The Drawer

Where Do You Keep Your Stash?

Life in the tenure track is prone to distraction. Looming conference submission deadlines interrupt a steady flow of assignment creating and grading. Faculty search committee obligations demand that you postpone that second data analysis. Juggling research, teaching, and service can feel like an unending series of minor disruptions to what-you’d-planned-to-do.

That’s why we MUST place every “thank you”—from students, committee chairs, conference organizers, whomever—in a SAFE place.

Accumulating “atta-girls” in a single repository, whether electronic or physical, helps us first recall, and then claim in our professional narrative, all that we have contributed to our academic institutions.

So pause for a moment.  What emails of gratitude did you just delete or ignore, simply because they mercifully didn’t create a number-next for your to-do list or require a response? Where COULD you have placed them, so you could find them at times of annual review or dossier preparation?

Everybody needs a stash.  Where do you keep yours?