Burn-out and suicide rates among physicians and scientists in academic medicine are at an all-time high and jeopardize the future of our entire profession. In the last 4 years alone, burn-out rates among physicians have increased by 25%. In a recent 2017 Medscape publication, burn-out rates in Critical Care physicians ranked in 9th place and Pediatricians ranked 13th among 27 subspecialties. Astonishingly, over 50% of the participants reported burn-out symptoms, with clear race and gender disparities. While men generally report higher burn-out rates than women, it is important to emphasize that response rates from women in these surveys were notoriously low and may not represent the complete picture. These numbers are even more dismal for tenured academic faculty at research-extensive universities. In this group, emotional exhaustion (i.e. high burn-out) is reported at 35% with a clear association with age and lower burn-out levels in the older tenured faculty. While no gender or racial/ethnic differences were found in this particular group, higher levels of burn-out were identified in individuals with financial responsibilities beyond a spouse and child. While it is comforting to note the increasing public interest and research activities in this field, successful approaches to ameliorate the burden and consequences of physician burn-out are still inadequately developed. Academic centers increasingly offer some type of work-life balance program to their employees but, unfortunately, these programs are frequently adopted from corporate business models and remain largely ineffective in the academic environment. It should be evident to most administrators that the stressors of academic clinicians and scientists substantially differ from those of corporate employees. Based on these observations and over 75 years of combined experience in academic medicine amongst the three editors of this Research Topic, we collected 26 manuscripts from 22 authors at different career stages and different genders, ethnicities, marital status and subspecialties to identify and stratify common and specific stressors and therapeutic approaches to ameliorate burn-out and achieve work-life balance in academic medicine. We are confident that each reader will identify with at least one, if not several, of the authors’ opinions, experiences and approaches to attain greater work-life balance and thereby avoid the consequences of burn-out in modern academic medicine.

This new edition of a popular guide to improving your mental agility will help you improve your performance at work and sharpen your thinking skills in all areas. Based on the latest scientific findings and including up-to-date coverage of how meditative skills such as mindfulness can enhance your brain power, this book gives you everything you need to get a mental edge. It challenges you to think on your feet with hundreds of puzzles, quizzes and problem-solving games, while giving you lifestyle advice on diet, exercise and lifestyle choices. Showing you how to put your new, more powerful brain to the test at work, home and play, this is a smart guide for any smart professional who wants to be brighter, quicker and in the lead at all times.

Train your brain to be quicker, fitter and brighter than it's ever been! This book gives you everything you need to get a mental edge, featuring hundreds of puzzles, quizzes and problem-solving games. It also gives you some great advice on how to maximise your mental agility through diet, exercise and the right lifestyle choices, as well as showing you how to put your new, more powerful brain to the test at work, home and play. NOT GOT MUCH TIME? One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started. AUTHOR INSIGHTS Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the authors' many years of experience. TEST YOURSELF Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress. EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGE Extra online articles at www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of how to train your brain. FIVE THINGS TO REMEMBER Quick refreshers to help you remember the key facts. TRY THIS Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.

Every organization is like a delicate ecosystem. It needs to be nurtured with care and concern just as a natural ecosystem is ecologically nurtured. For this, organizational behavior is the instrument. Organizational behavior is the study of human behavior in organizational settings including the interface of human beings among themselves, the interface of human beings with their and other external organizations, and the behavior of organizations with respect to individuals and other organizations. Individual behavior is an integral part of organizational behavior. As individuals and organizations devote the needed attention to the subject, the challenging issue of work–life balance is resolved. This major work on organizational behavior, with its ninety chapters, is divided into fifteen sections, each of which deals with a specific theme relating to factors impacting and is impacted by organizational behavior. This book provides multiple constructs that facilitate optimal work–life balance. This book will serve as a companion text for students and faculty specializing in organizational behavior and general management. Academicians, industry managers, and leaders as well as administrators and policy makers will find this book a useful thought-primer and guide for effective organizational management. More importantly, the several propositions made in the book would help individuals and institutions achieve competitive strength, emotional stability, and self-actualization through optimal work–life balance.

