Post Academic

If you’re a regular reader, you know I’m obsessed with checklists, and a good job-application checklist might help save your sanity as you go on the academic job hunt. So I went on a hunt for a checklist-generating program. So I typed “checklist generator” into Google, and voila! There was printablechecklist.org.

If you want a paper checklist, look no further than printablechecklist.org, created by Adam Pash at Lifehacker. It’s faster to print it out than to hand-write the checklist, and a sign-in isn’t required.

Sure, creating a checklist and drawing little boxes on a piece of paper or buying a checkbox notepad is easy. But the easier it is to make a checklist, the more likely it is that you’ll get in the habit of making them.

A little fun fact–I ran a search for “checklist” and “academia,” along with “checklist” and “professor,” wondering how academics handled checklists. Here are two that might help a few of you, even though school has already started:

Your 10-Point Checklist Before Sending Off That Manuscript (by a biology prof, but there’s no reason you can’t modify it for a humanities publication) I’m a fan of “Replace long words with short words.”
Creating a Checklist for the Semester (from ProfHacker) This one reminds you to get your office snacks now because you’ll be sad if you don’t.

… and for aspiring Post Academics, I have a special one on career changing:

Checklist for Career Change This article is a little old, but it does help you get in the mental and physical shape needed to make a move.

Alas, I didn’t see as many checklists as I hoped. Have any of you used checklists to prepare for your job applications?