Having a Life is Hard

For those following the discussion about having a career and a life, referenced in this post, there have been some interesting additions in recent days. Janet Stemwedel added a post clarifying some terms, and Rob Knop offers his own thoughts, and points out that academics aren't the only ones struggling to have a life and a career:

There has been some cultural awareness about the destructiveness of the career/life dichotomy in the business world for some time. I don't know if things have gotten any better, but it has long been a Holywood cliche that the executive has lost his soul because he keeps missing his kids' little league games for business meetings. (Think Hook.)

It seems to be a general truth in highly competetive, achievement oriented American society that people with long term careers they care about are supposed to put that before everything else. Academia is no different, and if anything may be worse. The whole pre-tenure process seems to openly assume that you will utterly sacrifice yourself in working at a tremendous rate to show that you are outstanding in all things. Another cliche of academia is that post-tenure professors slack off and coast... but, then again, if we are aksing them to utterly burn themselves out before tenure, why should we be surprised if some of them are cynical and burnt out after tenure???

I would sort of lean toward academia being slightly worse, both because the tenure process compresses a couple of decade's worth of family/career stress into just six or seven years, and also because the process of getting a Ph.D. pushes a lot of these decisions back into a later point in life for academics. It's a good point, though, and reminds me that I had some conversations about this very issue with some friends in the financial industry, back at the beginning of the month.

(More below the fold.)

Rob and Janet both note that hours in the lab are a poor measure of productivity, which is important enough that I'll quote it again:

4. More hours on the job does not always mean better hours on the job. Yes, you need to spend enough contiguous hours to accomplish the tasks you need to accomplish. If an experimental run takes nine hours, it takes nine hours. But, sometimes three good runs in a week is sufficient to keep the project moving forward at a good pace (and some experimental runs only take four hours).

Judging someone's commitment or contribution to the organization simply by counting the hours he or she is there looking busy is intellectually lazy. Evaluating the results of the time he or she puts in, while harder, is a better indicator of the stuff that matters.

This same point was also raised in the comments to this entry, and again, it's important. There's a real point of diminishing returns for me regarding time spent in the lab-- after twelve or fourteen hours, I become a zombie, and I'm better served by going home and sleeping for a few hours, than by staying in the lab to keep hammering at the same problems with no new ideas. I can't tell you how many times I've realized the solution to a difficult lab problem while on my way home after a long day, or on the way back in the next morning. Sometimes, getting out of the lab is the best thing you can do to make progress in the lab.

Back on the original topic of careers and family, Janet has also posted a fourth installment, talking about job searches. In the same vein, the Female Science Professor offers her own job-search story, with an emphasis on the "Two Body Problem," namely finding work for a spouse who is also an academic.

I'm very grateful that my own Two Body Problem was simplified by the fact that Kate is a lawyer, not an academic. There was still a fair bit of stress involved, but it's easier to find work for one physicst and one attorney than two physicists, or a physicist and an English professor.

Speaking of lawyering, Steinn Sigurdsson says some things about lawyers that Kate might object to, in the course of responding to my "Science Is Hard" post, but that probably deserves its own reply. After I put in a long day in the lab, of course...