Is It A Problem That I Don't Feel Overwhelmed?

00:00:00.000 | Hi, this question's from Danny, a postdoc from Texas.

00:00:04.000 | I'm currently a postdoc.

00:00:06.000 | I have heard many times from multiple people,

00:00:08.000 | if you ain't busy or looking tired,

00:00:10.000 | you're not doing it right.

00:00:12.000 | I do not feel busy or tired.

00:00:14.000 | As a matter of fact, I really enjoy being a postdoc.

00:00:16.000 | I've been implementing and following your theories

00:00:18.000 | for a couple years now, which has helped.

00:00:20.000 | But as someone who is striving to get into academia

00:00:23.000 | for teaching and research purposes,

00:00:25.000 | I am nervous if I am going into a field

00:00:28.000 | where if I'm not perceived by people

00:00:30.000 | as being overwhelmed or drowning.

00:00:33.000 | Yeah, this is common.

00:00:35.000 | This is common in academia, because here's the thing.

00:00:38.000 | It's a weird job to be a grad student,

00:00:41.000 | a postdoc, or an assistant professor,

00:00:43.000 | but especially a postdoc or a grad student.

00:00:45.000 | It's a weird job because it, unlike other jobs,

00:00:47.000 | doesn't have this diverse input of tasks and obligations

00:00:52.000 | that you need to be working on all day long.

00:00:54.000 | Your friends went to investment banks,

00:00:57.000 | and they are working 10 hours a day,

00:00:59.000 | and they have spreadsheets they have to fill out

00:01:01.000 | and emails they have to answer and meetings they have to go to

00:01:03.000 | and decks they have to update.

00:01:05.000 | That feels like work.

00:01:07.000 | And then you're a postdoc or a grad student,

00:01:09.000 | and your advisor is like, "Write a paper.

00:01:12.000 | I'll see you at Christmas."

00:01:14.000 | And it doesn't feel like work.

00:01:16.000 | And so there's a tendency that people get worried.

00:01:19.000 | They get anxious about this,

00:01:21.000 | and they want to invent busyness.

00:01:23.000 | They want to invent the same type of overload

00:01:26.000 | that they hear their friends at real jobs talking about

00:01:29.000 | because at least they can tell themselves,

00:01:31.000 | "I'm not lazy. I'm working hard. I'm busy all the time.

00:01:34.000 | So if this doesn't go well,

00:01:36.000 | it's not going to be because I just wasn't doing the work."

00:01:38.000 | I think expansiveness and autonomy and schedules

00:01:40.000 | can be very uncomfortable for people

00:01:42.000 | if they're not used to it.

00:01:44.000 | And so you get a lot of grad students and postdocs

00:01:46.000 | who try to lean into finding pain points of busyness.

00:01:49.000 | But here's the reality is that it's actually,

00:01:51.000 | with some exceptions,

00:01:53.000 | exceptions that typically involve lab work

00:01:55.000 | is very time-consuming.

00:01:57.000 | These are easy jobs.

00:01:59.000 | And I think it's okay.

00:02:01.000 | I love being a grad student. I love being a postdoc.

00:02:03.000 | They're not super demanding jobs.

00:02:05.000 | As you become a professor, it gets more demanding

00:02:07.000 | because there's other types of responsibilities

00:02:09.000 | that are layered on, and then it becomes much harder to juggle.

00:02:13.000 | That's okay.

00:02:15.000 | They're not paying you that much money.

00:02:17.000 | So it's okay that it's not,

00:02:19.000 | "I need to do nine hours a day of busy work."

00:02:21.000 | You are completely safe to sidestep that culture

00:02:25.000 | of, "My hair is on fire, dissertation hell,

00:02:28.000 | everything is so hard, what a hard job,

00:02:30.000 | I'm so overloaded, I'm so busy."

00:02:32.000 | It's okay to say, "I'm working on one research paper,

00:02:35.000 | and I give it three good hours a day,

00:02:38.000 | and then I'm training for a marathon

00:02:41.000 | because I don't really have a lot to do

00:02:43.000 | on a lot of other days." That's okay.

00:02:45.000 | That is a perfectly reasonable schedule for a postdoc.

00:02:49.000 | What was I doing? When I was a postdoc,

00:02:52.000 | I injected a lot of non-postdoc-related things

00:02:54.000 | into my life because, A, it didn't take that much time,

00:02:57.000 | and B, I knew as a professor I was going to have

00:02:59.000 | a lot of other things to do, so I wanted to get used to

00:03:01.000 | fitting the stuff I was doing as a postdoc,

00:03:03.000 | the research, which I would still have to do as a professor.

