities. Why? Because her shape will take a while to come back, if it ever does. Between skeletal changes, uterine swelling, the potential for a diastasis recti bump, and so on, she will look 6-months pregnant for at least 6-months postpartum. So instead of purchasing a whole additional postpartum nursing wardrobe on top of the new maternity wardrobe you just bought, just get maternity clothes that can accommodate nursing.

Nursing and Car Seat Cover

On the subject of nursing, if your family plans to nurse in public, then you may want a nursing cover. There are thousands of options. In my experience, ones like this provide the best coverage, especially once the child is old enough to really wiggle. It also doubles as a stretchy car seat cover that won’t blow in the wind. I chose black to block the sun from baby’s eyes and to maintain the ambient lighting if he’s sleeping while we transition outdoors.

Nursing Chair/‘Maternity Bed’

Nursing chairs are a definite must in our house, but not just for nursing. They’ve consistently been the only thing I can sleep in from the middle of pregnancy until the very end. This might not be true for everybody. But for me, a good portion of pregnancy involves a belly big enough that I can’t sleep on my back, but not so big that it will rest on the mattress when I’m on my side. It just sags, pulling on my hip to such a point that walking can be difficult the next day. To counter this, I’ve tried various pillows—including pregnancy ones like the Snoogle—all to no avail. The only thing that’s worked has been a rocking recliner. We bought a cheap generic one at first, not expecting I’d spend so much time in it before the baby even arrived. When in short order it predictably broke, we splurged on a Lazy Boy. If I could go back, I would’ve splurged at the outset to avoid the duplicative purchase and wasteful pillow vetting.

#3: Pseudo-Necessities to Avoid

Hindsight has taught me that a great number of so-called baby essentials never see a single use. I’ve also learned that some actual essentials will always be provided by others, mainly as the kinds of gifts that people have fun buying. Let me quickly rifle through both:

• Don’t buy newborn clothes, except maybe a few outfits for the hospital if that’s where the child will be born. Your wee one will outgrow this size within their first week.

• Baby shoes are not necessary until they really start walking independently and often. Before that, they’re just glorified socks. More often than not, they fall right off or become a favorite of your child’s to remove and toss.

• If you have private medical insurance, don’t buy a breast pump. At least not without inquiring with your provider first. They might offer you one for free.

• Diaper pails aren’t necessary. As mentioned above, Home Depot buckets and lids work better.

• We have never used a bottle sanitizer. Instead, we bought dishwasher-safe bottles and put them in the dishwasher or boiled them in a pot.

• We also never used a bottle drying rack. A dish towel on the counter has always worked just fine.

• Like baby food, baby food processors are another cottage industry item. A regular food processor will do the trick. In fact, it’s bigger so you can make more food at once and freeze it for later.

• Everyone will constantly buy you toys and books, so you really don’t need to purchase a lot of these yourself, unless you feel strongly about their use/content. Even if nobody buys you any toys, your children will constantly repurpose ordinary objects for play. They love wearing other people’s shoes, poking people’s eyes out, rearranging all the things in all your cabinets, climbing dangerous items, and so on. More often than not, the only person touching the bulk of the toys is you, and that’s to put them away after your children, in the span of a few short minutes, redecorated your entire house with them in the most chaotic fashion possible.

Conclusion

Make no mistake, parenting on the cheap is a tour-de-force, but one that I hope feels a little more within reach after reading this. Yes, it is hard, but it can work out for the best. It certainly did for me. Having kids in grad school rounded out my education and forced me into a healthier relationship with my work early on. It also gave me the chance to find my feet in the most important area, family life, before starting down the windy road that is a career in academia.

