
How many hours a week should academics work? - samclemens
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/how-many-hours-week-should-academics-work
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p4bl0
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.

~~~
ryanmonroe
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.

~~~
vtlynch
>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

~~~
ryanmonroe
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.

~~~
vtlynch
>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.

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yodsanklai
It also depends where you work and what your ambition is. Not all academics
work in US top-ranked institutions.

Personally, I'm tenured and I work very little. I don't do much research
anymore. I teach about 10 hours a week, which amounts to 20-30 hours of
effective work (including grading, various meetings, administrative work).
Besides that, I try to keep up to date with the latest developments that
pertain to the subjects I teach. I also try to switch topics regularly so I
keep learning new things. I attend research talks and follow my colleagues
research.

Because I don't do research, I can't expect any promotion and I feel a bit
like an outsider. If I was to do meaningful research, then I would have to
neglect some of the teaching, and work much more. I'm not entirely happy with
this situation, but it's the best compromise I found.

EDIT: my office mate has a research-only position with almost no
administrative overhead. He's not overworked, supervises a couple of phd
students and postdoc, and is reasonably well-known in his field.

Just to say that depending on the institution, country and personal ambitions,
working conditions can differ greatly.

~~~
greggarious
Yeah, I have a friend who is a "research scientist" \- he just does research,
no teaching, and gets a decent salary. Good gig, except it's soft money so
there's a little less security than your converse.

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VLM
If the population has 100K people who think being a prof would be a cool job,
graduate 1000 PHDs per year qualified to be a prof, and have 100 job openings
per year across the world to actually be a prof, you can expect that the
selection process will winnow down based on very easy to measure and "justify"
metrics like demographic membership and hours of butts in seats, not to
mention publish or perish.

No matter how small of a group you're in, there's always someone who loves
their family, themselves, friends, hobbies, or life, less than you do, and in
the modern hyperconnected world your boss wants to replace you with that
person, because we're all interchangeable fungible cogs that turn salary into
production metrics.

~~~
lgieron
I wonder why you are downvoted. This sounds like a pretty accurate
description.

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mironathetin
We shouldn't forget that life is a marathon not a sprint. I personally make
sure I am not tired while I work. If tired I found out that I make mistakes
that I have to repair the next day. This cannibalizes my concentrated time on
this next day, so I try to avoid this. Of course, if tired stupid work can
still be done unless it eats into the recreation (which is: make sure you are
not tired the next day).

I hardly know anyone who is effective beyond the usual 40 hours week. I
attended meetings with totally overworked colleagues which did not come to a
goal after hours of blabla. I also attended meeting with clear thinking
colleagues which ended with a week of work for everybody after 30 minutes of
discussion. Everybody awake, well prepared and belonging in that meeting. But
here everybody has to find its own best performance limits.

I also agree with other comments that we should not work more, but better. We
automatize work to win time and enhance quality of life, not to get into
competition about less and less work. If the wall street banker don't get that
- fine with me. <arrogance>This is certainly not the only thing they don't
get. </arrogance> But I also wouldn't count bankers as academics.

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sevensor
> Academic work is obviously very different from using a lathe in a factory.
> It requires creativity, intense intellectual effort and the social skills to
> deal with colleagues

I submit that the author hasn't spent much time around highly skilled lathe
operators.

