4 lessons I have learned from 4 years of logging every minute of my work

I have started logging my work 3 months into my PhD. I suspect I did it to keep track of my weekly productivity, but I don’t really remember. Unfortunately, for the three and a half years of my PhD, I have been using a paper-based calendar to note what I have been working on and for how long. It allowed me to use coloured pencils and stickers to decorate my logger, priceless. I still have all these calendars, just did not get around to transferring all these data to some kind of digital format which would allow easy analysis. For the last 4 years however, I have been logging electronically every minute of my work and because of that doing a data analysis was not a hustle.

Why YOU might like to log your academic work?

In academia, majority of us have no idea how much time the things take. No-one measures anything. Everyone is surprised by how long things take. This proves true for all stages of academic career, even established professors.

As PhD students attempt to run their first big research project, they have no experience to base the planning on. For some, everything seems to move slower than it should. This constant feeling of falling behind creates an enormous pressure and anxiety in many PhD candidates. Others on the other hand, underestimate how long research takes, and end up working to little or to slow at the beginning, running out of time by the end. If only someone would clearly told PhD students how long the things will take, it would be so much easier, wouldn’t it?

Considering the above, a few reasons to log your academic work come to mind. If you know how much time each component of your project should take, you could plan accordingly. Not only in terms of your work, but you can also plan your holidays, figure out how many projects you can handle at the same time, and when to start the next project.

Knowing how are you doing with your work as a young researcher would definitely decrease anxiety and worrying. It would also allow for seeing how quick or slow you are in a particular component of research work.

It may be useful to know how much time research take, also from a perspective of hiring someone to help you with your research. Although you logging your research work is just a sample of one, it is still way more data than zero. And now, if you also take some of the data I present below as the second example, you may be able to actually make some informed guesses. The last thing before we start going into details my work:

If you log your work (or know anyone that does), please please contact me. Let’s pull our data together and try to find out how the research work “really” looks like.

1. The main components of work for an academic

You can quickly notice that academic work is about research, writing, teaching and admin, mainly. Writing is a funny thing as it is definitely a part of a research process, but because it is a singular most important component of academic work.

It is not surprising that the biggest chunk of my work is spent actually working on research projects. What surprised me however, is how much time I spend on applying for the next job, updating my cv, writing emails and so on. The things I thought just take a minute here and there (like emails), or few hours from time to time for job application, actually add up to be a considerable chunk of time.

And now the most important fact: big part of my work is writing. One new year I have done this exercise of defining the one skill that would propel my career. That year I have found that is writing (in English). From that time I have made a continous effort to write as often as possible. Now, I have a few projects, this blog being one of them, for which I write regularly. This not only keeps me going, but has made writing easier, or even enjoyable.

I have changed how I log my writing over the years. Throughout the year 2015 I have logged writing separately, as I was finalising my thesis corrections, and writing up my PhD results for publications.But for the other years, I have incorporated most of the writing into the hours logged for a particular project. For that reason, it may be useful to look at writing and research categories together.

2. How much time a particular research task take

Of course, each research project is unique. But I am sure that in any research area, there are some components that could be extracted and measured. I have two examples for you, one is super niche, but the other is pretty general.

Broadly speaking, I am in a health research area. Running a systematic review of the relevant literature is often the first research task you have starting a project. In my estimation, a systematic review should take around 100 – 350 hours of your time depending on the scope. This is from a perspective of being a leader (and later the first author of a publication) and the main executor (first reviewer) of the review.

On the the other hand, if you are a second reviewer (and not the first author), the number of required hours of your work to finish this type of project drops down to only 40. If you also take into account that the systematic review takes at least three months to finish, your input becomes considerably smaller.

The second example I have is writing up a publication. As a novice writer, it took me 100 – 150 hours to write, submit, review and publish my first research articles in international peer-reviewed reputable journals. The difference in hours comes from the difference in review process for each of publication, as some got rejected and had to be resubmitted somewhere else.

3. How having a baby impacted my productivity

Having a baby might have made me less productive for a short time, but in a full year timeframe, it was pretty much the same as I would work if I did not have a baby this particular year. Maybe because I was trying really hard to still do things, but I did not “lose” much. This pattern maybe against the experience of many others. I was finishing my PhD at the time, writing up the results of my PhD for publication and working part time. if I wouldn’t have a baby, I would still not have a full time job at that time.

4. Every year, I work more

This got me thinking. Why this is true. How do I find more time to work? As I moved from finishing off my thesis, working for other people’s projects, to doing postdoc full time, my work obviously changed a little bit. Working on my first manuscripts was exhausting, working for other people’s projects often required me to switch tasks, as I would often work for more than one person at a time. Being a full time postdoc who managed their own work, makes me experiment with most productive set up. Also, obviously as the years go by, I am more experienced in planning my work and life.

Let’s look at the details though. Research work and writing, from taking half of my time, went up to take most of my working time. Teaching declined slowly, and went down to almost zero as I moved to Japan, for obvious reasons – I do not speak Japanese. Although as you can see I spend some time studying. Opportunities to teach in English are limited and not part of my job here in Japan, so I really have to look for them.

To sum up, if you are a PhD student and hope that the further you go in your research career, the easiest it gets. Well… this may not be the case, at least for the first few years. Also, if you want to have a baby, but are afraid that your career will be ruined, don’t panic. It is possible to plan for your family to grow minimising its impact on your productivity.

Limitations

The way I log things changed over these 4 years. For example, when I was writing up my thesis and subsequently producing journal articles, these were separate tasks. Later, writing became a step in each research project. Also, writing blog posts became a separate writing task for this blog, but part of a research group work for the www.HealthyLivingScience.com blog.

Similarly, I have some inconsistences with logging some other tasks too. Writing emails is sometimes logged as admin work, but sometimes it is a part of a research project (e.g., sending recruitment emails).

Each year my work differed substantially in terms of structure, type and responsibility level.

Nonetheless, I hope these data helps you to look critically at your work or at least gets you thinking about how much time the things take in research.

If you log your work, how your data compares to mine?