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Dan Sullivan (The Strategic Coach) teaches us about three types of days: Focus day:  A day when 65-85 percent of your time is spent during your work day doing activities that generate income. Buffer day:  This is a day where the majority of your time is spent handling the "behind the scenes" or administrative functions necessary to support your income-generating activities. Free day:  This is a full 24-hour period during which you do NO work or work-related activities, including checking voice mail or email.

1. In order to plan an activity, I consciously think about WHY I am doing it. Here are some questions that I ask myself: Is this activity moving me towards or away from my core goals for the year? Will this activity generate income? Is this activity a necessary part of supporting my core activities? If this is a support activity, is it something I can delegate to someone else so I can have more free or focus time?

But there is a fundamental problem here that needs to be addressed. Look at this issue from the other side. A significant number of articles, including many published in small circulation periodicals, are never cited by anyone. Think, too, of the conferences papers that fail to attract meaningful audiences, the journals that have tiny circulations and very small readerships, and the fact that most academic books are published in press runs of under 1,000 copies, despite the growth in the number of academics and university and college libraries. Put bluntly, we are researching without having an impact, speaking without being heard and writing without being read. Furthermore, our tenure and promotion procedures reward publication more than they do awareness of the field, thus pushing up conference attendance, and journal and book submissions.

We have collectively created the equivalent of an academic monsoon over the past three decades, with no change in the forecast for the coming years. Without a major reconsideration of how we share and use information, how we keep up with the field, and how we recognize academic accomplishment, we will continue to add to the floodwaters, all the while spending less attention on whether or not anyone reads our work, listens to our presentations, or appreciates our professional contributions. Academe 2.0 offers tools to build more effective dikes and even to regulate the flow. But we need to realize that the lakes at the end of the bloated academic rivers – our faculty, researchers and students – have finite capacity, in terms of time and ability to assimilate information. Controlling the scholarly input is crucial to ensuring that we actually learn from and about each other, and ensuring that our academic work truly makes a difference.