So as you can probably tell, since I've gotten around to posting the Scientiae carnival, I'm feeling better. Well, I'm out of bed, at least, so that's something. I think it's going to be a long road back to feeling like my "normal" self, though. I'm still tired all the time. Case in point: Yesterday I washed the kitchen floor and cooked dinner, and then had to spend the rest of the evening on the couch, because I was totally wiped out. I basically go to work and then come home and sleep.
Because I'm tired all the time, my thinking has been a bit fuzzy at times, too. (case in point: I'm working through an example for tomorrow's lecture, and I can't get the math to work. This is not rocket science, people!) But I'm dealing. I do have to say, though, that being so strict with my priorities has been liberating. I literally don't have the energy to do anything but the bare essentials for not sucking at my job, so suddenly, saying no has become really, really easy.
I'm still reflecting on how I got here. Part of it was definitely bad luck. I mean, I've had stressful periods before and not gotten sick, so getting the cold which ultimately morphed into pneumonia was really just bad luck. But I definitely think the extreme stress I've been under contributed to the cold-->pneumonia track. I'm going up for tenure next year, in a department in which I'm still not sure if I'm supported or not---STRESS! I'm teaching a class I haven't taught in 3 years, and my notes from last time are pretty much worthless, so I've been treating the class as a new prep---STRESS! My classes are huge---I am dealing with 2-3 times more students than anyone else in my department right now---STRESS! And oh yeah, I really need to get some publications out, and there's been some drama with certain collaborators withholding data and not responding to my emails---STRESS!
I am very interested in figuring out how to balance my workload better so that this doesn't happen again. I am not deluded enough to think that things will get better after tenure---I've seen what happens, especially to the women scientists, with the increased workload/institutional responsibilities.* But PhysioProf makes a great point in his comment a couple of posts ago:
Being a faculty member means being expected to do more things than there exists time for. Thus, a necessary skill in academia is choosing the things that you simply will not do, even though others might expect you to do them.
So I am hoping that this illness gives me the courage, and the freedom, to push back when I need to, to argue for the resources I need to do my job (for instance, more TAs for the larger sections I'm teaching), and to be brutally honest, with myself and others, when prioritizing my tasks. I need to remember the mantra I picked at the start of this school year: "will this help earn me tenure?" If the answer is no, well, that's my answer, then.
* On the other hand, I do know that I will not have to spend as much thought-energy worrying about the support, or lack thereof, in my department, so on that level, things *should* be a bit easier.
- Log in to post comments
An important skill, but it's by no means restricted to academia. (Side comment - from quite a number of comments on various blogs, folks seem to think that the problems and frustrations of academia are unique in many ways. I'm not convinced.)
A related and equally important learned skill is deciding how much time an item is worth. This goes along with being able to assess the worst-case outcome if you just don't do what someone expects to the level of quality/detail which they want.
I've found that using all 3 skills helps to keep the to-do list manageable. Not easy, but worth working at.
Why should it be like that, though? Why should it be reasonable for a job to have way more to do than one can reasonably do? Scrub that - try again - why should it be that even when you prioritize the things on your job and ignore the things that aren't important, you still have a huge amount of important stuff to do?
What do you suggest when prioritization *is* done, a lot, and there is still too much to do?
Why should a job give you so much important stuff to do that your only options are to fail to do important things, do a shoddy job of other important things, or work yourself into the land beyond stressed trying to get all the important things done?
What kind of a stupid setup is it where an employer gives you too much to do and then somehow it is the employee who has to deal with it?
To put it another way, why should the academic life have to result in a stress breakdown for someone who is the conscientious type? (I am not just talking about Jane here.)
Our chair has just embarked on a process of assessing how much work we all have to do. I have a nasty feeling he's going to end up at a figure of us all having about 60hrs per week to do and then of course the whole exercise will be abandoned. Pity.
I'm glad you're starting to feel better. I hope you can get back on your feet and figure out how to handle things in a more sustainable way. I'll be interested in reading about the process if you decide (or have time) to share it.
Scott, your point is well-taken that the to-do list explosion is certainly not limited to academia. I can only comment on what I see from my friends in research/government labs, and while they are certainly very very busy, I do think they have a bit more flexibility in their schedules, in terms of choosing to, say, work on weekends or not. Whereas in academia, you don't really have that choice: if you want tenure/want to get that grant/finish that paper/finish the grading, working on the weekends is a necessity. (Readers in industry, please chime in and let me know if I'm wrong!)
C, you are expressing exactly what I'm feeling/pondering right now. Short anecdote: I was at a meeting recently with a bunch of senior women scientists, and we started talking about how oppressive the workload is in this job. I said something like "why can't we reenvision this job as something more manageable, 40-50 hours/week?" And these senior women all said, as if on cue, "Yeah, right. Not gonna happen." But *why*? Why are we so averse to reimagining what an academic job could and should be? Why is there this stupidly perverse idea that "this job is a calling, and thus I should willingly devote my entire life to it?" How is this helping??
Ecogeofemme, I do plan on following up on this post, so stay tuned!
Good for you. I'm afraid that one of the troubles many women seem to have is that they won't ask for things the way men will. It certainly doesn't hurt to ask for some departmental help, as the worst that can happen is that things will stay the way they are now. And learning to say no is probably one of the most valuable skills out there, if your time is to be respected. Best of luck with your continuing recovery.
C- they did that at my place, found the silly number of hours thing, so decided to express it as a percentage.
The main funding council I apply to assumes that academics work 37.5 hours a week for 44 weeks of the year (the rest of the weeks are bank holidays and annual leave). So calculating how many hours you will work on a project involves calculating how many hours it will actually take and then how many that SHOULD be on the mythical scale. I sit on one of the grant panels. Everyone, even those who work for the funding council, knows that these nominal hours of PI time are fiction, yet we still have to try and make serious 'value for money' judgements about them.
It's not a problem that's unique to academia. However, I would argue that it has a distinctive 'flavour' in academia:
1) the tenure system puts extra pressure on pre-tenure academics, not just for a few probationary months, but for years. And even before the global slow-down, jobs were hard to get and so the consequence of failing to get tenure had a significant probability of meaning having to quit the career, after 1-2 decades of sustained effort... I don't know of other fields that are quite like that.
2) academics tend to be very passionate about parts of their work - supporting students, doing research. This means that it's really hard sometimes to say 'no'. It's not QUITE that we do it for something other than money - although many of us have chosen this route expecting lower pay than we might acquire elsewhere in return for the chance to spend the majority of our time doing the stuff we're passionate about.
3) I reckon I have five roles - lecturer, researcher, administrator, laboratory manager, knowledge transfer facilitator. Yet the education that got me this job trained me for only one of these, and the selection process totally emphasised 'researcher'. I've since taken classes and so on, and am clear from things like my Myers-Brigg profile and my (poor) ability in some areas that I'm actually not at all suited to roles 3 and 5 and have problems with parts of 1 and 4. What a surprise. Analysis of group working/committee role shows that I'm an individual worker. And the nature of the selection process is such that pretty much everyone in my department/team has the same pattern of strengths and weaknesses - e.g. everyone is relatively weak at roles like Chair, Team Worker... This makes for a more challenging environment, I think, since it's just not possible to balance duties across a team evenly when there are large skill areas missing.
I'm sure there are other reasons but I'm in the middle of a cold and not thinking well.
Jane, do, DO, watch out for yourself. At almost exactly the same point in my career path I had influenza and then bronchitis and then went back to work, and ended up with post-viral fatigue syndrome. That was a miserably unpleasant year, and my GP is insistant that the main cause was that I went back to work too quickly and that I was in a very stressed situation.