It’s a new year, and the academic term has kicked in with renewed vigor. I haven’t written here for a while because I simply didn’t have the mental capacity.
I collapsed into the Christmas holidays nearly flattened with exhaustion and stress, and demoralized by some bad news. Over the two week break, I finally managed to relax, catch up on my sleep and rebuild my battered confidence. Spending time with my family properly was the best medicine: there was a lot of cooking, and baking, and wooden train tracks snaking all over the living room carpet. Each day I ran up Windmill Hill, pounding the muddy grass with my trainers, heart beating furiously in my ribcage, low sun dazzling my eyes and the estuary Thames spread out below: a meandering ribbon of blue with its entourage of wind turbines, great ships, smokestacks, docks and cranes, the town’s rooftops, trees and church spires seeming to tumble into it.
Before I went back in January, I put my work practices under the microscope to see if I could identify any way to prevent another miserable term from playing out all over again. I’d kept a time sheet in the autumn to try to pinpoint what was going wrong. It didn’t tell me much when I’d skimmed it, bleary eyed, on my last day before vacation, other than that I simply had too much to do. With my renewed clarity, however, the patterns jumped right out at me, and what had caused the stress was now obvious.
I am supposed to teach no more than three days a week, with the fourth day for regular research. During the fifth day, my time has been bought out since October by the biotech company that’s helping me take our novel treatment for chronic urinary infection through to clinical trials. But the designated days were only virtual partitions – in reality the teaching was scattered all over the place, and as last term bore down, its chores spread like a cancer into all my other time slots. As anyone who teaches knows well, what’s in the timetable is only a small fraction of what you end up doing on a course. If you don’t defend your non-teaching time, it will simply dissolve into the maw.
The spreadsheet showed that each day, in a vain attempt to keep all the balls in the air, I’d do a little bit of everything – an hour of teaching, then frantic work on a grant, then more teaching, then a chat to one of my PhD students, then a meeting – then more teaching. Constant interruptions meant that I never really sank into any chore wholeheartedly or with the proper focus. Transitions – not being able to start anything else a half hour before teaching a class, or commuting back and forth for meetings between Bloomsbury and Belsize Park – eroded my time even further.
But suddenly it was all clear. All I had to do was block out two actual, real-life days a week and dedicate them solely to research (or other academic chores), and to keep them sacrosanct. I drew a thick black line through square after square in my diary. In weeks where there weren’t two free days from teaching in the timetable, I negotiated with the friendly admin staff to reschedule them to another day, until I finally managed to herd every last hour of teaching into three separate corrals. The two non-teaching days weren’t the same each week, but that didn’t matter. I had done it.
But has it worked?
Three weeks in and I’m sitting here asking myself that very question. If you’d queried me yesterday, I would have said yes: the first two weeks on the new pattern had felt manageable – and for the first time in many months, enjoyable. But now the stress is creeping up on me once again. I am registering flickers of panic just off-stage, the kind that heralds total paralysis: when you have so much to do that you can’t do anything. The problem is that, within each designated day, there are two many subcategories of chores. And tasks that are neither teaching nor research – for example, my new role as Athena SWAN lead for my Division – are starting to gather like brewing stormclouds. Where do I file them? How can I keep everything moving without slipping back into that inefficient multitasking mode? Most importantly, how can I prevent what now seems inevitable – starting to work even longer hours on evenings and weekends to catch up, despite a small child that takes up all my time and energy at home?
I think many working parents can relate to this post (I’m a science journalist not an academic). It does improve as children get older but it’s still exhausting. That fight for your time will continue and prioritising it is definitely important.
I’m better at saying ‘no’ nowadays. I also resigned from several committees that were either taking up too much time or causing too much stress. Though still overcommitted, it’s manageable now and I seem to have found tennis as my ‘me’ time. Whacking that ball helps keep me sane…
As ever with me, sports are never far from my mind, and there is a cycling analogy here. Many cyclists talk about “burning matches”. They will know their Functional Threshold Power (FTP) the power output that is tough, but just about sustainable for long periods. Any big efforts above this count as “burning matches”, and you only have so many matches to burn. Now it seems to me you’ve been burning matches all over the place, and if you’re not careful you will “bonk” or “hit the wall” to continue the cycling parlance. At that point, you won’t even be able to maintain your FTP, your sustainable pace, and so in the long run you will achieve less than staying at FTP the whole time. Yes you can burn a match or two occasionally to get over a hill or up the pace when required, but you can’t be a pyromaniac and get away with it.
