Nursing faculty are clinicians at heart. We were trained to notice suffering and respond to it. That instinct doesn’t switch off when we trade a stethoscope for a syllabus. It just gets pointed at a new population, often without the structures that made it sustainable in practice: shift ends, handoffs, a team down the hall. That’s how compassion fatigue settles in.

When I accepted my first faculty position, I thought I understood the job: I would teach. Then I received my first workload assignment. There was something about credit hours, clinical ratios, and committee meetings, and I stared at it the way a new grad stares at a 12-lead EKG for the first time. I recognized the words, but not in those particular combinations. Nobody explains faculty workload to clinicians before they make the jump.

Maybe your clinical practice is required for accreditation or certification, maybe your institution expects it, or maybe you love patient care too much to give it up. The reason doesn't change the reality that each role has its own pace, its own demands, and its own kind of mental load, and nobody hands you a transition plan for moving between them.

Academic meetings are where a huge amount of institutional work happens, but clinician-turned-educators often walk into this world without any preparation for it.

If you've ever caught yourself grading discussion posts while only half-reading them, you're not a bad teacher. You're likely a busy one and feeling a little trapped working within a format that is often built for compliance instead of thinking. The good news is that discussion boards can actually do what they're supposed to do without eating your grading time or turning into a box-checking exercise for anyone involved.

As fall semester ramps up and planning for next year creeps onto the calendar, I want to talk about a skill that gets far less attention in faculty development than time management or productivity hacks: the skill of doing less, on purpose. At the very least, I hope this post provides a new point of view you may not have considered. Maybe it will give you some permission to explore the idea that doing less can still be enough.

A 2022 article published in Medical Education Online titled "When Students' Words Hurt: 12 Tips for Helping Faculty Receive and Respond Constructively to Student Evaluations of Teaching" by Cornes and colleagues offers evidence-based guidance for exactly this moment. I'm breaking down their key recommendations here through the lens of NP faculty life, because this research is too good not to keep sharing.