Life of E's

Student evaluations are a part of every faculty member’s life. Some consider them to be a positive part of the academic life and others dismiss them as a meaningless exercise (or even worse, as a detriment to good teaching). You might as well know that I come down on the side of student evaluations being [...]

Tags: positive, Professors, students, teachers, Teaching, tips, work

Perfectionism runs rampant through the professorial world. Let me acknowledge up front that I am perfectly familiar with this, having lived with it for 56 years at this point, but having learned a great deal in the last 25 about how to deal with it so that it’s not debilitating. Here are ten tips for [...]

How can you stay in the present (mentally) – or get to the present? Here are 5 strategies: Breathe. The idea is that you breathe in. Then you breathe out. This helps you to get centered – and somewhere I read that the space between breathing in and breathing out – that’s the present. So [...]

Tags: distractions, energy, focus, positive, Productivity, success, tips

Human beings love to achieve…to set goals and to reach those goals. It’s motivating. Use that to your advantage when you are cleaning, clearing, decluttering – and of course, destressing. Make a VOW to rid yourself of a certain amount, number, or percentage of your ‘stuff,’ whether your stuff is books, papers, files, cans, emails, [...]

Tags: clutter, distractions, focus, Productivity, stress, tips

If you teach at the college level (or any other institution for post-secondary education), your students are going to complete course evaluations at the end of the term. That is a given. And, I believe it is a worthwhile way to determine one aspect of how well a professor or instructor teaches. The point of [...]

What if you want to eat and snack in a healthy manner? Does that mean no more good stuff? And why should you care about this? Snacking at work can be one of the biggest productivity downfalls for three reasons: We DON’T eat at all – and then because we’re starving, we eat half the [...]

Tags: energy, Productivity, tips

Let us say that you have decided to close the door to negative people (figuratively, of course). What is tough about this decision is that sometimes the negative people work in our offices (or live in our homes or are related to us in some way). Deciding to “close the door” on the people who [...]

Tags: focus, positive, Productivity, success, tips

“Destiny is not a matter of chance, it is a matter of choice; it is not a thing to be waited for, it is a thing to be achieved.” – William Jennings Bryan In life, “A door must either be shut or open.” (Anonymous); I think that means we need to determine which doors we [...]

Tags: distractions, focus, positive, Productivity, success, tips

It is not just the big things that need to be eliminated in order to reduce stress. You may need to get rid of those extra Cool Whip tubs that fall out of your cabinet every time you open the drawer. You will be surprised by what is on this list. How about starting to [...]

Tags: clutter, distractions, focus, just whelmed, Productivity, stress, tips