Clearly, this is a topic near and dear to all your hearts. And it has generated some really great discussion in the comments. Disgruntled Julie related that her PI asks her to take up the slack for some of the lab parents who have to leave early to pick up their kids (WTF!?!?). Silver Fox chimed in with what I would consider some very reasonable and rational expectations regarding the boundaries of working hours and other priorities (Silver Fox, can I come and work for you? Because I think it will be a cold day in hell before I find someone in my current field with this kind of sanity). Microbiologist XX left a comment that she thought was off-topic, but I really don't think it is:
I despise being told how many hours I should be in the lab or that I need to come in on the weekend. First of all, it isn't really fair and at the end of the day, it doesn't mean anything.
For example, when I am in the lab, I am busy from the time I walk in the door until the time I walk out. I multi-task my ass off. If I have a 30 min. incubation, then I start something new during that time. So, in one 8-10hr day, I get a shit-ton of stuff done. Sure it is super-stressful sometimes, but it is how I prefer to work. If I were to keep this pace up 6-7 days a week, I would go insane. In fact, if I were forced to come in on the weekends, I wouldn't get anymore done, I would probably just cram less into each day.
A different example. One of my co-workers chooses to read news stories and search the internet during all her incubations, etc. She gets way less done than I do in her day and she typically works at least one day every weekend.
So, it seems unfair to put a time expectation or a demand that you work almost every weekend when people work so differently. Personally, I would rather not dick around on the internet during the work day and not work on the weekend. The other student would rather work at a snails pace and put in more hours.
I think that if I have kids, I will be even more efficient during the day, since I know that my time is even more limited.
A lot of this work-life balance thing is observed, measured, and quantified in terms of hours in (or out) of the lab. Since general scientific success might be measured by other parameters (publication records?) for which data points are somewhat few and far between on the scale of day-to-day, it is only natural for our PIs to measure our work ethic and (perhaps inappropriately) our commitment to our project, our lab, our career, and science in general by other means (i.e., hours that our butts spend in the lab).
But as MXX very accurately points out, hours in do not always equal results out. I myself go through peaks of multi-task-like-a-maniac and troughs of faff-around-on-the-internet. And you know what I realized recently? The troughs correspond to when GrAdvisor is in town, and the peaks to when he is traveling. Why? At first glance it doesn't make any sense. He doesn't spend a lot of time in the lab so it's not like he's hovering over my shoulder or distracting me from my work. How is it that his presence in the office down the hall impedes my efficiency?
The reason is that regardless of how efficient I have been during the week, he expects to see me in on the weekends. As MXX pointed out, multi-tasking-like-a-mad-woman is not a sustainable level of activity/efficiency 6-7 days/week. So if I have to come in 6-7 days/week to pacify GrAdvisor, my efficiency takes a major hit. I get tired! And so I spend a lot of my hours in the lab faffing around on the internet when that time could be better spent working. But it doesn't stop there. When I am not being very efficient, I get depressed about my progress (because I am faffing around when I should be setting up more experiments), and general malaise sets in. I get a nasty case of Imposter Syndrome because things are not progressing as I know that they should and I beat myself up for not being a better scientist. It's kind of exhausting -- by 6pm I feel tired and go home even if just another hour could mean another experiment that runs overnight...but since I feel like my effort (or rather hours) applied do not yield results, what's the point? And then I lose motivation to set anything up because it's all going to fail anyway, right? This is not balance.
When GrAdvisor is out of town, I don't have to show up on the weekends to satisfy his accounting of my commitment to my job. As a result I feel free to take the weekends off, and knowing that I will do so motivates me to be much more efficient during the regular week so that I will not feel guilty about having two whole days away from the lab. Because of my somewhat bipolar approach, I find that I want to work longer hours/day when I am multi-tasking-like-a-mad-woman because I am getting SO MUCH DONE! This means that by Friday afternoon I feel that I have earned the weekend off...so I stay home (or go out) and enjoy the other things that I like besides science...and by the time Monday rolls around again I am excited to get back to the lab and see what else I can knock out this week. With this approach I feel that I am more productive in terms of data produced and experiments finished. This is how I know when my work and life are balanced.
In both cases I spend roughly equal amounts of time getting unequal amounts of work done. But my PI tends to measure face-time...did he see me come in on Saturday? If I was being really productive on Friday, why not continue to apply that efficiency on Saturday? If I wasn't all that productive on Friday, why am I not there picking up the slack on Saturday and Sunday?
It's a Catch-22...either way I lose my weekend.
It's a good thing he travels a lot. I couldn't sustain the 6-7 days/week of inefficiency if it happened all the time.
And like MXX, I kind of look forward to the day when I have children and therefore am not expected to do face-time 6-7 days/week...then I will have reason to maintain my super-efficient 5 days/week habit and it will be understood that this is allowed since I will "have a family" in a sense that is very different from the family I have right now.
Posts
8 comments:
It really bugged me as a postdoc when people claimed they spent endless hours in the lab when in reality they spent half the time drinking coffee and gossiping. I'd sometimes get criticized for working approximately 9-5, one day at the weekend if necessary, and longer days if required. I'd point out that when I was there, I actually did work.
