It's off to work we go...

Carrying on the theme from my previous post 'The Science Factory' I wanted to post about working hours.  Again, I am sure that this will be something that it not unique to science and long working hours are common to other careers (outwith research) but I can only speak from personal experience.  Really I have a question, do long working hours produce more and better research?

Having just moved to the west of Scotland I have a great commute to work, I live 10 minutes walk from Loch Lomond and if I catch the right trains my journey is 30 min to the nearest station then 10 min walk to the university.  Yes it rains a lot, but you'll get no complaints from me.  So the 'right trains' get me to work at 8.40 in the morning and I leave at 5.20 pm in time for my train home.  This is a wonderful working day, I have almost 8 hours of work time and can still have a nice hour for lunch and breaks.  I realise that for a career researcher I am in a highly unusual situation, most of the PIs around me are in when I get to work and most will still be there when I leave.  Post-docs tend to suffer from a sort of presenteeism, they may (or may not) come in later but they work late into the evening and often weekends, etc with their 'hours as required' contracts.  But do they do better research, or do they just feel a pressure to work all of these hours for the sake of it? 

Back to my question, do long hours improve research,  I think the answer is no – and those who work long hours just for the sake of it are kidding themselves - but please feel free to comment.  I understand that sometimes an experiment needs 48 hours of time-points, weeks of cell culture to start with and all sorts of nitty-gritty preparation, but good time management and project planning will get you further than just being present in the lab.  If post-docs were entitled to overtime I can guarantee that group leaders and heads of department would magically find ways to better manage their staff and organise their research.

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1. Matthew Salois02 December 2009 at 08:13 PM

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   You make a good point, Nick. I generally find that longer hours do not produce better or more results. However, I find this to be truer if I am working on just one or two things as opposed to many. If my day is spent just working on my primary project, I can really only focus on it for no more than 6 hours. If I do not give my mind something else to work on, like another research project, my mind wanders and I make mistakes. This is the age old quantity-quality tradeoff. I do find I can get more done in a 9-10 work day if I diversify what I am doing. Say I work on my primary project for 5 hours and my own research for another 3 or 4 hours. But with things like a work schedule I imagine it all comes down to personality and what works best for the individual at hand. Honestly, I would prefer to be in Paris!