27 November 2009
By Alistair Muir
What is the ideal work – life balance? Not an easy question to answer. For many researchers perhaps one of the most important things in their life is academic discovery, success and achievement, after all, if this were not the case we would not be researchers. However, the quest for academic success and attainment through the publications, grants, reports and results can seem unending and all consuming and herein lies the danger as we find we cannot turn off. How many of us have found ourselves still in the lab at midnight? How many spend more weekends working than not? How many will be lying in bed at night still commenting papers or drafting reports? Not that all of this is a bad thing of course, and if we wanted a strict nine to five we would not be in academia, but we have to remember that we need more in our lives to stay healthy and sane. We have to realise that we are more than just our research and that our lives must have room for us as well and for those of us lucky enough to have partners or children (or both) or friends and family (or perhaps all of the above) we also have to realise that they need space too and, in fact, we need them to have that space. So, despite the pressures we put upon ourselves, it is essential that we try to step back from time to time and see how we can make more room for us in our lives and try to get the balance right. It is not an easy thing to do, and we'll probably get it wrong more often than right but we must try.
Nick Dickens30 November 2009 at 10:28 AM
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I think that the real question is do longer hours mean that you are more productive? Sometimes, especially in biomedical research, long hours are essential to an experiment. But doing long hours all the time, just to get ahead I don't think is very productive. It is more likely that better planning and project management would be far more useful than working long hours. The good old-fashioned quality versus quantity argument..
Alistair Muir30 November 2009 at 12:16 PM
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Nick, you are absolutely right. How many of the long hours are simply because we have worked inefficiently during the day? Changing the way we work is probably much better than just working longer. Of course, the difficulty comes from admitting that we were doing things wrong in the first place.
Fay Huntley30 November 2009 at 02:46 PM
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I have definately found that planning my days to get the most done and being very protective of my personal time to avoid the feeling that you are doing work all the time is important! As Alistair suggests, more efficiency in the day definaltey helps with this and I've gradually found that I'm doing less in the evenings/weekends when I've had a properly organised day. Fingers crossed this will last as the work is not stopping any time soon!