Social Media

Next to—or perhaps alongside of—giving up the news, which I detail below, deleting my social media was the single greatest act of mental decluttering I have ever done. To my mind, the costs of these platforms do not outweigh their benefits. Their main upshot is supposed to be healthy socialization, but in my experience most of that can be accomplished in other ways, often with greater intentionality and depth. Of course, I did lose touch with some people, and in that way some friendships were lost—but only the ones whose lives social media had artificially extended. The connections it would have really hurt to lose already existed outside of social media and so were not significantly affected. In hindsight, deleting my social media didn’t narrow my friend circles any more than my children have by their demand on my time.

Still, the transition was tough. For the platforms I used often, I had to pass some months to fully wean my craving to know everything that I was missing out on. But after that, I experienced much greater mental quietude, being no longer inundated with information from friends and feeds. This immediately registered as feeling less busy—which is funny, since I wasn’t really doing much at all on any of these platforms. But I was processing a lot of information, which in retrospect was carving up my attention. Deleting social media reconsolidated my focus. Now, I have a much stronger grip on my attention. My head is in my hand, so to speak.

As a consequence, I don’t procrastinate. Quite simply, I know less about the world and so have less temptations to jump out of my work and into something lighter. I’m no longer connected enough to even wonder about what I might be missing. And that means that I can’t be bothered anymore with being out of the know. I can’t fear missing out on what I don’t know is happening. In the end, that’s left me with less to think about, but only in a very superficial sense. I have, in truth, so much more to think about now, so much more space in my life to ponder what really matters. Sometimes that’s my next paper; other times, it’s a new kids craft for the next grandparent’s birthday.

All of that has made me far more productive than I once was. Just to give you a sense, I worked an average of 25 hours per week in the last year of my PhD, but was able in that short time to draft my entire dissertation in one Fall semester, revise it in the Spring, polish it in the Summer, and defend (without revisions, if I recall correctly) before the start of the next academic year—all with a newborn and a one-year-old in tow. I say this as someone without a track record of prolificacy. And I have no superhuman intellectual skills—just my powers of invisibility on social media, which anyone can attain.

Beyond efficiency, deleting social media also improved the quality of my work, principally by reducing the mental interruptions that were disturbing the natural progression of my research. In my fields, history and philosophy, it’s important to work iteratively, to let ideas marinate. Too much noise and you break up that process. Too much popping in and out and you get worn down, until there’s no strength left to dig all the way to the bottom of a problem or even to see the project to its end. I’ve learned that when I’m territorial about the kinds of information I let into my mind, my work tends to be deeper and more rigorous.

Still, the disconnection might look like too great a loss to some, even from an academic perspective. For instance, I know lots of scholars who use social media for quasi-academic purposes; to liaise with other researchers, for example. I never used social media for these reasons and so may be speaking out of ignorance here, but I suspect that the threat to mental peace and productivity is all the same. Unless the only things coming into one’s feed fall within their research area, I see no difference between academic and non-academic content. Both take up mental space. Actually, academic content can be even more difficult to resist. Its intellectual nature gives it a guise of relevance, however tangential it may be (if even that) to what we actually study.

On a related point, some scholars use social media to promote their work, and so may be inclined to retain it for that purpose. Perhaps they are onto something here, since journals have started keeping track of Almetric data. In that case, the question then becomes whether social media is impactful enough to warrant its side effects. Personally, I was no longer willing to run the risk. Or, put more positively, I was reposing too comfortably to chance more disturbance.

I instead built my own website and left it to my institutions’ communications teams to circulate. For those who might be interested in this option, the cheapest way to do it is to buy a GoDaddy domain for $12 annually (USD—it’s a bit more in other countries) and connect it to a free Google Site. If you’d still like to reach people with announcements about your latest work, you can add a free listserv sign up sheet to your website using a program called Brevo. I made a guide here to save you the hassle of hunting down the links for this process.

The News

I used to think that it was important for everyone, but especially academics, to keep up with current affairs. I no longer hold that position, at least for most kinds of scholars. Today's news cycle moves faster than does most people's need to know about it, suggesting that frequent news consumption is superfluous in most cases. I suspect this has been true for quite a while, actually. Nearly a century ago, a worry of this sort was already in the minds of scholars like A.G. Sertillanges. He was writing in the 1940s—a much slower period by our standards—and even then was led to conclude that consuming the news on more than a weekly basis was deleterious to most academic work.

