🎙️ Podcast Link 🎙️

“Just Say No” – but where are the instructions on how to put that into practice?

Whilst not everything in our professional careers is within our control, a lot, typically more than what a person may think, is!

One of the primary ways you can control your career, and how stressful it is, is by being deliberative in terms of what you choose to take on.

In this new video in my #HackingAcademia series, I dive into the concept of “Lifestyle Crafting” your research career. This concept revolves around being deliberative and systematic in assessing the pros and cons via key “factors”, of each new opportunity that comes your way, making sure you don’t take on too many challenges simultaneously in any one activity, and asks you to consciously check the assumptions under which you’re operating in your career.

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Check it out, in this page, on YouTube, or via podcast.

🕒 Timestamps are as follows:

📌 (0:00) Opening Scene
📌 (0:09) Introduction to Lifestyle Crafting Work Activities
📌 (0:43) For People Who Want to Be a Bit More Deliberative
📌 (1:07) A Process for “Just Say No”
📌 (1:21) Career Relevance and Applicable Scenarios
📌 (1:43) Check Your Assumptions
📌 (1:55) Don’t Pursue Assumed Requirements Irrationally
📌 (2:25) Don’t Take On Obviously Risky Endeavours
📌 (2:49) Introducing Key Factors for Lifestyle Crafting
📌 (3:14) Asessing the Distribution of Factors
📌 (3:36) Key Factor: Interest, Excitement, Passion
📌 (4:17) Key Factor: Talent Requirements & Rarity
📌 (4:51) Good and Bad Talent Examples
📌 (5:55) Key Factor: Technical Difficulty For You
📌 (6:28) Don’t Combine Technical Difficulty With Other Challenges
📌 (7:00) Key Factor: Project Plan Robustness
📌 (7:54) Key Factor: Team Dynamic
📌 (8:21) Key Factor: Resourcing Margin
📌 (8:50) Good and Bad Resourcing Margin Examples
📌 (9:47) But Won’t Asking for More Risk the Project?
📌 (10:08) Key Factor: Project Financial Situation
📌 (10:27) Three Typical Project Charging Rates and Their Impact
📌 (11:50) Financial and Resource Viability Isn’t Just About the Total Dollar Figure
📌 (12:16) The Benefits of a Lifestyle Crafting Approach

Full Video Notes

There are lots of things outside your control in your career, but one thing within your control is choosing what and how you do things. It’s very easy to get stuck in “I have to” cycles, but the reality is you almost never have to do anything. You almost always have a choice; the choice just has potential consequences.

Lifestyle crafting your work career is about adopting a deliberate, considered approach to what you take on, that reduces the chances of epic stress and disasters further down the line. It’s not for everyone – some people really love to not plan their career and instinctively make decisions, and for some, this works out amazingly well. But for many, the prospect of somewhat reducing their stress, improving their work life balance, and reducing the number of metaphorical fires they have to put out, is appealing. Those people are who this video is intended for. The video is also intended to flesh out some of the concepts behind the commonly quoted advice, “Just say No”. Saying no is indeed very important, but you need to have some sort of process for how you choose when to do so.

I’ll pitch this video in the context of academia, but the concepts will apply to many other career types as well. The test case here is any new “project” type research activity – this could be a project with an industry or government partner, a research grant, taking on supervision of a PhD student or postdoc, or any other similar activity.

Lifestyle crafting your career is also about checking your assumptions. A lot of academics feel pressured to get more PhD students, or to get more funding, and hence will naturally chase after opportunities. Sometimes the pressure they feel is so great that their assessment of those opportunities is either irrational, or non-existent, and they’ll keep chasing an opportunity that any reasonable observer would deem is not a good idea. It is vitally important to keep in mind that if you take on a bad PhD student, or an industry project that turns into a disaster, it will do a lot of damage, and no-one, especially supervisors or line managers, will thank you for it. Supervisors and line managers also won’t have as much sympathy for an activity going bad, which was clearly a substantial risk from the beginning. Compare this outcome with a good project and good plan that goes wrong for reasons outside your control, in ways you couldn’t have anticipated. That’s completely different – and managers, at least good ones, will pitch in to support you in that situation.

The core idea of lifestyle crafting your career is that you can assess any potential opportunity in terms of a number of what I call key “factors”. These factors are things like resourcing, technical difficulty, or talent prospects. In assessing whether you want to take on an opportunity, you want to make sure your assessment of the project against these factors is positive for as many of them as possible. Realistically an opportunity will typically only be good across some but not all of the factors – that’s fine. What you want to do in particularly is avoid projects that are negative across all the factors, and keep an eye out for those unicorn projects which are positive across all the factors.

OK – let’s get on to those factors.

The first and possibly most important single factor is your excitement and interest level in the project. When things get tough with a project, a lot will depend on your excitement and interest level in the thing you’re doing. If this is just a half-hearted opportunity that you’ve seized, you’re going to struggle to push through the times when it gets difficult. Conversely, if the project is really aligned with your core interests, passions, beliefs and goals, then it will be easier to summon the fortitude to keep pushing through those difficult patches. Interest and passion for something won’t fully compensate for an opportunity being bad against all the other factors, but it can help a lot.

The second, and also an incredibly important factor, is the talent requirements of the opportunity, particularly for research grants and industry or government projects. Does your project need a very specialized type of talent, or could you take any average senior undergraduate student and rapidly onboard them and have them doing a useful job? How hard or easy will it be to recruit in the first place, and to recruit replacements when talent leaves the project, gets sick, has personal life things to attend to, at random times throughout the project?

