Once a month, I’ll be sharing a curated collection of ideas I keep returning to: concepts that are surfacing in my work, questions I’m wrestling with, patterns I’m noticing. These posts are my way of thinking out loud and sparking some interesting conversations along the way.
This series is part of an ongoing experiment in exploring how to most meaningfully share what I know while connecting with others who care about similar ideas. (See also: my weekly office hours.)
This post is the third instalment in the series; you can also read the previous posts for March and February.
1) Keep the line open.
One thing I’ve learned, over the course of my career, is that you never know when someone from your professional past will later come to play a role in your professional present. And while you have no control over the circumstances that lead to a potential reconnection down the line, you do have control over how you treat people during those periods when you’re actively a part of each other’s lives.
I’ve found this to be especially important to keep in mind during the periods that are at the end of whatever time you happened to have together. Two recent examples…
Continue reading here.
——
2) Gift your best time to yourself.
There’s a well-known concept in personal finance known as the ‘pay yourself first’ principle.
What this principle suggests is that, whenever you receive a paycheque, the first thing you should do with that money — before you pay any bills, before you buy any shiny new thing — is to pay yourself first. As opposed to paying yourself last, by only saving whatever is left over after everything else has been paid for, paying yourself first means immediately setting that money aside for future you in a savings account.
I don’t pretend to be a personal finance expert, but as someone who’s currently completing her fourth academic degree I do know a bit about time management. The reason I share the above example is because…
Continue reading here.
——
Recommended reading
- “Bluesky’s quest to build nontoxic social media,” by Kyle Chayka
- “My father tries to teach me his map of Chicago,” by Maggie Andersen
- “What do you remember?,” by Joshua Rothman
- Care and feeding, by Laurie Woolever
——
Thanks for being here. 👋 If you enjoyed reading this post, stay tuned for the next instalment in this series at the end of May.
Jana M. Perkins is a computational social scientist. An award-winning scholar, her research has been federally funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada since 2019. She is the founder of Women of Letters, a longform interview series celebrating women’s paths to professional success. Together with Miranda Dunham-Hickman, she is co-authoring a book that will be published by Routledge.
To learn more about Perkins and her latest work, visit janajm.com or follow her on Bluesky.