This essay sheds light on what is a work life balance, explicates how to attain a work life balance, demystifies the benefits of attaining a work life balance, and reveals the problems with not having a work life balance. Work life balance is a term that delineates a lifestyle in which you are able to minimize work-related stress and avail yourself of a desirable lifestyle in which you can maintain your health and well-being while working a real private sector job based on voluntary demand. A work life balance does not involve expending an equal amount of time on both work-related activities and leisure activities. A work life balance is able to afford you the opportunity to follow health optimization measures for a prolonged period of time everyday if you so choose to do so. Once you have attained a work life balance, working is deprioritized. Once you have attained a work life balance, living your life becomes prioritized so that you can at the very least maintain your health and well-being if you choose to do so. It can be cumbersome to attain a real private sector job based on voluntary demand that furnishes you with the opportunity to avail yourself of a work life balance, especially since most real private sector employers require their employees to work for long hours every shift and are unwilling to make a dispensation regarding their employee scheduling to minimize the amount of time that their employees earmark into working real private sector jobs based on voluntary demand. If you are keen on embracing following health optimization measures for a prolonged period of time everyday, then you will however need to have a substantial amount of time everyday at your disposal to be able to allocate as you deem fit. Retaining a real private sector employee job based on voluntary demand often requires you to forfeit purview over most of your waken hours to be able to retain the real private sector employee job based on voluntary demand. If you cannot be highly accommodating to a real private sector employer’s employee scheduling desires, then you will be poised to be ousted from the company that you work for as an employee, thereby culminating in you being discharged from your real private sector employee job based on voluntary demand. Working a real private sector employee job based on voluntary demand is a brobdingnagian inhibitor to attaining a work life balance in contexts in which it requires you to forfeit purview over most of your waken hours to be able to retain the real private sector employee job based on voluntary demand and does not provide any latitude for flexibility with the employee scheduling. Even though attaining a work life balance can be ineffably beneficent to you since it can afford you with the opportunity to be able to follow health optimization measures for a prolonged period of time everyday if you so choose to do so, most real private sector employers lamentably do not care about the overall health nor well-being of their employees and want their employees to work long hours every shift even though doing so dispossesses them of their sacrosanct time that they need to have purview over to be able to afford to pursue embracing following health optimization measures for a prolonged period of time everyday. Most real private sector employers are keen on maximizing the daily workload assigned to their employees and are eager to maximize the amount of hours that their employees work every week. Most real private sector employers are keen on minimizing the compensation provided to employees for their hard work, time, efforts, and mental bandwidth that they expended to fulfill their job responsibilities. Lamentably, most real private sector employee jobs based on voluntary demand are often deemed to be dead end, highly time consuming, debilitating, minimum wage, unfulfilling, harrowing, distressful, brutally wretched, ineffably agonizing jobs that not only drain almost all of the employee’s sacrosanct time, but also do not pay anything close to 1/4 of a subsistence wage for affording housing. Most real private sector employers are keen on not offering any benefits nor pension to their employees in spite of how much hard work, time, efforts, and mental bandwidth that they expended fulfilling their job responsibilities. The only way to get out of poverty is to have your recurring revenue streams generate enough revenue to offset your recurring expenses.

