the vehicles for the road to success

The question about what to do to become a successful and happy academic is one that pops up regularly in all kind of early career researcher seminars, mentoring sessions and blog articles. Being successful and being able to maintain a life outside academia is a balancing act that does not always work out as good one wishes. In the last few years I have been sitting in a number of "I tell you about my career" talks given by very successful people and I talked to a bunch of senior colleagues down the corridor about this topic. Some points always re-appear in these discussions - they seem to be the core of successful-senior-colleague-wisdom on the topic "success and happiness".

 1) Don't work your ass off

This is so against everything that everyday life in academia tells us. With funding rates going down, with job insecurity, with "publish or perish" it seems like everybody who does not work hir ass off, should better start to polish their resumes for non-academic jobs. But I've heard this sentence quite often and of course it is the key to whole-life happiness. Maybe it is easy to say that one should take time off on the weekend when you are the one with the Nobel-Prize on the shelf. But on the other hand it is essential to allow myself time to recharge my batteries and to actually enjoy my life today - this is not something that should be put on hold until I maybe have secured tenure.

2) Enjoy what you are doing and check once in a while if you are still enjoying it

For me as an ECR, this is the essential bit for my work in academia. With all the insecurity and the continuous search for funding, I better enjoy my work and the opportunities university offers. Maybe I'll become a professor and I can continue doing awesome research, maybe it'll not work out and I have to find something else that interests me and pays the bills. I don't doubt that I would. And if this happens it is better to not have regrets about the years spend in academia. It is easy to miss the point where you stop enjoying your work, because you just have so much on your plate and the piles on the desk don't become smaller. Taking the time once in while to reflect about what I'm doing and if I still like to be where I am, is a very good advice.

3) Be efficient and effective

This is a life-long learning process: tame the procrastination cat in you. Learn how to approach a task that you can finish it in a timely manner. How to not waste time on minor tasks. How to focus on the important things. How to get other people to support you work. Tons of books have been written about this - it's about finding the strategies that work for you and about applying them every day. Sometimes that works - sometimes it doesn't.

4) Have a bread and butter project and have a risky, exciting one as well

One of my super successful colleagues pointed out to me that the people who will be appointed on fixed term positions are the ones who work on the edge of knowledge and who dare to jump into the really unknown.But on the other hand nobody wants to hire a "crazy" person who is only looking for the Holy Grail. University wants to see solid publications, funding agencies - even though they claim that they want to fund novel ideas - want to make a safe investment and your colleagues will take you more seriously if you publish some not so far fetched ideas once in a while. 

5) Don't piss off your colleagues

Because you never know if you meet them again in the future and in which role. Maybe they will have to decide if your paper gets published or your grant gets funded. And even though we all should be unbiased by our personal relationship to someone, we are not. Even if we try. Especially not when the other one just pooped on your lawn. So it is better to choose which fights are really necessary - and some certainly are - and let go the other ones even if it would feel so good to just grmpf$%*.

6) Have friends outside your field or better even outside academia

That helps to see that the world is not evolving around your research niche. That other people have other priorities in life and still can be happy. That working in academia has a lot of perks and privileges. Getting your head off work is necessary to recharge your brain and having a hobby can actually be quite fulfilling as well, e.g. Nobel laureate Brian Schmidt owns a 4-star winery (to take one of the super successful people with super successful hobbies (= ).    

These points alone certainly won't make me a successful academic, but maybe a more happy and interesting one. It's good to realize that life happens now already and that it does not help to wait until an uncertain point in the future to start with being happy. And I go now and bake some cake, because that makes me happy on a Sunday afternoon!

more structure or less?

After all these years of attending classes and having a pre-structured week there comes the time for each student, when they have to start their thesis work. For many this seems to be a scary thing and I remember that I had no clue what was expected of me when I started with my first thesis. In my undergrad institution there was no structure at all that would have helped to get me on the right track. I worked in my group for several months without having a real topic and during the whole thesis period I saw my professor only twice. Looking back I'd say that the PhD student who supervised me, was quite overstrained with this supervision job - something I can very much understand by hindsight. It's not easy to supervise an undergrad student when you have to keep your PhD thesis going at the same time - with a professor who is not around very often. I wasted a lot of time during my thesis and even though I've showed up every day early and stayed late my progress was slow and I wrote until the very last day possible. I would have loved to have a bit more structure given to me during my thesis.