(edit: formatting)

~~~
roel_v
I have (and welders, and carpenters, etc), and I'm in academics now, and it's
nonsense to compare the amount of intellectual effort the two require. Not to
dismiss the skills of tradesmen, but let's stay realistic here.

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buro9
This is a sample size of 1, but my wife is currently averaging about 70 hours
per week at a Russell Group university. That's the average number of hours, it
is frequently higher.

She works every evening and nearly every day of the week ( only seldom taking
a full day off on a weekend).

As an early career lecturer in the UK she is currently (this term):

* teaching 60 students (this definition means marking the essays of 60 students, 11k words = 660k to be marked at end of this term)

* convening two modules (researching, writing the module materials, etc)

* lecturing 6 times per week to at least 50 students per time (including prepping all of the material for that)

* running large lectures for 300 students 2 times per week

She is also:

* writing and publishing 4 papers this term

* working on her book proposal (initial chapter from her PhD)

* working on a trip later this year for which she has received a research grant

* completing teacher training, this is supposed to be 160 hours of work this term that she has to find, no work has been removed from her to make time for this

* presenting 2 papers, 1 of those at Cambridge

* working in the local community, every Monday she works with a local group and this is required as the University measure "impact"

* mentoring students and having to make herself available for student consultations, this takes up at least 12 hours per week (not including the waiting time between students which is context switching and difficult to utilise)

Somewhere in here she still has to read and consume enough information in her
field to be able to have ideas on where to take these things next term.

She is so very close to quitting academia after three years of sustaining
these hours with only 2 weeks off per year (that's all she can afford to
take).

We had the conversation again yesterday, about what she might like to do
instead. She does love researching and her field, but she is being absolutely
crushed by the workload.

On top of all of this, she needs to look to me to pay (fully) for her vacation
as her salary is barely £30k (though if she sticks it out another two years
she'll qualify for a £600 pay rise!).

All I want is for her to be happy, but it's been a long time since she's been
happy in academia. The unbelievable workload is killing her love of the
subject.

This comment on the original article sums it up:
[https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/how-many-hours-
wee...](https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/how-many-hours-week-should-
academics-work#comment-6147)

Hours are not measured, only "student satisfaction", "papers published",
"impact"... output is the only thing measured, and the required output does
not fit into less than 60 hours per week, and if you actually want any career
progression or to do a quality job then the hours it takes is much higher.

~~~
_delirium
Lecturer in the U.K. seems worse than most places, even the relatively high-
pressure U.S. standards. As far as I can tell from the outside (though with
some good colleagues who work there), U.K. universities seem to want the
research output and grant funding of U.S.-style "tenure-track research
faculty", but without being willing to give the relatively low teaching loads
that U.S.-style research faculty have, instead having teaching expectations
more akin to what in the U.S. are called lecturers or teaching faculty, or
just regular faculty at universities not considered research universities
(these faculty in the U.S. _don 't_ have particularly high research/grant
expectations). And to sweeten the pot, they also offer fairly poor pay.

The one big advantage seems to be that job security comes much quicker. The
U.S.-style "tenure clock", where you have six years to either be promoted or
leave, is pretty stressful. While it seems that many Lecturer positions in the
U.K. turn into permanent positions relatively quickly, and don't have the same
up-or-out pressure.

~~~
buro9
> The one big advantage seems to be that job security comes much quicker. The
> U.S.-style "tenure clock", where you have six years to either be promoted or
> leave, is pretty stressful. While it seems that many Lecturer positions in
> the U.K. turn into permanent positions relatively quickly, and don't have
> the same up-or-out pressure.

My wife is at the University of Exeter and has a 5-year probation period with
measured goals after each year.

Few to none of the goals have time allocated within her regular workload. The
stress here is very real.

------
Shivetya
They need to separate out those who teach from those who don't. Then you can
get a better idea of who is working too much.

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PaulHoule
I know a professor who has written articles for Parade magazine about how to
improve your lawn.

This guy is going in every direction at once and he regularly runs out of gas
when driving to rural locations. Definitely he has so much going on that he
doesn't think straight all the time.

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cm2187
They need to work twice as much than us. Flipping burgers during the day to
pay for their studies and doing their studies at night!

------
bayesianhorse
If you love what you do, you'll never work an hour in your life. So maybe
academics shouldn't work at all, since the compensation isn't worth doing
something you don't love ;-)

~~~
pdpi
That's absurd. No matter how much I love what I do, spending more than a
certain amount of time at it makes me tired. Tired me makes mistakes that
fresh me has to fix. Tired me produces less overall output for the same amount
of effort put in. If what I want is to maximise output, stopping to rest is
the only rational choice.

Also, the implicit assumption is that, if you love what you do, you don't love
doing anything else. I want time to devote to activities other than the work I
so love. Much of that time can and does end up producing useful cross-
pollination with my day job, but that's just gravy.

~~~
omegaham
As the saying goes, "If you tell me to chop down a tree in six hours, I will
spend the first three hours sharpening the axe."

Swinging a blunt axe at a tree does nothing but keep you from devoting time to
sharpening the axe.