I tried sticking to Sertillanges’ weekly recommendation, but it didn’t go well. For one, I have too much Irish in me to find the middle that easily. So, I ultimately had to swing to the other extreme and fully cut all of the news out. In hindsight, I’m grateful I did. The distance has given me more clarity about the utility of the news to my life, which isn’t much; I’ve learned I can pick up events of consequence through osmosis. For a time, I requested weekly updates from non-academics I know who keep up on current affairs, but even this has proved duplicative and unnecessary.

All of this has been excellent for my focus. Cutting the news multiplied the mental peace I received when I deleted my social media, while also maintaining my emotional equilibrium. Unlike social media, the information overload of the news comes with the added danger that every bit of it is made to feel urgent and important; it’s difficult, at least for me, not to get whipped up on a regular basis. You can’t realize how taxing that is until you go without it for some time.

Cell Phones, Or At Least Notifications

I initially gave up my cell phone in a bid to resist the temptation of the news and other internet rabbit holes to which I was prone. I replaced it with a cheap landline and experienced more silence than I have since leaving home for college, the last time in my life that was largely internet-free. As when I deleted social media, there was a certain winnowing of my social life. Nobody contacted me unless they felt comfortable picking up the phone, showing up at my door, or shooting me an email. This marshaled in a transition period of social adjustment, which was a little lonely at first. But once my friends and I transitioned away from texting, our friendships were stronger for it. Speaking on the phone or sharing long-form emails were all improvements on quick and brief messages, as far as I could tell. It made our exchanges deeper, although less frequent—but that was more compatible with my family life anyways.

Unfortunately, this time was short-lived. Although I would’ve loved to keep things as they were, my postdoc involves a significant commute, so my navigational needs brought me back to the cell—to my husband’s cell, which he graciously lets me share. And that is where I remain. I don’t like the arrangement and dream of returning to the landline. Actually, I’ve made numerous attempts to do so, in the course of which I learned that there are things you have to ask yourself first, such as the following:

• Do you have the time/ability to replace all texts with phone calls, or at least to replace all texts with emails accessible via your computer?

• Do you have the geographic stability to go without navigation (as far as I can tell online, there aren’t any GPS systems that are independent of cellphone data usage).

• Can you transition to a paper calendar without loss of functionality?

• Are there any cell phone apps that you need for academic purposes?

• Do you work in different places regularly enough to need a cell to access services, academic (e.g., Duo Push notifications) or otherwise (e.g., double authentication for online banking)?

Having said all that, perhaps the most productive approach is not to forego all the conveniences of a phone, but to simply turn off its notifications when working or customize the ‘do not disturb’ features so that high-priority items can get through. I have done this on my computer with great success. When I’m working, I turn my notifications off and check my inbox during breaks. It’s amazingly useful. No longer does the ping of a new email interrupt my flow with an anxious invitation to check my inbox. No longer can I accept this invitation that I never receive. No longer am I derailed by what I used to find when I would give the ping a yes.

Conclusion

All in all, I am freer and more productive for having abandoned select technologies. I say ‘select’ because I am very much in favor of other technologies for productivity, some of which I shared here. That’s why I consider my experiment an exercise in only ‘semi-luddism.’

While this experiment proved a boon for my work life, the measures are rather extreme and probably not necessary. I know many fine scholars with families—even large ones—who are on every social media platform and news outlet. I can only assume they are more moderate with their media consumption than I, or else are just better at thinking with a busy brain.

Even so, I think semi-luddism is insightful for anyone to attempt. How much we find ourselves hankering for these technologies when we give them up is a good litmus test for the concentration of our mental energy in these platforms. Periods away from media and devices also provide enough distance for a clear reading of their utility to our work-life balance. From there, we can imagine new ways to make these technologies work more robustly for our betterment.