I have learned at several points in my life, that no matter how quickly you clear the decks, they become full again. (To continue my cycling analogy imagine you are at the velodrome it doesn’t matter how fast you go, the track just stretches out in front of you, there IS no destination, no finishing point ). The speed with which you clear the decks and the speed with which new items fill them are directly linked. The problem arises when you go too hard trying to beat the maximum speed of problem/work ingress, not realising that it HAS no maximum speed. You can’t outpace it, because if required it calls on reinforcements and just keeps on coming. Of course you can respond in the short term for emergencies, but you can’t work beyond a limit ad infinitum.
Example 1: During school and University holidays I often did temping jobs to earn money, frequently ending up kitchen portering; washing pots and pans, sweeping and mopping floors, cleaning equipment down. For a lot of the time there is a rush on as pots and pans come thick and fast. Desperately you try and keep ahead of it, but it is physically impossible for one man to scrub welded on custard from a pan faster than the chef can dirty things, or the diners can leave empty plates. The work builds up and you can’t keep up, and if you do, then there is always something else that needs doing. You prioritise, and you work like the devil for a while, but you have to realise: You can burn yourself out going at more than your threshold speed, or you can up your game but staying within limits where you are still going to do a decent job, and stay safe doing it (not spilling water everywhere to make the flor lethally slippery, not throwing everything in the water and then slicing your hand open on a knife). If you try and go too fast then the old adage of “more haste = less speed” comes in, items start coming back because they’ve not been properly cleaned and now you have to do them again AS WELL as the new stuff. If you work hard but clearly there is too much to reasonably cope with, then maybe someone else can sweep that floor, or grab a few of those clean pots and put them away for you. It’s not being lazy or bad at the job if you can’t reasonably keep up, that just means the workload is too great.
Example 2: You have a mountain of sectioning to do for electron microscopy. There are several groups and users that need a load of samples cut and imaged, and of course it all needs doing ASAP. You set to it and work late for a couple of days to get this stuff done on top of the normal workload, but then someone else comes that also needs work doing ASAP, and there are 4 conditions in triplicate, and someone has e-mailed you a draft of a paper that they need you to write methods on and read etc, and they really wanted to get it sent off by the end of the week. So you work late thinking I’ll get over this metaphorical hill, and then we’ll be back to normal, but a combination of the expectation your desperate efficiency raises, your willing attitude, and circumstance means that more and more work just keeps flooding in. So you can keep working like a loon and hope you don’t make too many mistakes, or you can rein it in to a maintainable speed that balances speed and quality with your own sanity. It’s not being lazy or bad at the job if you can’t reasonably keep up, that just means the workload is too great.
In essence, I’ve had to learn on multiple occasions where to draw the line, and how to put my foot down. To manage expectation and priorities, and to not be taken advantage of. To delegate where required, and to say no, even to things that I think are worthwhile, if I cannot reasonably carry out that task properly giving it the attention it deserves. Case in point Athena Swan lead. Is it a valuable thing: yes. Does it need doing: yes, Does it need doing by you specifically: No. As much as it may grate something’s gotta give. Your most important task is deciding what, because clearly the current state of affairs is not sustainable is it?
Good luck on your prioritising, my advice is to get a sidekick. We sidekicks are very good at standing between the boss and added work that people try and foist on them 😉
Ian
Sue – saying no is a skill that I am still working on!
Ian – thanks for that Tour de Force response! Unfortunately some tasks cannot be said ‘no’ to…and I really didn’t want to. I feel very strongly about equality issues, and also it is valuable experience to chair a committee. I know it’s crazy, but I am determined to make it work. Possibly by accumulating a few sidekicks and delegating appropriately. 😉
I found Leo Babauta’s book “The Power of Less” very useful for these issues.
Not to say I’ve actually got things under control yet …
One of the main culprits for me is small commitments, which by themselves are not a problem but they add to an already overloaded system.
Thanks, Mark. Finding time to read anything these days is so challenging! Small commitments are the ones that kill, I agree. Arranging the repair on your autoclave. Getting your department an updated list of your grants. Editing someone’s document.
Jenny,
I remain in awe of all that you manage to fit in.
On saying no: This book helped me. It’s a series of scripts for every eventuality – there’s one chapter on work which gives scripts for saying no to all sorts of things, including the handy “how to say no to a dumb idea”. And, yes, outsource, outsource, delegate, delegate. Indispensable sidekicks can be found in the most unlikely places. People can be flattered if their specific expertise is called upon. And, sympathy. One thing I’ve learned is how important it is to set your own limits – and how if you exceed those limits, the new limits quickly become the expectation.
For all that unsolicited advice, from the outside, you’re doing stunningly.