00:03:06.000 | I was like, "I want to be really comfortable doing that

00:03:08.000 | in a relatively small amount of time,"

00:03:10.000 | because even though I could, as a postdoc,

00:03:12.000 | take the papers I'm working on and find a way

00:03:14.000 | to take up my whole day with it,

00:03:16.000 | I can't do that as a professor

00:03:19.000 | because I'm going to have classes to teach

00:03:20.000 | and service obligations and family,

00:03:23.000 | and I'm going to have way more distractions,

00:03:25.000 | so I better get good now at doing just this thing

00:03:28.000 | that I'm tasked to do as a postdoc, research,

00:03:30.000 | doing this in a reasonable amount of time.

00:03:33.000 | So I did a lot of other things. I wrote a book.

00:03:35.000 | I was sculling. I was taking sculling classes

00:03:38.000 | on the Charles through BU.

00:03:40.000 | I would go for a long midday run and exercise.

00:03:43.000 | I'd run home across to Charles on the Mass Ave. Bridge

00:03:46.000 | and then would exercise on one of the floating docks

00:03:49.000 | and would get lunch and watch a show

00:03:51.000 | and then take the subway back from Charles MGH to MIT

00:03:54.000 | and do a little bit more work in the afternoon.

00:03:56.000 | I mean, I had huge breaks out of my day,

00:03:59.000 | and that was all designed.

00:04:00.000 | I was like, "I cannot let myself get into the mindset

00:04:02.000 | of this work needs to take up the whole day

00:04:04.000 | because everything is going to get

00:04:06.000 | for real busier in the future,

00:04:09.000 | and so if I make this fake busy,

00:04:10.000 | how am I going to handle that in the future?"

00:04:12.000 | So this is all to say you can ignore

00:04:14.000 | that culture of busyness.

00:04:15.000 | If you have good organizational systems,

00:04:17.000 | it sounds like you do. You listen to my stuff,

00:04:20.000 | and you don't have a really hard lab position

00:04:22.000 | where you're overseeing seven grad students

00:04:25.000 | and a bunch of undergraduates as part of a giant NIH grant.

00:04:28.000 | If you don't have one of those situations,

00:04:29.000 | just lean into it. It's a pretty easy job,

00:04:31.000 | and that's great because life will get harder soon enough,

00:04:34.000 | and you can be fine with it.

00:04:35.000 | And as for the question of whether that's going to hurt

00:04:37.000 | your academic trajectory, no one cares

00:04:40.000 | or notices how you feel or how quickly you answer emails

00:04:44.000 | or how busy you are.

00:04:45.000 | All that matters for that is what did you publish,

00:04:48.000 | how good was it, how many people cited it.

00:04:50.000 | That is all that matters.

00:04:52.000 | Some of the most famous academics in history

00:04:54.000 | were basically misanthropes and did nothing,

00:04:58.000 | were pains, were lazy, were irresponsible.

00:05:01.000 | It didn't matter. Papers are all that matter.

00:05:03.000 | So just focus on doing your research well.

00:05:05.000 | No one is going to say, "We wanted to accept you,

00:05:08.000 | and we love your work, and we love your papers,

00:05:10.000 | but we heard that you often don't work past five or whatever."

00:05:14.000 | No one cares. Let's care about your papers.

00:05:16.000 | So lean into it. Postdocs are a great job.

00:05:18.000 | It's a fake job, an awesome job. I miss it.

00:05:21.000 | You're okay not being busy.

00:05:24.000 | Those really are easy jobs.

00:05:25.000 | And they're not easy jobs, but they're hard

00:05:28.000 | because of the autonomy, honestly.

00:05:30.000 | I really do think it breaks a lot of people,

00:05:33.000 | especially at the elite school.

00:05:34.000 | You go to a school like MIT or something,

00:05:36.000 | it's just, "Write some papers. Let me know how I can help."

00:05:39.000 | It really is, "I'll check back in at the end of the semester."

00:05:43.000 | And that can drown you, or it could be super exciting.

00:05:47.000 | And some people are like, "This is great.

00:05:49.000 | I'm writing papers and have all these hobbies and whatever."

00:05:52.000 | And some people just, "I have to find a way

00:05:55.000 | for this to be hard and for me to be busy."

00:05:58.000 | And it's really clear. It's like binary.

00:06:02.000 | You're either one or you're the other.

00:06:05.000 | It's a good job. The easiest jobs I've ever had.

00:06:08.000 | People always think I'm crazy when I say

00:06:10.000 | I wrote a book during my dissertation

00:06:12.000 | because writing my dissertation did not take enough time.

00:06:15.000 | I was like, "How long can I spend on this?

00:06:17.000 | What am I going to do? It's like two hours a day.

00:06:19.000 | So let me write a book at the same time." Unrelated.

00:06:23.000 | My grad students love to hear that from me.

00:06:27.000 | [music]

Is It A Problem That I Don't Feel Overwhelmed?

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