Hi, this question's from Danny, a postdoc from Texas. I'm currently a postdoc. I have heard many times from multiple people, if you ain't busy or looking tired, you're not doing it right. I do not feel busy or tired. As a matter of fact, I really enjoy being a postdoc.

I've been implementing and following your theories for a couple years now, which has helped. But as someone who is striving to get into academia for teaching and research purposes, I am nervous if I am going into a field where if I'm not perceived by people as being overwhelmed or drowning.

Yeah, this is common. This is common in academia, because here's the thing. It's a weird job to be a grad student, a postdoc, or an assistant professor, but especially a postdoc or a grad student. It's a weird job because it, unlike other jobs, doesn't have this diverse input of tasks and obligations that you need to be working on all day long.

Your friends went to investment banks, and they are working 10 hours a day, and they have spreadsheets they have to fill out and emails they have to answer and meetings they have to go to and decks they have to update. That feels like work. And then you're a postdoc or a grad student, and your advisor is like, "Write a paper.

I'll see you at Christmas." And it doesn't feel like work. And so there's a tendency that people get worried. They get anxious about this, and they want to invent busyness. They want to invent the same type of overload that they hear their friends at real jobs talking about because at least they can tell themselves, "I'm not lazy.

I'm working hard. I'm busy all the time. So if this doesn't go well, it's not going to be because I just wasn't doing the work." I think expansiveness and autonomy and schedules can be very uncomfortable for people if they're not used to it. And so you get a lot of grad students and postdocs who try to lean into finding pain points of busyness.

But here's the reality is that it's actually, with some exceptions, exceptions that typically involve lab work is very time-consuming. These are easy jobs. And I think it's okay. I love being a grad student. I love being a postdoc. They're not super demanding jobs. As you become a professor, it gets more demanding because there's other types of responsibilities that are layered on, and then it becomes much harder to juggle.

That's okay. They're not paying you that much money. So it's okay that it's not, "I need to do nine hours a day of busy work." You are completely safe to sidestep that culture of, "My hair is on fire, dissertation hell, everything is so hard, what a hard job, I'm so overloaded, I'm so busy." It's okay to say, "I'm working on one research paper, and I give it three good hours a day, and then I'm training for a marathon because I don't really have a lot to do on a lot of other days." That's okay.

That is a perfectly reasonable schedule for a postdoc. What was I doing? When I was a postdoc, I injected a lot of non-postdoc-related things into my life because, A, it didn't take that much time, and B, I knew as a professor I was going to have a lot of other things to do, so I wanted to get used to fitting the stuff I was doing as a postdoc, the research, which I would still have to do as a professor.

I was like, "I want to be really comfortable doing that in a relatively small amount of time," because even though I could, as a postdoc, take the papers I'm working on and find a way to take up my whole day with it, I can't do that as a professor because I'm going to have classes to teach and service obligations and family, and I'm going to have way more distractions, so I better get good now at doing just this thing that I'm tasked to do as a postdoc, research, doing this in a reasonable amount of time.

So I did a lot of other things. I wrote a book. I was sculling. I was taking sculling classes on the Charles through BU. I would go for a long midday run and exercise. I'd run home across to Charles on the Mass Ave. Bridge and then would exercise on one of the floating docks and would get lunch and watch a show and then take the subway back from Charles MGH to MIT and do a little bit more work in the afternoon.

I mean, I had huge breaks out of my day, and that was all designed. I was like, "I cannot let myself get into the mindset of this work needs to take up the whole day because everything is going to get for real busier in the future, and so if I make this fake busy, how am I going to handle that in the future?" So this is all to say you can ignore that culture of busyness.

If you have good organizational systems, it sounds like you do. You listen to my stuff, and you don't have a really hard lab position where you're overseeing seven grad students and a bunch of undergraduates as part of a giant NIH grant. If you don't have one of those situations, just lean into it.

It's a pretty easy job, and that's great because life will get harder soon enough, and you can be fine with it. And as for the question of whether that's going to hurt your academic trajectory, no one cares or notices how you feel or how quickly you answer emails or how busy you are.

All that matters for that is what did you publish, how good was it, how many people cited it. That is all that matters. Some of the most famous academics in history were basically misanthropes and did nothing, were pains, were lazy, were irresponsible. It didn't matter. Papers are all that matter.

So just focus on doing your research well. No one is going to say, "We wanted to accept you, and we love your work, and we love your papers, but we heard that you often don't work past five or whatever." No one cares. Let's care about your papers. So lean into it.

Postdocs are a great job. It's a fake job, an awesome job. I miss it. You're okay not being busy. Those really are easy jobs. And they're not easy jobs, but they're hard because of the autonomy, honestly. I really do think it breaks a lot of people, especially at the elite school.

You go to a school like MIT or something, it's just, "Write some papers. Let me know how I can help." It really is, "I'll check back in at the end of the semester." And that can drown you, or it could be super exciting. And some people are like, "This is great.

I'm writing papers and have all these hobbies and whatever." And some people just, "I have to find a way for this to be hard and for me to be busy." And it's really clear. It's like binary. You're either one or you're the other. It's a good job. The easiest jobs I've ever had.

People always think I'm crazy when I say I wrote a book during my dissertation because writing my dissertation did not take enough time. I was like, "How long can I spend on this? What am I going to do? It's like two hours a day. So let me write a book at the same time." Unrelated.

My grad students love to hear that from me.