At my current university the system is different. Still it is a big step from doing solely coursework to suddenly having a thesis project to work on. But the system is set up in a way that it gives as much structure as possible, means a Master thesis is designed as a course. A bunch of thought through topics to choose from, fixed starting date, fixed date to hand in the final thesis, a date to hand in the literature overview, a date to hand in a progress report, to give a test talk, .... . From a students perspective it might seem that doing a thesis is just another course you have to attend. But it's not! And this is the point where the expectations of students and their supervisors usually don't match. If you don't attend a course but you do well in the final exam, you might still get the credit. If you do a thesis, you have to continuously work on it. You can't do all the experiments or simulations in the last few weeks and expect everything to work and expect that your supervisor will be there to help 24 hours a day.

Unfortunately, this insight often comes quite late to some of the students. They don't seem to understand that if you start your "Master thesis course" a couple of weeks late that you have to catch up right away if you want to keep your head above the water. And even if you are used to go for travels in the semester break, it might be a good idea to spend this time in the lab instead. A decent literature overview takes more time to prepare and to write than some homework about the content of the last few classes.

Most supervisors (I guess) have a chat with their students about their expectations and about a thesis being so much more complex than a course. But still a lot of them (including myself) complain about students who do not show up for weeks and weeks, who send in terrible drafts seeking advice 24 hours before the deadline and who need several months to complete the safety paperwork to be even allowed to enter the laboratories. How can they not care about their own degree?

How can you make it clear to the students, that with starting a thesis the bar has been set higher? How can you motivate the students, who are not self.motivated enough? Where does this "I don't care" mentality come from? We had a lot of discussions about this but can't come up with a decent answer. Do we need even more structure? Or less? Have we lowered the bar too much and should we fail more students? Do we need to take them by the hand even more or is there something in our way to communicate that the students don't get that we are serious about this?

Are there any strategies out there to get your students on track? I'd love to hear about them.

on productivity

"Be productive" is certainly one of the mantras following me around since I started my PhD. Being productive in the sense of using my mental and time resources well, not slacking around and procrastinating too much, creating some measurable and valuable output. Being productive sounds very easy and I've been to tons of time management seminars and alike to identify and avoid all the things stealing my time and draining my brain. Still, it's a constant process of improvement and failure and a lot of "tomorrow I'll get started". My productivity is a very sensitive fairy. Easily influenced by external circumstances, tiredness, hunger, the degree of productivity follows a certain pattern throughout the day with it's daily maximum fluctuating a lot. I've always envied people who seem to be able to be very present and concentrated throughout the whole day. I'm not as you can see in the graph below:

Whoosh's productivity trend throughout a normal working day

I am one of the people who have to get their most important stuff done in the morning, otherwise it'll not get done at all. Too bad, this conflicts with my desire to sleep a lot. Coffee and naps play an essential role in this pattern and if I'll ever have my own research group there will be a quiet space somewhere equipped with bean bags or hammocks for everyone in need of a nap*.

While this is the general trend of my productivity, the daily maximum can vary a lot from day to day. I'm usually less productive if we have a 40°C day with high humidity or if my office mates decide that 26°C is the perfect A/C temperature setting (I'm more the 21°C type). I'm less productive if something or someone bothers me or if I have too many different things on my plate as well as when the mental pressure to get something done is too low.

But the one thing that can overrule most negative influences on my productivity and keep me working even through bad food coma dips is progress. Seeing the progress of my experiments or paper writing or whatever I'm doing is a huge motivation to keep me going. Sometimes even tiny progress steps are enough to motivate me for another hour of work which I would otherwise have spend in zombie mode. 

So I have to take care that I get in a motivation creating mode as soon as I enter the office. Which means I have to avoid all the pitfalls that distract me from my important tasks. I've mentioned writing to-do lists before and how well it served me during my PhD but somehow failed me now that I am a Post-Doc. I still use to-do lists a lot but I needed to take them to the next level. It is not enough anymore to write up my to-do's for the day in the morning of the same day as this list would be too biased by my momentary preferences and the more unpleasant chunks of work would get pushed away further and further.

