🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️
Do You Ever Sleep??? 😴
I periodically get variants of this question: “When do you sleep?”, “Do you ever sleep”, and the more constructive, “how the heck do you manage your time?”
In today’s #HackingAcademia video, I cover some key concepts and my experiences with the whole, “how many hours do you work” topic.
Specifically:
⌛ the difficulty in accurately estimating how many hours you work, with understimation and overestimation rampant, further confounded by the blurry boundaries for many researchers between “work” and what they are passionate about in their personal lives
⌛ the fetishization of overworking and grind culture, and the tendency for this to creep into accurate and objective assessments of how hard people work in research and academic careers
⌛ the insidious nature of how work can creep into days off, a call here, an impromptu zoom meeting there, and how that can result in underestimation
⌛ coming to grips with the reality that you will be outworked by many: work smart, not hard, is good advice, and many work hard but ineffectively. That said, there are lots of people who are working both smart AND incredibly hard. Having the resolve to accept the differences in opportunity because of deliberate life choices to not work that hard is key.
⌛ my work hours – often relatively normal but bursty around deadlines and horrendous when doing work travel
⌛ the aftermath: a 40 hour week of one type of work can leave you refreshed and ready for fun and family: a 40 hour week of a different type of emotionally and personally draining work can leave you with plenty of “spare” hours but drained 🥱
⌛ my situation – no surprises: work and lean heavily on amazing teams and collaborators, heavily leverage and lean on your “superpowers” – those few skills where you’re very very fast
⌛ skill hacks: capped time and energy budgets for activities, and have the discipline to keep to that budget regardless, and accurate, non-optimistic *or* pessimistic time estimation and subsequent planning and prioritisation
🛡️ PROTECT your time and diary from non-time-effective tasks as much as possible: these are tasks where you are required to put in a fixed amount of time rather than achieve an outcome. This gets increasingly difficult to do the more senior you become – a large chunk of your week will unavoidably involve fairly fixed-time commitments. It’s also impossible to do with fixed time commitment activities like teaching and certain type of committee type roles, just to name two examples.
🤔 how many hours you work and how hard you work is, at least theoretically for most people, at least partly up to you – your ambition, your risk appetite, your life commitments, your need / interest for a life outside of work, and also your ability or willingness to face the consequences like getting sacked in the extreme example (and see my other HA videos about perceived consequences in my Breaking the “I Have To” episode). What is important in my opinion is simply taking the time to be consciously aware of how hard you’re working, and checking in occasionally that it matches your intentions (rather than something you’ve just slipped into doing by default).
#careers #worklifebalance #work #hours #working #jobs #academia #research #timemanagement
Full Video Notes
I often get asked variants of the question, when do you sleep? Do you ever sleep? And more constructively, how do you manage your time? How do you get everything done?
Of course, I am not the only one getting asked these questions. Typically, you will see this being joked about with anyone who appears, at least superficially, to be very busy, with the impression that they never sleep.
In today’s Hacking Academia video, I wanted to cover two key aspects of this. First, the whole deal with workload, hours worked, work-life so-called balance in academia and research, and some of the key important concepts. Second, I wanted to share my experiences and the varied phases of my career to date over the first two decades or so in terms of workload, how I have devoted my hours, how I have split personal stuff with my working career, and other related concepts.
One of the key things to remember is that it is quite hard to accurately estimate the number of hours you spend nominally working per week. There are a number of reasons for this.
If you have ever tried to do a detailed financial budget or count calories for some sort of diet, you will have noticed that it is actually difficult to accurately and faithfully keep track of these quantities. The same is true for hours worked.
It is difficult for a number of reasons. Firstly, because what is work and what is not work is often blurred in many careers. Not all careers involve you being able to clearly and distinctly clock into work and clock out of work.
In the research landscape, especially because personal interests and passions bleed over into professional work or vice versa, it can be hard to clearly articulate what is work and what is not work.
A second reason is that people, including myself during my career, very easily either underestimate or overestimate the number of hours they work. Being substantially off in a faithful and accurate accounting of the number of hours you are working is quite common. It is not trivial to get this number accurate.
One of the reasons people overestimate work, whether explicitly or implicitly, is this sort of fetishization of working extremely hard, the whole grind culture. This has made its way into parts of academia.
There are certain subsets of academics and researchers who pride themselves on working seemingly superhuman hours. Sometimes they are literally working these hours, and sometimes it is exaggerated or part of a gesture or storytelling exercise.
But it is also easy for academics and researchers to underestimate the number of hours they work per week. There are creepy, insidious ways for work to creep into times you would not consider to be working.
For example, if you have a day off but answer a call or dial into a meeting. This is common and not specific to academia. There are many other ways little bits of work creep into personal time if you let it.
Getting an accurate estimate of how much time you have worked on average over a year may significantly underestimate what you actually did because of these factors.
When discussing work and the number of hours you put in, people always bring up the saying, work smart not hard. People also talk about the fact that once you work beyond a certain number of hours per week or per day, you start to lose productivity and might even go backwards because you are so tired and overloaded.
These statements are true in the general case, but it is also important to be realistic. One of the struggles I deal with in Australia, particularly in trying to cultivate a sensible work-life culture where people have their own lives and are not in the lab 24/7, is the fact that while some people elsewhere may be working long hours in a silly or unproductive way, there is also a significant proportion of the community who are both working very hard and generally working very smart.
One of the things I work with, especially with mentees, is having the foresight to accept that there will be people who are sensibly and strategically working and simply putting in a lot more hours and effort. That may have consequences.