Stories of Our Living Ephemera recovers the history of the Cherokee National Seminaries from scattered archives and colonized research practices by critically weaving together pedagogy and archival artifacts with Cherokee traditional stories and Indigenous worldviews. This unique text adds these voices to writing studies history and presents these stories as models of active rhetorical practices of assimilation resistance in colonized spaces. Emily Legg turns to the Cherokee medicine wheel and cardinal directions as a Cherokee rhetorical discipline of knowledge making in the archives, an embodied and material practice that steers knowledge through the four cardinal directions around all relations. Going beyond historiography, Legg delineates educational practices that are intertwined with multiple strands of traditional Cherokee stories that privilege Indigenous and matriarchal theoretical lenses. Stories of Our Living Ephemera synthesizes the connections between contemporary and nineteenth-century academic experiences to articulate the ways that colonial institutions and research can be Indigenized by centering Native American sovereignty. By undoing the erasure of Cherokee literacy and educational practices, Stories of Our Living Ephemera celebrates the importance of storytelling, especially for those who are learning about Indigenous histories and rhetorics. This book is of cultural importance and value to academics interested in composition and pedagogy, the Cherokee Nation, and a general audience seeking to learn about Indigenous rhetorical devices and Cherokee history.

This book is a longitudinal life history of the lives and work of primary school principals in Ireland. It provides a unique opportunity to peer inside the realities of leading schools in changing times. In a system that until recently did not prepare principals for the onerous roles and responsibilities, a small system with limited mobility, inter-personal relationships emerge as critical, frequently privileged over professional relationships. Consequently, principals struggle to bring about change, to build trust in order to cultivate a transformative leadership agenda, while several aspects of systemic structures and processes emerge as constraints on leadership capacity building. In the absence of comprehensive leadership portfolio development, classroom teachers, catapulted into the principal’s office, tend to be cautious and careful in ways that tend to perpetuate the status quo while putting a premium on the exercise of soft power and an over-reliance on the good will of colleagues. Several of the ‘leadership lessons’ that emerge from this in-depth analysis concur with an increasing international consensus that due to complexity and increasingly performative policy demands, learning about leadership for all is an absolute necessity. However, care must be taken to avoid overly scripted programmes. Critical to the cultivation of a professionally responsible leadership disposition, rather than capitulation to ‘technologies of control,’ is professional renewal cultivated through adequate attention to the Zone of Proximal Distance.

As we begin the twenty-first century, UK employees work the longest hours in Europe. Workplace stress and home responsibilities are among the top five causes of absence from work. Yet work-life balance has emerged as a key concern for employers, policy makers and the media. This edited volume contains findings from 14 research projects within the ESRC's Future of Work Programme. The research examines the notion of employment flexibility and the effects of gender and care responsibilities on work and work performance. Conflicting needs of employers and employees and the gender divisions in work and family life call into question the feasibility of achieving the Government's aim of work-life balance for everyone.

Intimate Ephemera is the first major study of autobiographical writing produced and consumed in a youth subculture. Investigating the uses of the zine form for life writing, it examines the recurrent themes in texts circulating in Australian zine culture, including depression, consumerism, popular culture and political identity. Intimate Ephemera also examines zine culture as a unique community of life writing and reading, where handmade texts circulate in an economy of gifting and exchange utilising the postal system. The book analyses the material diversity of zines as handmade objects, examining the use of the photocopier and craft techniques in these limited edition publications, bringing a focus to the role of the text-object in communicating personal experience.

This book provides a systematic overview on issues and challenges related to work identity and identification at work in the ‘new’ South African workplace. It shares results and measures of a work identity research project that was conducted in a variety of modern South African workplaces. It looks at the concept of work identity in the light of a keen and growing interest in why people are becoming attached to, involved in, engaged with, or committed to their work. Still a relatively unexplored concept, built on the foundations of different identity theory streams, the concept of work identity provides a fundamental reconsideration of explaining engaging behaviours at work. Against the backdrop of a changing political and economic landscape and the impact these radical changes had on the South African workplace, the main research question of the project was the South African employees’ question ‘Who am I at work?’. In search of the answer to that question, the book explores the impact of South African employees’ life spheres and life roles on their choice of work-related identification foci. It further explores how identity work tactics and strategies are being used to develop and define their own work identities, resulting in the conceptualisation and development of a work-based identity measure.