To give an example of a computer science project with lots of flexibility options, consider one where you need someone who has modest coding skills at an undergraduate level, and is sufficiently autonomous to acquire some familiarity with a software package or tool within a week or two of starting the project. If you’re in a typical university environment, there might be literally thousands of undergraduate students, not just from computer science or engineering, who meet that capability set. If the student you hire leaves midway through the project, recruiting and training a replacement should be relatively straightforward.

At the extreme other end of the spectrum, consider a project which requires a particular type of expertise, where there are only three people in your country who have the sufficient expertise, and acquiring the expertise takes years. If you were to even consider this project, you’d want to make sure there are lots of extra mechanisms in place to ensure access to that critical talent.

The technical difficulty factor refers to whether the project is in the core area that you are really proficient and experienced at. When the PhD student, research assistant or postdoc gets stuck, will you be able to glance at the issue and immediately tell them exactly what to try, which could be multiple things, with a high degree of confidence that one of those things should solve the problem? Or will you be alongside them, just as confused, puzzled, and relying on the researcher to find a solution largely on their own?

At this stage, you may be thinking my advice is to only take on projects that are mundane and trivial – but that’s not what I’m advocating at all. What I am suggesting is that if you take on a project where you don’t know much, as a fun learning experience, you don’t want to be doing that simultaneously with dealing with not having enough funding, and a hard-to manage problematic external industry or government partner – that would be a recipe for disaster.

The project plan robustness factor relates to the fact that projects almost never go exactly to plan, and to how resilient the project will be to pivots. Examples of things not going to plan would be some of the partners for a multi-partner industry project dropping out – which happens regularly, for all sorts of reasons outside your control. Ask yourself if that were to happen, could you easily scale back to a reduced set of deliverables that don’t critically depend on anything that former partner was providing? Project robustness also relates to talent, already discussed in this video. Another angle to consider here is if things get really tough, and you can’t get any talent to help you, can you do the rest of the project yourself because it’s in an area where you’re an expert, and you still have the technical skills to do the required work?

Relating to project robustness is the team dynamic factor: how likely is it that the team for a project will work productively and well together? Teams you’ve previously had good experiences with are a great plus here: new teams always carry with them an inherent risk that it won’t work out, but you can derisk this to some extent by getting to know them ahead of time, and asking colleagues who’ve worked with them what their experience was.

The resourcing margin factor relates to the level of resourcing margin that you can access for the project. Margin in this context is completely separate to the absolute size of the resourcing: it’s about how much “margin for overrun” there is in the resourcing when things, inevitably, take longer than expected. A small project with a lot of extra resourcing is often much easier to fulfil than a large project with no or negative resourcing margins.

An example of a project with a very healthy level of resourcing margin would be a small research project, which you think, after a detailed, realistic planning exercise, will take the Research Assistant 3 month to finish, but where you have 6 months of research assistant funding. That is a project with an excellent resourcing margin.

An example of a project with a bad resourcing margin is a million-dollar research project, which you think, after a detailed, realistic planning exercise, will take the full-time postdoc 2 years to completely, and you only have exactly 2 years of postdoc funding. This is not a great situation to be in: statistically speaking, almost no projects run on time, so you’ll either be failing to fully deliver on the project, or you’ll be exploiting extra unpaid time from you or others, which is a very bad practice and has negative onflow effects. People will often push back on this saying that they feel they will jeopardize the prospects of the project occurring in the first place: it’s true that asking for more will put off some partners, but taking a project by skimping on budget can also do a lot of damage. If you still want to do this, make sure the other factors are really positive.

The financial impact of your project is also a key factor to consider. Your organization, like a university, will have a system for how they charge for projects you will typically need to follow. Terminology and processes vary, but generally speaking there will be a few rates at which projects are charged out to funding bodies or partners.

Ignoring pro-bono type projects where you do the work for free, the base level of funding would cover the basic salary costs of the researchers on the project, including their superannuation or 401k. The exact percentages vary hugely across countries and sectors, but at an Australian university this might be the salary the researcher is actually paid plus 30%. In real terms, this will directly lose your organization money because it doesn’t cover all the other indirect costs of doing research – space, utilities, insurance and so forth. A second tier of charging will add additional charges to account for those indirect costs – this could be another 40 or 50%, or more. In different countries, or in industry, these rates can be much, much higher. A project charged at this rate will be helping keep the organization viable by being relatively financial neutral. Finally, for some projects, extra charges will be added beyond these – some might call this “profit”, although it’s not necessarily a perfect description. Depending on how your organization handles these, you may be entitled to a significant percentage of those extra charges back into a discretionary work account. If the project is large enough, this can be like having your own internal research grant.

In discussing the resourcing margin and financial charging for a project, it’s super important to emphasize the fact that large dollar figure projects are not necessarily easier to run than smaller ones, and that the absolute size of the project should not be used as a proxy for its value to you. Don’t get blinded by the prospect of your “biggest ever project” without checking the other project factors!

If you are trying to be a little more deliberate about planning and executing on your career, then these are some of the many factors you can consider when evaluating any new opportunity. It will on occasion make sense to proceed even when one or more of these factors isn’t great – but try to avoid opportunities where the majority of the factors are negative, and if you must, don’t make a habit of it.

Following this sort of evaluation process won’t instantly change your life overnight, but in the medium and long term you should find yourself less often in super stressful situations where everything is going wrong, and more often enjoying the whole process of working on a good project.