During their
studies, people rarely learn how to organise their work. I, at least, remember
these times as particularly chaotic in this respect. The end-of-term
examinations meant of course the highest mobilization. My clearest memory of
them is always a pair of sweatpants and a sloppy hairstyle, intended to stop
hair from falling in front of the eyes. Many days were passing, though, without
any action plan whatsoever. The decision to do research for living meant
enforcing over myself a work scheme, which wasn’t enforced on me by anybody
from outside. Even people working full-time at the academia are totally
flexible in scheduling tasks other than teaching students.
I’ll
describe here my own method of organising work. It’s not suitable for
everybody, as different people live different lives and have all sorts of other
commitments. But I hope this post proves to be helpful to someone, anyway. The ‘system’
is based on counting real working hours. Due to an extremely high level of
distraction connected to irregular working hours (they give an impression of constant
accessibility to other people), I decided six hours a day to be a reasonable
amount of time, including Saturdays. This rate is only slightly lower than that
in full-time employment, though I venture to say that I often work even more
than it happens to be the case in some institutions. For I don’t count:
- lunch,
coffee or other breaks
- commuting
(e.g. to a library)
-
compulsively checking my Facebook account etc.
- peeping
through the window and other kinds of distractions.
If these
six hours a day are taken seriously – it proves to be quite a lot (and one
should remember that intellectual labour can be really tiring). Keeping up this
slightly repressive system requires counting the ‘minus’ hours, as well: if I
don’t work the given daily amount of time, I should make up for it on another
day.
Planning
every day in advance – on the previous evening – can be really helpful there.
Tasks and specific hours may be written down on a piece of paper or in a calendar.
This schedule isn’t there to be slavishly followed (in practice it never works
out that way). It serves, however, as a reminder that sometimes it might be a better
idea to have a small coffee with a friend met accidentally at the library, than
to engage with him in a prolonged conversation on the meaning of life, which
would inevitably have a disastrous effect on your work plan.
I find it
reasonable as well to have a set of ‘easier’ and ‘harder’ tasks to do. We
should acknowledge that we won’t be always capable of simply ‘sitting there and
writing our thesis’, let alone six hours a day. For me such less demanding
tasks are e.g. composing a formal letter, reading secondary literature or
scanning a text in order to find a specific information in it.
Research
work, although not done under careful supervision, is hard work, if we take it
reasonably seriously. Even so academics have often problems with giving
themselves a break, always trying to catch up with a backlog of unended tasks.
They can even do this without much obstacles when they’re away. But I think
that they need holidays just as much as anybody else. It’s all about finding time
when you can (although you don’t have to) leave your place of residence and
when you can do what you really want (of course, parents spending their
holidays with children would have to give here their own definition of holiday
leisure). Two, three weeks of real holiday break in the summer, one week in the
winter, once in a while a weekend spent for example in the mountains, and in between
sight-seeing in Portugal or an extra trip to attend a family wedding – such an
amount of days off work seems to me reasonable and beneficial.
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| Holidays |
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