So at the moment my motivation strategy involves the following subjects and procedures:

• a general paper list of all of my current projects
• a paper list of the stuff I want to do during a particular week, which I write new every Friday evening for the following week. It contains very specific sub tasks of my general projects as well as all of my appointments and all the tiny bits and pieces which need to be done.
• parallel to this process I give all these tasks and appointments a time slot in my Outlook calendar - esp. time slots reserved for checking and answering my emails! In the beginning I thought it was very strange to structure my big writing tasks as well as tiny stuff like expense reimbursement paperwork with fixed time slots, but after giving it a try for a week I found that it gives me a better feel for how long each task takes and it is quite rewarding when I'm done with a task earlier than planned. And Outlook still allows to shuffle time slots around if necessary.
• as there is always a long list of things on which I can't continue working because I wait for other people's replies, I create follow-up notifications to remind myself to remind others
• on Friday evening I additionally clear of my desk

So before I leave the office on Friday I have a good overview of what to expect next week and I have a non-messy desk to come back to.

• I'll certainly do some work on the weekend, but as all of the tasks will be all on my list for the next week I can cross them off directly on Monday morning on my paper list - yeah!
• Monday morning (and all other mornings) then starts with opening Outlook, but not on the Email page but on the Calendar page. I try to start working on the task I've given myself, which might be an urgent one, but most days I can give myself 2 hours of writing time before I do anything else, before my office colleagues turn up and before the first hunger-dip in my productivity level hits me. 
• The first time I check my emails is after I'm done with my first time slot of the day, which is then usually followed by a coffee break.
• Every task that is finished is then crossed of my paper to-do list - for some reason this visual progress is very important for me to realize what I have done during the day

This kind of pre-structuring of my work has helped me a lot to get going right when I sit down in front of my computer instead of wasting a lot of time checking emails and thinking about what would be the best task to start working on. There are very few days when I can perfectly stick to my plan. But even after a disruption it's easier to just refer back to the plan than to start thinking again about what would be the best use of my time right now.

So forcing myself to create tiny progress steps helps a lot to keep up my motivation and with this my productivity. 
Since I'm working more from home now and with the LittleOne arriving soon, all this structure has fallen apart and was replaced by sleeping longer, enjoying nice breakfasts with my partner, taking regular afternoon naps*, spending an increasing amount of time with my GP and midwife on all the standard check-ups they do here and going through the baby stuff we've got from friends and family. In between I'm writing on my big proposal, asking for equipment quotes, checking the proofs of my latest paper,... .  All very much unstructured and driven by my momentary mood and less productive than it could be. A new structure will be needed at some point, but if and to what extend that's possible with a newborn - we'll see. Not sure LittleOne will fit into Outlook time slots! So any tips and tricks how to handle work with a newborn are more than welcome!

-----------

* This post for example was supported by a food coma nap from 2-3 pm!

Structureless

Why is it sometimes so hard to have a well structured working day? I have gazillion things to do, the uni is still pretty quiet and nobody really distracts me, but still there are some days where I can't finish one thing before I start another. Today I did data analysis for two paper drafts and some literature reading for a third one, just because while working on one I got some ideas about the others and directly had to check it. Then I had to check some more stuff and seconds later I already had forgotten why I actually changed the topic I was working on. This is an ongoing issue for me and I'm not very happy that I have not improved much since I wrote about it last time.

I know that having a plan for each day and each week works very good for me. When I was still commuting to work I was using the time on the train to note down daily plans. Ticking each point off was very motivating. I still have a general to-do list, not really a weekly plan though. But I never made it to having a plan for the whole year or even just a month, with well defined goals and stuff, even though that's supposed to be fantastic as well. Setting up a plan for the whole year scares me even a bit. When I'm really honest I think it would show me merciless that I'll never ever be able to do all the work that I think / wish /dream I could. So it even would be very helpful to become more realistic... *sigh*. Things like this seem to need a lot of fresh attempts to maybe / hopefully / finally master them.

still running....

Conference/vacation time is over and the data analysis was done, the slides were prepared on time and all the students had a measurement schedule before I left. So I actually could enjoy my time off!

The only thing that was unclear was if the lecture will be on or not. The number of enrollments said "no", but the teaching committee did not meet until a week ago. And even though the enrollments were below the official threshold they decided that my course will be on - a week before the first lecture had to take place. Yeah! Great fun! That will keep me busy for the next weeks.

And of course not everything worked out with my well planned measurement schedules for the students. One of them needs access to a shared lab and for some reason her electronic access was not activated during the last weeks, even though all the paper work was done - most likely because the main person in charge was on leave and nobody felt particularly responsible to take over the job. As the student is just with us for a couple of weeks this "laziness" delayed her project a lot and so her schedule will be busy as well - and mine with it.