Now I find that I work until I'm sick of working each evening, then go home and do non-work stuff there. One day/weekend is still sacred 'do something else' time. I don't measure face time, I don't believe that is a good measure of the productivity of a lab. However, I reserve the right to bust a student who is not productive, and not visible in the lab enough. If you ain't there, you better still have some reasonable level of results ;-)
I have the exact same problem -- I get so much more done when my advisor is out of town, though in my case part of that IS because he loves to be in the lab, standing over my shoulder, poking around my cells, and in general being a big distraction and pain in the ass. But mostly, it's because he has a general expectation of how many hours one should work in a week (and how many days). For what I do, I spend a lot of time using equipment in other labs/departments, and I get held up sometimes because I have to wait until the equipment is free. I can work and work and get all my things ready, but I still can't progress with my experiment right away, because I'm waiting up on the equipment, but I'm expected to sit in lab and twiddle my thumbs, so I wind up wasting time. When PI is here, I dole things out slowly to fill the 12 hours/day that I am supposed to be here, and 6-7 days/week. When he goes out of town, I'll cram everything into 3 days, and then take the rest of the week off until I can use the equipment. I feel no need to sit in the lab pretending to work just because my PI seems to value quantity of hours in the lab over the quality of hours here. It makes zero sense to me.
But, then again, when I am doing some of my protein work, I actually do have 24-36 hour days in which I am running around like a headless chicken, so I guess it evens out in the end. But it still pisses me off that I am forced to sit here twiddling my thumbs "looking" busy because if I were to go home since there is nothing else to do at that point in time with my experiments, my PI would run around the lab demanding to know where I was, and be angry when he found out I went home at 4:00.
Propter Doc - you bring up an interesting point and EtBr sort of speaks to this as well.
I think that it is fine and good for a mentor to bust someone who is not productive - part of being a good mentor is knowing when someone needs a kick in the butt.
However, some advisors seem to forget about the time frame that some experiments require. EtBr is sometimes held up because of equipment availability and when that is the case she has to sit around in the lab and "look" like she's working in order to keep her advisor happy.
For me, the rate-limiting step is often the generation time of my research subjects.
GrAdvisor: How come this isn't done? We talked about it 2 weeks ago?
Me: Yes, we talked about it 2 weeks ago...and the mouse gestation period is 3 weeks as you may recall. I can't perform the experiment until I have the subjects.
In the meantime, there are other things I can do to be productive...but sitting in the lab all weekend pretending to work when I could be more efficient by giving myself a break occasionally isn't one of them.
And you're right...if you're not measuring face time, you should be measuring results...with this caveat in mind: long-term experiments don't (by definition) generate immediate results.
I wrote some about my thoughts on this over in my blog (I tend to swamp other peoples' comments sections). It's going to be hard to change the culture but it has to be possible, right??
Part of the problem is that you/we are letting the face time = our productivity. Its a huge problem in science and one of the reason why former lab was so frustrating. Everyone would notice that I left at 4pm and did not come in on weekends. No one noticed that I am the only one there at 9am. I didn't go for coffee or spend hours chatting in the lunch room. I work, or read blogs during my 3 min incubation steps.
The key is to become confident enough in ourselves such that when someone comments about our lack of facetime we feel throw all our amazing data at them. Which brings back the other problem of no data = lack of work even if you are spending time troubleshooting
@scientistmother -- you also bring up an interesting point, that it's not just our supervisor's that apply this kind of pressure.
[As an aside, I should note that there often inconsistencies in the professed standards and the ones we are actually held to. GrAdvisor says he doesn't care about hours as long as a reasonable amount of work is getting done. Yet, despite the fact that I am making sufficient progress on my long-term studies, the fact that they are not FINISHED yet is reason to expect me to be in the lab every waking hour...even though this does not cause the mice to gestate any faster.]
And now back to our originally scheduled program...I do see this kind of flak tossed around between lab members. There are some people in our lab who 'brag' about how many hours they were here yesterday (and others - ok, it's me - who complain about how many hours they were trying to finish monster experiment last night).
And then there are people who waltz out the door at 3:30pm waving and singing cheerily at the top of their lungs, "Bye guys! I don't have anything else to do today so I'm going home." Which may actually be true, and if it is, good on you for being so efficient.
In my envy though, I admit to feeling like I would like to stab these people in the jugular with my pipet tip sometimes.
Which finally bring me to the point I was originally trying to make: Why don't I feel as though I can leave at 3:30pm on the rare occasion that I've finished what I set out to do by then?
Because I am not only worried about pacifying my immediate supervisor, but I worry too about my reputation as a "serious scientist" with the other people I interact with on a daily basis. They won't be writing my letters of recommendation but I worry that I will gain a reputation as a slacker that will get back to GrAdvisor.
What Crap! If we all held ourselves to a standard of 'stuff done' rather than 'hours present' this wouldn't be an issue.
I have a similar issue except that it's compounded by the fact I'm a nocturnal creature. I would much rather come in at 1pm and leave at 8pm, but no one seems to appreciate this. So I end up coming in at 9am like all the other poseurs and wasting an hr zoned out trying to pump enough caffeine into my veins to get going.
AA - Great job expanding my comment into a post. I think you illustrated my point better than I did. :)
Post a Comment