I’m no acolyte of technology writ large. Heck, I don’t even own my own cell phone and am currently writing a manuscript about the intellectual woes of Microsoft Word. Having said that, I cannot deny the power and utility of some technologies. In this post, I’ll tell you which ones I have in mind exactly and why I think they’re worth taking the time to pick up.

Storage, Notetaking, & Citation Software

By a long shot, the tool that has saved me the most time and energy is notetaking/citation software. These days, there are many on the market, a useful comparison of which can be found here. I confess that as far as comparisons go, I have only listened to presentations on the subject, without test-running all the options myself. When I was making my transition from Microsoft folders to a notetaking program, I decided in a rather helter-skelter fashion on Zotero. Nevertheless, I’ve been more than pleased with the program. In fact, I don’t think it’s really possible to appreciate the power of this technology until you see it in action. Even so, allow me to summarize my favorite of its features.

Citation

• CITING: When you download Zotero, it automatically adds a new button to your Microsoft Word processor, allowing you to search for sources in Zotero and cite them automatically, as in the first image below. It’s easy to change citation styles, too—say, for a rejected manuscript you’re keen on submitting elsewhere. All you have to do is select the ‘Document Preferences’ button in the top left hand corner, per the second picture.

• CREATING BIBLIOGRAPHIES: Perhaps most impressive of all, with the click of the “Add/Edit Bibliography” button (also pictured above) Zotero can automatically generate a bibliography from the sources you've cited in-text.

• CREATING SYLLABI: Relatedly, you can export all the sources in a folder by highlighting (Ctrl+A) and copying (Ctrl+Shift+C) them all. Paste them in a Word doc (Ctrl+V) and voila! Now you have the meat and potatoes of a syllabus in one second flat.

Notetaking and Storage

• OBTAINING NEW TEXTS: To download new literature, Zotero comes with this connector that can be added to your web browser (for example, see the icon circled in red below). With a click of this button, it will save your reading and all of its bibliographical information, which it takes down pretty accurately in my experience.

• TAKING NOTES: Gone are the days of loose-leaf papers and marginalia miscellany. At long last, you can now keep everything you need in one spot, a Zotero library. Each record in it includes a PDF of your literature, its bibliographic information, tags, and notes you’ve taken—all of which can be organized into separate folders or shared across libraries for collaboration with other colleagues. You can also customize the interface of your library. Here’s mine:

• SEARCHING YOUR NOTES: All at once, you can perform word searches across your entire library, as well as in each folder. That includes all the records of all your readings and every note you have ever drafted. Very often, I can only recall a snippet of an interesting insight I read somewhere, that I know is in my notes but not which one. A quick search pulls all that information up and has saved me the trouble of finagling, googling, etc., to track down quotes, citations, and the like. You can also tag your notes to build these connections pre-emptively. Also, when you download texts, the publisher’s tags already come with it. For an example, the green circle below shows you how Joel Feinberg’s “The Moral Limits of the Criminal Law” automatically appears in my Zotero library, while the red circle highlights where to search for tags alone (as opposed to the “All Fields & Tags” search bar at the top of my library):

• TRACKING YOUR READING PROGRESS: On the subject of tags, you can right-click your tags to color-code them, which I have found incredibly useful as a tracking system for the sources that are unread, read, skimmed, excerpted, keyworded, and so on. This has proved especially handy when dealing with large volumes of literature across multiple projects. For example, below is a folder in my library, where you can see in the bottom left corner the meaning I have assigned to each color. The colors, in turn, appear as little squares beside the title of my items. In my library, every item without a color is presumed to be unread.

