4.21 How much should I work per week in academia

Everyone I know in academia somehow simultaneously believes that they’re working far too much AND that they’re not working enough to get it all done. That leads to a horrible situation where we feel unsatisfied and exhausted, and we often don’t get to enjoy our downtime because we feel guilty too. In this episode, I answer a very common question - how much should I be working - with a more nuanced answer than you will get from most people! If you worry you do too much or not enough, then this is the episode for you.

If you want to find the Randy Pausch lecture that I mentioned, it’s here.

If you liked this episode, you should check out my episode on how to stop wasting time by trying to be too efficient.

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I'm Dr Vikki Wright, ex-Professor and certified life coach and I help everyone from PhD students to full Professors to get a bit less overwhelmed and thrive in academia. Please make sure you subscribe, and I would love it if you could find time to rate, review and tell your friends! You can send them this universal link that will work whatever the podcast app they use. http://pod.link/1650551306?i=1000695434464

I also host a free online community for academics at every level. You can sign up on my website, The PhD Life Coach. com - you'll receive regular emails with helpful tips and access to free online group coaching every single month! Come join and get the support you need.

Transcript

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the PhD Life Coach Podcast. Today we're gonna be thinking about one of the most common questions that we get asked, especially when I was a supervisor and that just, I think, runs through our heads a lot of the time, and that is how much should I be working? There seems to be obsessions in all different directions at the moment in academia, and it slightly does my head in because we have the people that are like, if you don't work 60 hours a week, then it's just not even worth being in academia. You're meant to be committed, that kind of, you are not working hard enough vibe. But then we also seem to have this other obsession with you've got to have work-life balance at all times. And you should never be stressed and you should never be busy and you should never work too long hours. You know, I can get everything done in 25 hours a week and blah, blah, blah. It just seems to be a whole lot of people telling you a whole lot of things about how much you should be working, and so many people seem [00:01:00] to want a definitive answer to it, that you should be working this much. And I mean, I have a confession, right? You're not gonna get a definitive answer to that in this episode. I know you want one. And so what we're gonna do today is we are gonna think about why it feels important to have a definitive answer to that question, and then I'm gonna give you some other tips and guidance for what are actually better questions to be asking and how you can answer them. Okay, so let's go.

First thing, why do we want to know? We want to know how much we should be working because we are worried we're doing it wrong. The reason that question feels so important is because we are convinced that either everybody else is working more than us and we are not doing enough, and that we are gonna get behind.

Or we're doing something wrong by not working enough. You know, I've [00:02:00] had PhD students in the past who are like, I'm not doing as many hours as everybody else and I seem to be on, on top of all the things I'm doing. And that freaks me out a little bit 'cause I think I'm doing something wrong. Or we wanna know, could I be working less than I am? 'cause what I'm doing at the moment doesn't feel sustainable. Is there a right amount of how much I should be doing that could be less than what I'm doing at the moment, or it's because you've got particular circumstances, whether they're health circumstances, life circumstances, or whatever, that put a limit on the number of hours you can work or are willing to work, and you are wondering whether it's even possible for you to be in academia. Can you do a PhD in those hours? Can you be an academic within those hours? And so we desperately often want somebody to say, this is the amount of hours. This is how much you should be working, and if you do that, you'll be okay so that [00:03:00] we can answer some of these bigger and more pressing questions of whether we're enough, whether we are doing it right, and whether we are capable of this anyway.

The problem is that when the real things that we care about and worry about are kind of squished down, and we're instead asking the practical kind of so-called easier questions like, how much should I be working? We just don't get to the bit that really matters. 'cause I could turn around and say to you, you should be working 35 hours a week. You should be working 50 hours a week. You should be working whatever, however many hours a week. And you might go, oh gosh, I'm already working way more than that, and I don't feel on top of things. Or you might be going, oh, there's no way I could do that many hours in a week with my commitments, with my energy levels, with my disability, with my, whatever it is. Whatever number I gave you of [00:04:00] how much you should be working, you are gonna have a reaction that's nothing to do with those actual hours, or probably the worst case you'll go, oh, okay, right cool. I can work that much. And then you'll work that much and then often not get the stuff done that you want to get done, and then say, well, hang on. She told me that working that many hours is the right amount, and I worked that many hours and I haven't achieved what I wanted to achieve. And this is because we're asking the wrong question.