Additionally, there are some reports with deadlines coming up, so it seems that at least until the lecture is over I'll be the first one in and the last one out of the office. Double-yeah!

A post-doc colleague of mine said once to me, that I should enjoy the first 18 month of my post-doc time. Afterwards it would start to be very stressful. He seems to be totally right!

Oohh, and one thing about the financial situation: the commencement of the new taxation rules (LAFHA) has be moved to September and even then it's still not clear who will be affected how much. I guess, everybody who moved house, sold their car, quit their job,... because of the expected massive net pay reduction, feels a bit taken for a ride. Everybody else is quite happy about this new announcement - me, too!

leaving on a jetplane

The last weeks have been a bit crazy! After two long and more or less successful experimental sessions with lots of data to analyze, there was not much time to settle back in the office. One of our collaborators from the experimental session stayed a few days longer and we discussed and pre-processed our data - and had a few lunches/dinners/beers. Directly after that our group got "swamped" with short term exchange students, who all need the same pieces of equipment to do their projects. And of course they all just have limited time, whereof a lot is already taken by safety instructions and paperwork. All their projects are related to what I'm doing, so I'm their main contact person. Which is sort of great, because they are in very different stages of their studies and its great to see them progress. But of course it takes up a lot of time. 

At the end of the week I'll leave for a combined conference/vacation trip and until then there is still a bit of data analysis on my table and ... yeah .... the conference talk needs to be prepared and I still didn't come up with a great way to present my data. After the conference there may or may not be my first lecture to be given - which is as well not amazingly prepared yet. I mean, the first lecture - I refuse to think about the rest of it for now. Because maybe the number of students enrolled is too low and then the whole course is skipped - so my motivation to prepare a lot is quite low.

Sounds all like bad time management, I guess. But until the deadline/departure of the plane everything will be organized, slides will be prepared, I'll know if the lecture will take place and all the exchange students will have a plan for the time I'm not there and they will do great stuff and present exciting results when I'm back!

This is how it will be!

other peoples deadlines

A deadline getting serious because I myself mess up my scheduling is one thing. Bad scheduling that gets additionally messed up because other people can't hold their deadlines and they "need my help" is something totally different:

my boss decided that I should do some writing for him, not much and even a nice task - just that his deadline was already last week, so I have to squeeeeeeeeeeeeeez this task into my already tight schedule of this week. But as I wanted to make "getting up earlier" a habit anyways, this is just a bit of extra motivation ...

deadline coming up

Finally, after 19 posts without a single deadline topic, I can proudly present my first serious deadline since quite a while. And it is getting serious! 

There is a major external experiment coming up next week, for which half a truck of samples needs to be prepared. The samples come from two different collaborators. One of them has send the samples in way before schedule, so I had to delay the whole preparation process quite a while, to build up the right amount of mental pressure for this task. Even before this threshold value was reached, I checked if all the equipment needed for preparation was there - and, of course, it was not. Some significant parts got lost and the PhD student, who most probably new where they could be, was away for a few weeks. It took a while until we found out that some not-authorized person had "borrowed" the equipment and broke it in action - the secret person and the PhD student knew about it, but it seems they were all too busy to inform somebody. This first issue was luckily fixed very quickly and I was still relaxed in schedule.

Sample prep was already progressing well this morning, when I realized that the prep lab will be blocked by student classes half the week and I have to squeeze my prep time in between classes, group seminars, meetings about the upcoming experiment,.... - there goes my "still relaxed in schedule". But finally the other half of the half a truck of samples arrived today, so at least I can't blame it on anybody else anymore (= .

So the next days will be a great practise in prioritizing and keeping calm (and maybe humming "soft kitty" once in a while).

adjustments to the timetable

Recently I admitted to myself that something seems to go pretty wrong since I'm here. I used to be much more productive and organized during my PhD, but here I'm easily distracted, esp. by all the random thoughts in my head. So I decided to put my focus-helmet back on and dig out some of the old strategies which helped so much in the past.

One of my main problems - and this sounds silly now - is the general working culture here. At my former uni I worked mostly from 8am to 6pm, because I was commuting and bound to the timetable of the trains. This external condition structured everything a lot. If you walk in here at 8am in the morning, you'll maybe meet one or two grad students but certainly no postdocs. This was very confusing during my first days at work, but I adapted very fast and by now I come to work around 9-9:30am - even though I know that my most productive time is in the morning and the best thing I can do in the afternoon is a nap.

