Hacker News Reader

Comment by p4bl0 | Hacker News Reader

The only acceptable answer to this question is that the question makes no sense.

An academic work is a creative work. And as such it can't be counted in hours. When you do research, you can't really stop working, your brain has no off switch. That's why it is very important that academics loves what they do.

What you can count is hours spent actively doing stuff related to your job: writing papers, reviewing papers, emailing, preparing courses, etc.

And yet the correct answer will be "depends on the week". Some weeks (okay, very rarely) it can be as low as 20 hours, because your mind in too preoccupied by other stuff like your personal life. The good thing is that this is okay, because some other weeks (most weeks in practice), it will be a lot more. Typically if one has a deadline for a paper submission, the two weeks before, you can bet that 60 hours is a minimum. I didn't count but this week-end only I probably worked for more than 10 hours.

View on HN

Of course academic work is creative work, but saying "there's no off switch" is too simplistic. Academics are people too. They prepare meals, watch television, spend time with their kids and spouse, go grocery shopping, go out for drinks, and visit mindless entertainment websites just like the rest of us. They may happen to think about their work during those activities but ,if they do, it's only by accident. The question of how much time they spend in these "leisure" activities vs "work" activities is well-posed enough to have a useful answer. And of course it varies from week to week but that doesn't mean we can't talk about what the distribution looks like. A professor whose average workweek is 60 hours lives a different life than one whose average workweek is 40 hours.

>They may happen to think about their work during those activities but ,if they do, it's only by accident

This says so much about how we think about thinking

That most of us have times we dedicate to thinking about the things that make us money and times we dedicate to thinking about other things? I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Obviously we don't have the strict control to turn our thoughts completely on or off so this doesn't preclude what might be considered "background processing". Still, surely it is reasonable to dedicate some times to some things and other times to other things, even if the things in question are creative processes. For most people, deciding "I'll just work through this new research topic whenever I spontaneously happen to be thinking about it" is probably not their best way to contribute to the field.

>That most of us have times we dedicate to thinking about the things that make us money and times we dedicate to thinking about other things? I'm not sure what's wrong with that. Obviously we don't have the strict control to turn our thoughts completely on or off so this doesn't preclude what might be considered "background processing". Still, surely it is reasonable to dedicate some times to some things and other times to other things, even if the things in question are creative processes.

Of course. After all, humans are computers.

The problem is that the levels of bureaucracy are so high, that we spent a lot of time just managing research, which is not creative at all. And this management of research requires a lot of time, unfortunately.

I would not mind to spend hours during my weekends thinking about scientific problems. The problem is that we must write proposals during the weekends, time that we should spend with our family and friends.

This bureaucratic work hinders creativity.

So, the question is: should scientists do science during our free time and do project management during working hours, as we do now? Or should we try to change how the system works in order to diminish the management workload in order to allow for more time for thinking about scientific problems?

I reply to myself in order to add an example.

I just was told that a proposal we sent a few months ago has been denied due to formal problems (not the content).

Apparently, there is an error of 1.8 € (the price of a coffee) on a total budget of 2M€. And the error was introduced by the software used by the administration handling the call. Our documents were correct.

The work of a scientist is fighting against stupid bureaucrats. Real science? Who wants that!?

I used to feel the same way. I still feel that there's no off switch, but one can still count hours.

With students, peers, and superiors these days, I actively encourage everyone to go home. Our research group, by default, easily encourages everyone to work 50+ hour weeks. I think it's less productive than 40 rested and focused hours.

You can think and dream at home, or lie awake in bed, but it's important to carve out time for everything else in life, too.

The question is funding driven. The funding is dependent on the question "are you working hard enough?", expressed as a bunch of output targets. Failing to meet the targets will result in not having the job. Not necessarily as simple as being fired as an individual; more like having your whole small department, institution, course or subject defunded.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com