The other reason I hate the question, how much should I be working is because I have known people at every extreme of that in every direction. I've known people who work an obscene number of hours don't seem to do a lot else in their life and who are exceedingly, exceptionally successful. I also have known [00:05:00] people who every time you went into the department on a weekend, they would be there doing their stuff and they were no more successful than anybody else.

I also know people who would happily tell you exactly how many hours they work a week, and it was very high numbers, but who also seemed to spend all of that time chattering with people in nearby offices. So it doesn't predict success in any meaningful way. I've also known people who didn't put the hours in and didn't really get on with academia and didn't get stuff done, and I've known people who really didn't seem to work that much, but somehow did the right things and flourished anyway,.

Success in academia is not measured in number of hours worked. It's also not measured in number of words written. That's the other metric we often go to, right? How much is the right amount of what words to be writing every week? Well, it depends [00:06:00] what phase you're in. Depends what stage of the research process you're at. I've known people that have wrote loads and been really successful, wrote loads have not seemingly been that successful. People who haven't written very much, who've had amazing careers 'cause they've just written the right things and people who have not written very much and sort of drifted out of academia. Again, how much writing should I be doing is also the wrong question to be asking.

What we want to be asking instead, and if you take nothing else from this podcast, this is the question I want you to take, is what do we want to be doing with the hours and energy that we are willing to give this job or this PhD? What would I best be doing in the hours that I'm willing or able to spend on this career of mine?

' Cause how much time you should spend on something is entirely dependent on what the thing is and on who you [00:07:00] are and what constraints you have around you. So some people who work really long hours spend all their time doing things that don't move the needle. Don't bring fulfillment. Don't move them closer towards either their goals or their kind of community collaborations or whatever it might be.

There is an amazing guy called Randy Pausch, and I'll put a link to his work in the show notes. And he talked about don't polish the underside of the banister. Often I see academics polishing the underside of the banister iE doing work that nobody sees and is not very important or impactful. Now, does this mean you should only be doing things that get you promoted? No, obviously not. We want academia, whatever stage we're at, we want academia to be a fulfilling place, an intellectually stimulating place, a place where we work for the social good, if that's your vibe or work for the pure joy of knowledge, if that's your vibe whichever, right.

So this isn't just about being like super [00:08:00] strategic and doing the exact right things to get yourself promoted, but it is deciding what's important to you and choosing to spend more time on that stuff. If you are working 60 hours a week, but you're spending 20 of them sorting out your reference manager system, then you're probably not enjoying it, and you're probably not moving your career in the directions you want to go.

How much we should be working also depends on what we are doing from a personal human perspective. So there was a really good episode a while back with some researchers from Bath where they talked about how to look after yourself when you're doing emotionally taxing research. And so if you are somebody who is doing research that is distressing to read about, where you're having interviews with people who are having very big emotions about the situations that they're in. You may find that the amount of hours you can dedicate, at least to that part of your research is gonna be much less than somebody who is doing much less emotionally taxing research.

For those of [00:09:00] you doing research that is extremely cognitively taxing, you may be able to do less per day than you are at other times. And this is something that will also change throughout your PhD throughout your career. So for me, when I was in data collection phase, for me and the stuff that I was doing, data collection wasn't at all emotionally taxing and it wasn't particularly cognitively taxing. I was getting people into the laboratory. I was administering stress tests and things like that. Not like nasty ones, just like difficult maths tasks and things like that. I was sticking electrodes on them. I was taking saliva samples, all these sorts of things, right? It wasn't that difficult. As a bit of an extrovert. If anything, it was kind of fun chatting with these people running the sessions. I could do hours and hours and hours of that sort of work without it wearing me out socially, emotionally, cognitively. Whereas if data collection for you is close analysis of a poem, for example, [00:10:00] maybe it's not emotionally taxing, depending on what the poem's about, but it's maybe cognitively taxing that you can only do it for a couple of hours before your brain feels like it's drained. And then other people, we have so many people in my membership and in my wider community who are doing research about inherently distressing tasks often, which intersect with their own personal situations as well. So people with disabilities looking at disability prejudice, for example. Anything where like intersects with their own experiences. And for you guys, you may find that you can only spend a much more limited period of time. So taking into account what you are doing at any one time and how much time it is reasonable for you to expect to spend on it is super, super important.

