Simo Hosio

The worst part of academic life isn't the workload. It's the guilt you carry when you're NOT working. Sunday afternoon with friends? Sure but you're thinking about that grant proposal. A nice evening walk for no reason, and boom just like that you're just inventing new todo items on the go. Holidau...but you packed your laptop "just in case." Anyone? Sound familiar? So what's really happening? That guilt doesn't come from working too little. That guilt springs from not knowing what's "just enough" right now. So in practice: When you don't have a plan, everything feels urgent. When everything feels urgent, you will never truly rest. The most effective self-care practice I've found in academia? A clear, written-down plan for what "done" looks like this week. Or even tomorrow. A decision: "These 3 things. By Friday. Everything else can be done badly, or they can wait." When you know what you're doing and when, suddenly the guilt loses its power. You can actually sit on that couch and feel nothing but the couch. Comfy? You should give it a try. Easiest way to get started: edgeacademia.com/powertrio/

@itmeded @the_grafixmedic i think it's more like no actual academic task can be shortened that much

@the_grafixmedic This is why #AI is slow to catch on in #academia. When we run AI workshops and show academics how AI turns their 2-hour task into 20 minutes, a common response is: "Wow...., but, this feels like cheating." What?? No, it's called "working smarter." Give yourself a break!

Academic stress is so normalized that basic rest feels like laziness.

This week @ Augmented Humans in Okinawa, Japan. Complete pattern breaker. Hard to keep up with emails and other plans. But very much needed: in-person conferences are very much what makes academia worth it. Great talks, great food, friends and, in this particular case, wonderful nature too! Boom. Academic life is good.

Academia isn't what the job description says! Many ways much more chaotic. And far more human. People make mistakes, behave badly, and come with all the quirks like... you know, everywhere else? People are also wonderful, just like everywhere else. Work is tough, though. In a unique way. Between emails, grant madness, and research group coordination, the day fragments into dozens of micro-tasks. Each one drains a bit of willpower. Two things stand out: systems thinking in the scale of YOU. One person. And then open-mindedness to try out new stuff to see how you can invite a bit more sanity to your days. You can't rely on motivation alone when you're juggling research, teaching, mentoring, and the endless rejects and revisions that come with everything you do. But it's all very much worth the while. We build our own prisons, in most cases. It's not a top-down thing. Academic life is good: - When a PhD student has a breakthrough. - When research findings might actually help people. - When teaching clicks and you see the life in the lecture room Oh, and, of course, when you get to meet some excellent old friends at a conference in Okinawa, like next week in Augmented Humans 2026... --- btway you might want to join simohosio.com/join

Write down just one (even small) win every day for 7 days. Watch what happens to your anxiety We're so often comparing to unachieved future goals that we forget...how far we've come. Not a simple thing to remember to celebrate that. But not exactl impossible either!

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Had a super interesting short exchange of thoughts yesterday. An AI-savvy postdoc can crank out 10 "meh" quality but still publishable papers now in a month. Easy. There's gonna be a bunch of people who become extremely hyper-productive and, as a consequence, stop collaborating with humans because humans are not available 24 hours a day and they're much slower than Claude Code. They make more mistakes than Claude Code too. Very, very mixed feelings about this, but personally I'll double down on human collaborations. Claude Code is not going to invite me to a proposal years from now. Claude Code won't celebrate the paper together with me when it gets accepted. Claude Code won't laugh at the reviews when the paper gets rejected. Win together, lose together.

@IanArawjo 9 times out of 10 nobody even complains about that with 1-7 (or more) scales so yeah "just do things" applies here too :D

Annual PSA: Yes, you *can* treat Likert data as continuous, especially if the scale is 7+. No, you don’t need to fit a CLMM. People studied this. Stats simulations show very close outcomes for anything beyond very small sample sizes.

@Dookmarriot @KateBMwriting But there is a power dynamic at play here that doesn’t work in favor of the sender AI generated one always loses

@KateBMwriting If you’re requiring a cover letter, then you deserve to get an AI-generated one.

I’m reviewing job applications and 90% of the cover letters are AI generated. They use identical phrases and have exactly the same structure and word count. Why do people do it?

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I cannot repeat this enough. 2-3 hours of focused work per day is the maximum you can humanely do. Demanding anything more from yourself is torture. The rest of the day, you will find a lot of stuff that you can do to help others. - Send emails - Sit in meetings - Build stuff - Enjoy outrageous amounts of iced coffee That is the only way to stay sane in a game where you have to produce a lot of thinking. Do not feel guilty if you can't do more than that, because 99% of us can't do more than that. The one tip I would say is just make sure you do it every day, consistently over a long period of time, and that is the way to win. Bigly.

@seanjwestwood I am openly exercising my rights to draw the line on where AI use is OK and where not, precisely because I feel the responsibility to train people for what's coming. Too easy to become a brainless robot with the current tooling.

Faculty raging against AI: are you just openly abdicating your responsibility to prepare students for what's coming? AI is the future. Your anger doesn't change that. It just means your students learn it from someone else--or don't learn it at all. Enrollments will respond.

@AkademiskC @mattbencole Truth hurts. But also liberates. The paper is dead.

@mattbencole I see that this tweet works on people's nerves. Especially academics. I wonder why.

This is a funny way of admitting that quantitative social scientists just churn out garbage that they themselves don’t want to write or read

@codyschneiderxx generator enjoyooooor here too

I just had Claude Code build me a Facebook ad generator that can make 100+ on-brand ad variations in minutes for $0. And I made a full Notion document guide for you. It includes: 1. How to use Claude to find the pain points and desired outcomes of your ICP 2. How to use these pain points and outcomes to write ad copy variations 3. How to build a Facebook ad template entirely with code (just like the ones you see) 4. How focus Claude Code’s design so the ad feels “on-brand” 5. How to export the Facebook ads as PNGs in a zip file 6. How to bulk upload them to a Facebook ad set 7. How to use an AI data analyst to track the success of these ads Everything above is just API calls and Claude Code doing the work for you. You just come up with the ideas and polish the outputs. Like and comment "generator" and I'll send the Notion document to you

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If you went to the supermarket for the first time in your life now, what would happen? All the colour and signal would overwhelm you. Academia will always have the good and the bad. Focus on the good. And your mind will be in a happier place.

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Ever stop to wonder how... little it really takes to make great progress, if you simply put in the work every day? And how hard it is to actually do it, every single day?#progress #academia #phd

@PhD_Genie Of course batman costume ✨💪

Should academics (profs, lecturers, PhDs teaching) have an official dress code? Is it field related?

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In my humble but always oh-so-correct opinion, this simple daily planning technique is a splendid form of academic self-care.