• SAVING AND SYNCRONIZING YOUR NOTES: Everything is saved locally on your device for use in offline environments. But once you go online, your entire library is automatically synchronized and periodically re-synchronized into Zotero's backup cloud. Never again need you fear the blue screen of death. What’s more, this is true across all of your devices. That includes smartphones, since Zotero has an app version as well. I have it downloaded on one of my husband’s phones that I borrow (see my post on semi-luddism for an explanation of this circuity). If I have a long car ride or some other menial activity to do, I send readings from Zotero to my audio-reading app to work while I’m on the fly. And now, more about reading apps!

Finding Literature in the First Place

It can be difficult to stay on top of the latest literature, but new technologies make the task more manageable. Several scholars use RSS feeds, such as Feedly, with reader apps like NetNewsWire. I myself am still working through the best approach, but so far I’ve set up alerts in Google Scholar attached to an email I set up just for academic work. Having a separate email protects the rest of my life from too much academic intrusion, while preserving my alerts across whatever institutional changes I may experience. By pulling scholarship based on keywords rather than discipline, I can be sure I’m getting a panoptic view of what scholars across the academy are discovering on my research topics.

Nevertheless, keeping a closer eye on research in one’s primary field is crucial. Journals often have email sign-ups for this purpose, but discipline-specific literature collection platforms might also exist in your field. In mine, for example, I have created a feed on Philosophy PaperBoy.

Reading & Editing

As just mentioned above, reading apps help you make mindless tasks more mindful. Just think of it: now you can justify exercising more by taking Dostoevsky on the treadmill! Actually, upon reflection, that’s probably not be the most enticing example. But you get the point.

In my experience, two things matter most if you want audio-reading to work for you. First, you must select the right kinds of things to read in this format. Not every scholarly text will fit that bill. As a philosopher and historian, I have really only found success audio-reading narratives: that includes prose fiction and some histories (not ones that require a lot of scrutiny of a book’s end matter). I would caution against attempting dense philosophy (with the exception of Nietzsche and others who are hardly intelligible half the time anyways). Also be sure to avoid literature with graphs/tables/charts, every detail of which the text reader will attempt to read to you.

Second, you must, must, must have a good text reader. Anything too robotic, or with sub-standard AI/OCR capacities, will either muddle the pronunciation of words or skip them altogether. In both cases, you’re setting yourself up to miss potentially vital information. It’s too taxing on your attention to monitor the author’s arguments and the performance of your text reader.

Of the programs I have tested, Voice Dream is the best. It’s $25 in the Apple store and worth every penny. It can read everything from books to PDFs to Word Docs to webpage HTMLs. The intonation is great, the accent options are plentiful, and the pronunciation is pretty good. Note, though, that for some texts, it mistakes ‘f’ for ‘s.’ So, ‘suffer’ will sometimes sound like ‘susser,’ for instance. It’s a bit annoying but not a huge deal once you catch on.

The latest version of Zotero also has a reading feature, which you can read about here:

As a quick aside, I have found audio-reading incredibly useful for late-stage editing. Instructors regularly advise their students to read their own work out loud before submitting it, but how often do we follow our advice ourselves? Sometimes, you can get too close to a manuscript to really read it freshly—especially when you’re nearing the end and can probably recite some sections by heart. To fix this issue, I change screens so that I’m not looking at my text and then feed one of my drafts into Voice Dream. Listening to my own writing in this way has helped me catch stylistic kinks, typos, and other errors that went unnoticed. When I come across one of these problems, I pause the reader, switch to my draft screen, make the edit, and then return to the reader.

Of course, one problem for Voice Dream is that many of the texts we want to listen to don’t exist digitally—at least not in formats that are legally downloadable. One way around this is Internet Archive. While you can download a lot of books as Zotero or Voice Dream-compatible PDFs/HTMLs at the bottom of the page on Internet Archive, not all of them have this feature; many can only be borrowed for repeated hour-long intervals. A lot of scholars know this already. But what they might not know is that Internet Archive can read you these texts. Simply click the headphones icon in the platform’s bottom right-hand corner (see circled image below). Do note that the pronunciation and speed-control are sometimes wanting.