You also get to think about yourself as an individual. So some of it, you know, when I was doing my PhD, I was young, I was fit and healthy. I probably had ADHD, but that [00:11:00] mostly came out in over excitement rather than anything else and I didn't have any children. I didn't have any responsibilities. I didn't get much money, but I got a little bit of money from the department, which was enough that I wasn't doing other jobs and things like that. I could basically largely throw myself into stuff. Now, obviously, being me, I was trying to balance 47 other hobbies as well, so that slightly dragged away from my academic time. But other than that, not a lot did. You might have. Illnesses, you might have disabilities, you may have responsibilities, you may have family. You may be caring for people. You may have a whole bunch of reasons why you only have so much to give. There's also, I know many, many listeners and members who are part-time students who are balancing this alongside part-time or full-time work. And then the question is not so much, how much should you be doing? It's how much can you do given your constraints? And once you have that time, once you've decided what that amount [00:12:00] is, what do you want to spend that time doing?

And it may well be that if you are somebody who has quite a lot of constraints on you, that means you need to be much more selective about what you choose to spend your time doing. It is not that you should be trying to find more time to work, more than your body or mind will allow you, but instead thinking about how can you support yourself to be much more selective than your average PhD student, than your average academic, so that you can really pick and choose what you spend your time on and how much time you give it.

Now one of the things I'm gonna be teaching in the membership next quarter, so if you're listening to this live, this is coming out a week before quarter one of 2026 launches, and the entire quarter, so running February, March, April, is gonna be focused on time management, task management, and how we can kind of create a PhD life that we love and one of the things that we address right at the very beginning is this notion of really thinking about what proportion of [00:13:00] our time we want to be spending on different things.

We need to balance the current needs of what we're doing right now. So for those of you who are academics, that might be your administrative responsibilities, your teaching responsibilities, your supervision responsibilities, or those sorts of things, how we balance the kind of urgent day-to-day needs of those sorts of things with the longer term needs of your career and your progression and so on, and thinking about what proportion of your week rather than the absolute number of hours, what proportion of your week you want to spend serving those different parts of you. For PhD students, it's slightly different, but obviously lots of you are balancing lots of things anyway, but also towards the end of your PhD you start having to balance what do I need to do to serve my current work, IE the thesis versus my future self. So turning things into papers, presenting at conferences to raise your profile, applying for jobs and all [00:14:00] those sorts of things too. So at pretty much any stage, your academic career, you're sort of balancing up the needs of the day to day now with the needs of future you.

And one of the things I'm gonna be supporting my members to do is decide, therefore, what proportions of their week do they want to spend on these different elements. For example, one of the things I will teach is my role-based time blocking system. I do have an episode that kind of broadly introduces that, if you wanna go check it out. But I will take people through step by step so that they can really think about what amount of their week do they want to spend in each of the different roles that they have in what they're doing at the moment, and how adjusting that can make you feel so much more in control of your academic life.

We also wanna think about how you are working, not just what you are working on in these, not just what topics you're choosing to spend your time on, but also how you are working within them. Often when the pressure builds and the to-do list grows and the panic sets in, we [00:15:00] somehow forget that we did actually choose to do most of this stuff, especially those of you doing PhDs. I accept that once you become an academic, there's a whole bunch of stuff that you did not necessarily sign up for, but as a PhD student, the doing of your research is pretty much what you dreamed of, right?

Yet somehow all that pressure helps it turn into something that feels like someone else has forced it on you. Feels like you don't want to be doing it when actually most of us came into this through a love for our subjects. So another really useful question to ask yourself instead of how much I should be working is, how do I want to work within these hours? How do I want to make those hours feel lighter and more joyful and more engaging, rather than feeling like a sort of pressured drag that I have to pull myself through?

This can be about changing the way we [00:16:00] work on things. Those you who've been around for a while know that I'm a big fan of like pieces of paper and felt tip pens and all that kind of stuff as ways to work in a more engaging way. But it can also be as simple as what, how we talk to ourselves while we're working. Because if we're working on something that we allegedly like, but the constant narrative in our head is, this isn't good enough. You are not good enough. Everyone's gonna think you're an idiot. That's not very clear. What if they disagree? What if they dislike it? What if they fail? Then you are not gonna enjoy doing that thing.