So this will be adjusted back to the original time schedule and I'll try to come to work an hour earlier, even though I really got used to sleeping very long.

To make things even more complicated I decided to combine this task with a second one, inspired by Tanya’s fantastic blog and the book The Clockwork Muse. I realized how difficult it is for me to find time for my writing, when there is no boss who gives you a deadline and asks for drafts. So I'll test some strategies to get my own self-motivated and self-structured writing going, starting with dedicating some fixed time slots of my working hours to the task "writing" and then working my way through all the posts on Tanya’s blog - maybe.

I'm very excited about these adjustments, eve though they seem tiny and very straight forward - and then we'll see what a quiet office and one more hour of productive morning time can do to my research.

what your student wants

Recently, I sat in a very good talk about supervision and what students expect from their supervisors. It was a long list - lets see what I remember of it...


You students want you to ...
... be a respected and successful researcher
... be approachable
... respect the differences in each others characters
... give them freedom in their work
... guide them
... be a friend
... respect their work
... respond quickly, when they gave you something to do
... be in interested in and to push their career
... manage their projects
... tell them what's the next step
... take care of them


They want you to be a bit teacher, a bit friend, a bit role model, a bit manager, a bit parent, a bit boss, a bit psychiatrist - each of them in a different weighting. Seems as if one could only fail their expectations - always a good reason to relax a little bit...

listen and think - no way

I really do envy people, who can just put their headphones on, vanish into their own world of music AND work at the same time. As soon as I have music on my ears, my whole brain seems to be completely focusing on that. I'm maybe able to do some stupid, repetitive data analysis stuff, but nothing more than that. No clear thought can move through my brain without being totally shaken into bits and pieces. I can start reading the same sentence 10 times and if it's longer than 5 words, I'll not make it to the end of it. This gets even worse, when someone else has headphones on and I slightly hear his/her music - that drives me nuts - even if its "good" music. At my last position I was commuting by train each day and I gave up the idealistic thought of "doing a bit of reading on the train" very quickly, because in public transport there is always at least one person, who seems to be half-deaf but still has to listen to music in public. Or forgets to actually plug in the headphones and doesn't realize that the French Chansons sound strange today.

Is that genetically fixed or are there any tricks or trainings to overcome this brain shutdown during appearance of music? Yoga? Scented candles? Mixed pickles?


(This article was written, while my neighbors were indulging in Indian pop-music)

do it!

I love list! To-do lists! Where I can write down all the tasks that are swirling around in my head. I use to-do lists for my private and my professional me, so I don't loose track no matter what.

My first to-do lists date back to when I was a teenager and I noted down pretty much everything, just to have the joy of ticking tasks off the list a lot more often.

During my undergrads I had list of what I would like to do (seeing a movie, meeting with friends, writing a letter, going to a concert,...), because time passed by while I often was stuck in front of the TV or the computer and I needed to be reminded that my life can be more exciting than that. 
I still use this type of lists and they are very helpful to prevent me from "being too tired" every evening. By now I'm not using paper lists for that but a program that pops up little notes on my desktop (still sitting too much in front of my computer) once a week and once a month. They are reminding me to write postcards to friends, to go for a swim, to see a movie/go to the theater, to read a paper that is not related to my subject just out of curiosity or to cook something I've never tried before. I had a note that was popping up each day, which said "read a random Wikipedia article" and "make 20 sit-ups" - but my private me got bored pretty fast by the daily to-do list.
My most professional "professional" to-do lists were made during my PhD thesis. I was commuting every day to uni and used that time to make a list with the tasks for the upcoming day. And I became extremely good at judging what kind of work and how much of it I could handle. Sitting in the train on my way home in the evening with a completely ticked of list was always very satisfying.
For some reason this concept does not work as good anymore. Dealing with three PhD students plus my own projects and the responsibilities in the lab gives me the feeling that I can't plan my day beforehand anyways. So I sort of stopped trying. I started weekly list but even that is chaotic and often enough I can only tick off stuff like fixed appointments. I'm not sure what's the real cause for my to-do list dilemma: is it really the bigger diversity of my projects or maybe the lack of progress control by other people / supervisors? Do I become lazy or is it just bad time management? 
Maybe I need to find a new way to kick my own butt, at least the professional one - but I'll always love to-do lists!