Time Management

I have tried many approaches to staying on top of tasks and deadlines. For a while, I was doing a Word Doc with a legend, which worked well during my PhD. Here’s what that looked like, which I supplemented with a daily list of tasks originally kept on Microsoft Whiteboard and then on Sticky Notes (an example of which you can find below, which belongs to my timeline for my postdoc):

For grad students, I think this system is acceptable. But it’s not sustainable. When I transitioned to my first research-oriented postdoc, my system started to breakdown. I started off well, creating a legend that corresponded to the titles of my Word Folders where the Word Docs for each publication were located. But since I was no longer anchored to primarily one project, like a dissertation, things got a lot hairier until they were eventually unworkable:

From there, I drifted in a sea (or rather, a storm) of confusion, bouncing between emails to myself and various attempts at imitating scholars I interviewed for A-KID-EMIA or in private. I tried paper lists and agendas (regularly lost, scribbled on by children, or too far away in the moment for me to get all the tasks onto them before forgetting); Excel sheets (hard to know where to begin in terms of structuring it, and unwieldly besides); Word Doc folders (too unspecific); Google Docs (similar to my Word Doc timelines but with the advantage of virtual accessibility, yet still limited in all the other ways); Calendly (too limited to events); project management apps like Trello and Asana (too much upfront user investment for platforms not clearly suited to academic needs).

By the time I started trying my hand at teaching as an Instructor of Record, I knew I needed to find a better solution. It was about this time that I gave the app Todoist a serious shake. Onboarding was very easy: you simply word vomit all your tasks into one place, the “Inbox,” and then organize them as you see fit. I keep a section for free floating tasks, which I call “Tasks,” another for time-specific things called “Events,” and another for yearly birthdays. You can organize how they appear; for this section, I chose boards, so that I simply swipe left or right to move between my three boards, like so:

As you can see, most of my “Tasks” are family-related. Creating a system that integrates my personal life with my professional one has proven to be a huge relief. In my brain, these domains are integrated; so it never really made sense to disaggregate them on paper. Needless to say, it’s been a huge relief to finally have all those tasks compiled somewhere that will notify me of the time-sensitive ones.

I keep my academic stuff in a separate section. On the left-side panel you can see a tab called “My Projects.” In the section under here called “Work,” I keep all my daily academic duties, which I was previously entering into Sticky Notes or Whiteboard. I organize these not as boards, but as lists, which accord with each of my work days. I also keep an unorganized section for tasks I eventually need to categorize:

You can easily drag tasks to another day if you haven’t completed them by the end of your work day. When I come to the end of a week, I try to populate the upcoming week.

As it happens, I am expecting a child next week, and so you can see by “Tuesday” that I am tapering things down! That’s what my other Project, “2026 Publication Plan,” comes in. This is where the tasks from my Word Doc timelines now go. Like my timelines, the titles of these projects correspond to my Word Doc Folders where the files for these projects are located. These, too, are organized by lists with discrete monthly goals to help keep my publications on schedule. You can nest as many tasks under each other as you wish.

I’m fairly new to this app, so I’m sure there are more hacks to maximize its utility, such as the “Filters & Labels” function which I have found so useful in Zotero. Even so, I have been surprised at how much this app has improved my quality of life. Todoist automatically syncs my desktop app with the one on my family cellphone, so that I can always put a task to virtual paper before it falls out of my head. I can customize notifications as needed, import my institution’s calendars, and other nifty integrations. All in all, this app has consolidated the cacophony of stream-of-consciousness responsibilities, providing a peace of mind I have not been able to secure before in spite of all my efforts.

Conclusion

I hope this detailed run-through has piqued enough curiosity for you to consider giving these tools a try. I cannot reiterate enough just how useful they’ve been to me. In combination with other major changes, these tools have helped me just about double my productivity. And that means double the time to spend with my kiddos.