Whereas you could be doing the exact same jobs for the exact amount of time, and instead thinking thoughts about how interesting this is, how fun it is, how difficult it is in a really kind of puzzling and interesting sort of a way so that you can actually spend more time enjoying the things you're doing. So that kind of quality of how you work is also super important, much more so than how many hours you spend doing it.

I have two points left to make. So one is [00:17:00] the amount of time you are working and what you are working on also can and should fluctuate. Fluctuate day to day, week to week, month to month, and year to year. If you find that you are always working, like slogging away the same number of hours every month, every week, I want you to really reconsider.

 When you think about people who are at the top of their game, you think about people, you know, athletes and things like that, Taylor Swift even, anyone who's like at the top of their game, they will have periods where they're doing more of this, and then there'll be periods where they're doing more of.

That there'll be periods where they're really pushing or where they're really preparing to push, and there'll be other times where they're sort of ticking over to some extent. And I want you to think about how you have those fluctuations in your life and how you can try and create those fluctuations in your life.

One of the things I think has gone wrong with academia at the moment is how all the kind of traditionally down [00:18:00] times have got eaten at both ends. So, you know, there used to be this semi unstructured summer that you could kind of look forward to and get stuff done. It sort of, you know, exam boards and things like that, start eating into it at one end, conferences and things like that. Then suddenly there's loads more getting ready for next year than you ever anticipated. Those of you in the US and other places might be teaching summer schools and so on. It is getting eaten away at, you know, all these grant agencies. If any of you work for grant agencies, I'm looking at you. Not impressed all these grant agencies that have a deadline of January 15th. Excellent. Thanks for that. So suddenly your Christmas holiday is spent writing a grant or finishing off a grant and so on. It does feel as though the academic year has got eaten away at in lots of different ways so that it doesn't have quite the ebb and flow that it used to. But I want you to think how you can create a sense of ebb and flow, how you can create a sense that there's periods where you are pushing, where you are really working hard, but in a fun and [00:19:00] engaging kind of a way. And then there are periods where you are doing what's necessary to get through.

This always reminds me of the metaphor of athletes. They have their competition season, they have more preparation season. They have more recovery season, and then even within those periods of time, they have their kind of, you know, hard training hour and their recovery hour and all these sorts of things. They don't expect themselves to be running all day every day.

They also don't expect themselves to never be uncomfortable. And I think this is something that academia gets wrong is that we think if you've got a period of time where actually you are working long hours, you are pushing hard. It is quite pressured that that is necessarily a bad thing.

That is not necessarily a bad thing. If you can put around yourself the support structures you need, so that you can feel looked after during that time. So you can look at where, are there things [00:20:00] I can take away that I don't have to think about during this time while I'm pushing hard at it? And where there's an end to it.

So I often say to my members who are in that last sort of throes towards submission, they don't have to come up with a kind of work schedule that is sustainable forever. This is not talking forever. It's about the next two months or the next three months or whatever it might be. And they get to decide what's sustainable for that period of time and what pressures are they gonna relieve of themselves so that they don't have to do them during that period of time to support themselves to be working really, really hard. And then what are they gonna do after it so that they have that period of recovery and have less pressure before the other elements come along.

The other way you can do it is even on a week to week basis. I remember a mentor of mine back in the day, she told me she had a very high, she was like pro vice chancellor level and she told me that not working on weekends was really, really important to her, but she had very [00:21:00] heavy workload that she often struggled to get done within the normal working week and so what she had arranged with her family was that on a Friday night, she would always work late. She was just not available on Friday nights, so they could do their own thing, whatever. She would work as late as she needed to work on a Friday night, but she then wouldn't work until Monday morning. So it was this sort of balance where in order to get her completely free days on the Saturday and Sunday, she kind of compensated with one later night. I also knew people who wanted to be able to be engaged in their family life to be able to put their children to bed and all those sorts of things. And they would sometimes work split shifts, so they'd allow themselves to finish at 2.30 so they could pick up the kids from school so they could do homework and tea and all that fun stuff.

