I’ve been precariously employed in academia for enough time that it has rewired my brain – at least the areas to do with scholarship. I now have the attention span of a gnat, the ability to dive as deep into a particular subject area as I do into a puddle, and my ‘research’, when I get a chance to do it, is also superficial and shallow only as I have only time and energy to skim the surface of anything: read an abstract, the first page and the conclusion of any paper, scan the subheadings of a research report, press Cntl+F on a PDF looking for particular keywords that I can stick into my latest briefing paper. On the plus side, my speed reading has tremendously improved as has my “That’ll have to do” approach to academic work.