The fact that you may not get all of the benefits those people get can be more than compensated for by the fact that you have deliberately chosen to have more family time or more personal time.
But it is not as if by magically working much smarter you can achieve in 30 hours a week what someone who is equally smart and savvy can do in 60 hours a week. The maths just do not add up.
That is some general context around hours, how people report hours, and cultural attitudes towards hours worked.
In terms of my own personal experiences, my journey started with a PhD. I did a PhD full-time, and at the end of that process or shortly afterwards I worked out that on average I probably worked about 40 hours a week.
That was probably somewhat below the average for people in my discipline at the time, but not absurdly so. It was very imbalanced. There were periods during my PhD that were relatively cruisy with normal hours, and periods around deadlines and paper submissions where we worked very long hours for sustained periods of several weeks. This continued into my initial postdocs.
I did about five years of postdocs. The postdoc periods had fairly standard hours, but there were also periods, sometimes several weeks or months on end, where we were working extremely hard, basically most daylight hours for a sustained period.
So again, it was very bursty. The average was probably a fairly average work week, but there were very intense periods at regular intervals.
One thing that is important to mention is the nature of the work. During my PhD and postdoc, even if I worked long hours for a week, I was generally capable of switching into family activities or friend activities or fun activities without being completely exhausted.
Obviously I might have been a bit short on sleep. Part of that was because I was younger, but part of it was the nature of the work. The work was challenging, but I often had spare energy left over for the rest of my life.
If you fast forward about two decades, my lifestyle now in terms of work is that I typically work relatively normal hours, but when I come home or on weekends or whenever my off time is, I have very little left to give.
What I mean by that is that although I am not typically working 80 hours, though there are exceptions, my work is of a nature where I have to always be on most of the time. That is very taxing and draining.
So when I finish work, although theoretically I have lots of hours free, there are limits to what I can do with that time because I have used up a lot of my energy during the week doing the work activity.
It is a different type of work now compared to 10 or 20 years ago.
There are exceptions to this, especially in the lead-up to particular deadlines, though not most deadlines nowadays. We will work substantially longer weeks. A regular exception is work travel.
If I am at an international conference, often for three, four, or five days my days start work-related at 8:00 a.m. and finish work-related anywhere from 10:00 p.m. to after midnight.
Some of that is work socialization, like having breakfast with colleagues, but nevertheless it is a 12–14 hour day repeated, on top of jet lag and other factors. You are working very intensely.
Partly the work back home generally does not stop when you are traveling, so you are also trying to keep up somewhat with that, especially if you have a leadership position.
So, to the phrase that started this, do you ever sleep, when do you sleep, and other similar statements, I am able to do whatever I do because of a number of factors.
The first is that I am fortunate to be surrounded by an amazing team and an amazing set of collaborators, which means that so much of what I am associated with does not critically depend on me, or does not always critically depend on me.
These could be people I work with in our center, people in our research team, or collaborators. It is a force multiplier. We are able to achieve a lot collaboratively, much more than I could do by myself.
Working with amazing people and becoming interdependent with amazing people is a key part of this.
A second key element is that there are some things I do regularly where I may be much faster at doing the task than others might expect.
For example, I do a lot of online engagement through social media and other avenues, and through practice I have become relatively quick at doing this. Someone who has done it only ad hoc might be five or ten times slower.
So there is a subset of activities where I am surprisingly fast. Of course there are lots of things I am not good at, and I try to minimize doing those and find workarounds, but there is a subset of tasks where I am very fast.
Some other skills I have found important in terms of being effective with time: one is capping time investments.
As you become more senior, you do not have the luxury, and you do not need, to spend inordinate time perfecting everything. You can work backwards from a time and effort budget and aim for the best outcome you can achieve within that capped investment.
This applies to many tasks where you do not need Nobel Prize-winning research. You just need to get something done competently and adequately. Capping time investments and having the discipline to stick to it is important.
Another key skill is time estimation. This is hard because people often underestimate how long things take.
But you cannot compensate by being pessimistic all the time because then you would plan to do almost nothing. Being able to realistically estimate how long tasks take, and how to prioritize and order them, is critical to getting as much done as possible with limited time.
Another very important thing is protecting your time and your diary from non-time-effective tasks as much as possible. Meetings get a bad reputation for this. You should minimize meetings that are not critical.
People like Warren Buffett talk about the fact that everyone has the same number of hours per week, whether you are a billionaire or a graduate student. Time is one of the most precious resources you have, and one of the most effective ways to protect it is to prioritize activities that can be done in an arbitrary time window rather than activities that require a rigid fixed time commitment.
You will not always be able to do this. Some things like courses or meetings require fixed time commitments. But there are other activities where you can prioritize outcomes rather than fixed time blocks.
In terms of the general debate about how hard you should work, it depends on context, goals, constraints, commitments outside work, risk appetite, and many other factors. There is no one-size-fits-all correct answer for how many hours per week you should work.
What is important is that you attempt to have an accurate appraisal, and refresh that appraisal on a yearly basis, of how hard you are actually working.
This is important for basic honesty, like realizing that if you have a high paid job but are working 90 hours per week, your actual hourly rate is lower than you might expect.
Then you can step back and decide whether this is actually what you want to be doing. Are you getting the reward you intended for the hours you are working, or did you just automatically slide into it?
I have never really consciously decided or deliberated on whether I want to step back and do a new fresh take on how hard I work and how many hours I put in a week.
There is nothing wrong with working incredibly hard and long hours. Technological advances in society probably need at least some people to do this for some stages of their lives.
At the same time, you can do a lot of psychological and family and relationship damage if you do this by default all of the time, especially if you are not aware of it.