But they would then do a couple of hours after the kids had gone to bed to finish off the things that they hadn't finished earlier. And that was how they balanced it so that [00:22:00] they were meeting their needs, and also being able to engage with the things that were important to them.

The final thing I wanted to say is that I actually think constraint helps, and this is the only place where I think thinking about how much I should be working or I want to work is important, is I highly recommend that in any kind of chunk or phase of time, you know, whether that's this week or this month or this quarter, that you decide how many hours you are willing to give and try as far as possible to intentionally stay within that time.

So I've built this into my week planning process that I teach in the membership. At the beginning of any week, I will decide, okay, how many hours have I got that I'm willing to give this week? And then given that constraint, what stuff am I gonna get done this week?

And the absolute number of hours will vary depending on where I'm at in the quarter, how many [00:23:00] workshops I've got going on, whether it's launch free study of those sorts of things. It will vary a bit depending on those sorts of constraints. It'll also vary at different times of year. But once I know how much I'm willing to give that week, then I decide , what are the most important things to fix into it? And the reason constraint helps so much with that is because of that age old law that probably has a name that I don't remember, which is that work expands to fill the time you give it. If you know that you can flop over into the evening or you can flop over into the weekend, you often end up not wasting time as such, but allocating more time to something that's less important than you would if your time was constrained.

So one of the sort of premises of the role-based time blocking method that I teach is that we try really hard as far as possible to stay within those blocks that we set doing tasks that are associated with that [00:24:00] role and if we have less time to do it, then we make decisions about the scope of the task, about the quality of the task, or about the way we are working on the task to enable us to still get it done within that time.

Okay. Usually people think the only thing you can manipulate is to give a task more time, and that's simply not true. , I did an online life drawing class this weekend, obviously, 'cause you know, hobby Girl and, one of the things they got us to do, we had like a woman in like her little shorts t-shirt thing. And I dunno why I felt the need to tell you she wasn't naked, but she wasn't naked. Um, and. At first, the first few drawings they gave us a minute. So she did a pose, we had a minute to draw it. She did another pose. We had a minute to draw it, and then they gave us some different instructions. And then we had a three minute pose, and then we had a five minute pose and things. And the point is, any of those times were enough time, [00:25:00] as long as you were kind of mindful of what you could get done in that time. Yeah. Could I have drawn better in my one minute ones if I'd had three minutes? Obviously, yes, but I had one minute, and so I did what I could do within that one minute.

When I had three minutes, I did what I could do within that three minutes. None of them were right, none of them were wrong. None of them were very good frankly. But that's 'cause I'm a beginner. But I adjusted my expectations of how accurate it would be, how detailed it would be, how rough it would be, all of those things based on how much time I had to do it.

And we can do that in academia way more than we think. It's actually true of wordcounts as well. Okay, you can explain your entire thesis in 15 words if you had to. You can explain your entire thesis in 250 words. You can explain your entire thesis. In 2000 words. You can spend a hundred thousand words. You just give less detail. You just give a broader brush [00:26:00] picture, the fewer words you have. And the same is true with time. You get to decide not only how long you're going to give something, but also what that means for what you are going to produce within that time. If you are marking and you've got x number of hours to mark, X number of papers, then the way you mark it needs to be adjusted to allow for the amount of time that you have. Expecting ourselves to do a one hour review in 20 minutes is the pathway to absolute burnout.

So I hope you have found today useful. I've taken a question I often get asked, how much should I be working? Hopefully explained why it's not a particularly useful question to ask or to try and get answered at least, and hopefully giving you some guidance about other things that you could be thinking about instead that I hope will address the real issues here of feeling like there's too much to do in the time that you have available. [00:27:00] I really hope that's useful. If you want more specific guidance, you wanna know how I recommend people set up their weeks, how I recommend people review their weeks, what to do if you don't stick to your plans, what to do if you make unrealistic plans. If you want help with all of that stuff, please have a look at the PhD Life Coach membership for PhD students.

If you're an academic, please recommend it to your students as well. The launch starts next Monday on the 26th. You can get in anytime that week between the 26th of January and the 30th of January. But the sooner you get in, the sooner you get access to everything, including the live sessions. So if you have any questions, do let me know. Thank you so much for listening, and I will see you next week.