Have you entered the New Year with renewed motivation and a spring in your step, or has the pressure to reflect and set goals completely overwhelmed you? Sara Zsadanyi shares her recommendations for taking another year of research in your stride. Maintain a healthy working environment, find a work-life balance, and remain productive and organised!
Ah, the new year. A moment of excitement and passion. We’re all busy making resolutions, with a vision of a ‘New Me’ who, by December, is going to be running 10K every weekend, reading a book a week, publishing 5 articles in high-quality journals, and who somehow also has the time to juggle all of life’s responsibilities. But how many of us stop to think and reflect on the last year? In 2023, I heard about so many students experiencing burnout, PIs and professors who were considering whether the long slog to tenure was worth it, and I, myself, felt the pressure mount until I had to take a step back and re-evaluate whether sacrificing my own health was worth finishing my doctorate more quickly.
It's about time we give our resolutions an overhaul. We need to think about who we were last year, and whether the systems (or The System) are fostering a healthy, balanced approach to research. Here are some practical strategies to combat overwork, boost productivity, and foster a healthier mindset that you might want to think about.
1. Find Your Working Hours
You’ve probably heard it before, but I’ll say it again: you are a person before you are a researcher. In this fast-paced world of research, it’s easy to get caught in the trap of working long hours and never fully switching off from your research ideas.
Establishing clear work hours, and sticking to them, can help create a healthier work-life balance. Make it a habit to switch off your computer at a set time each day, giving yourself the much-needed mental, and physical, break to recharge. This means, if you’ve said you’re going to switch off at 5PM, you’re not going to respond to your supervisor’s 10PM email, under any circumstances! Treat it like the French do - you have the right to disconnect!
Understanding your peak productivity hours is a crucial part of this. Identify the time of day when you're most focused and energetic, and make sure you use that time for your most important tasks. If you’re able to come in at ‘weird’ hours which align with your night-owl lifestyle, take advantage of it! If you don’t have that flexibility at work, try to identify hours within the 9-to-5 within which you can reserve menial tasks, like responding to emails, for the time when your brain is tired. Little tweaks to align your work with your natural rhythm will go a long way!
2. Take Regular Breaks
A tired mind is not the optimal condition for productive and interesting work. Something else we need to normalise in our working environment is taking breaks, because, in reality, nobody can work for 4 hours straight on intense, information heavy work, like writing or data analysis. Schedule regular breaks to rest your eyes and let your mind wander; don’t just switch from the computer or bench to your phone! Make sure that you move away from your desk: grab a cup of tea or coffee and a workmate – so you can spread this good habit – and head outside to chat about anything, anything, but your work, for five minutes. Or go out for a ten-minute walk around the block with your favourite music playing, letting your brain chew on ideas subconsciously. When you come back, you should feel refreshed enough to tackle your research again, with fresh eyes.
3. Lead by Example
Fostering a healthy working environment is the responsibility of all workers, at any stage. It is important to set the right example for others around us. This is especially true when those in earlier stages are first-generation students or researchers, as your lab may be their very first insight into research life. For example, if I come into the lab every weekend, or I work 10 hours per day, my master's students are going to pick up on this. I may not have bragged about my working hours, or said that I expect them to do the same, but because of the power imbalance and hierarchical nature of academia, they will feel an underlying pressure to impress you by replicating what you do. Also, ensure you call unhealthy working habits out; if you are leading a research group, and a postdoc is bragging about staying in until midnight in front of your masters students, be very clear that this is not something that you encourage within the lab.
4. Prioritise Openness and Honesty
Embracing openness and honesty about the difficulties we face in academia helps us to get the help we need, and helps others to feel less alone. If we can establish a workplace culture where we discuss difficulties and support each other, this can make the research journey less daunting. Sometimes, simply sharing your experiences with others might help them to reconsider the way they approach their own work!
5. Break Projects Down into Smaller Tasks
One major problem with the work we do in research is that many of our projects, whether they are papers, experiments, or theses, take months from start to finish. If you’ve ever had the experience of sitting in front of your blank page, wondering what to write or where to start, you know exactly how it feels to be at the beginning of a project wondering how on earth you’ll get to the end of it. That’s why we have to take these projects and break them down into many bite-sized pieces.
This can work on a macro and a micro level. For example, when starting a new project, write down all of the main steps you need to take, such as ‘Experiment 1’, ‘Data Analysis’ and ‘Write article to send to journal’. Within each of these main steps, there are bite-sized pieces, such as preparing materials for your experiment, or writing a limitations paragraph. As you begin a main step, jotting down the smallest possible steps within it might help you to see that this large project is more manageable if you can just get one or two tasks done every day.
The same can be said for viewing your whole year. Long-term goals can be exceptionally overwhelming, difficult to set, and many of us don’t check in with them throughout the year to ensure that we are on track. Think instead of 3-month goals, 1-month goals, or even weekly goals that align with your larger objectives. This will help you to monitor your progress more frequently, and it should feed into creating your bite-sized tasks.
6. Make a Daily Commitment
The last, and most important, habit I’m bringing into this new year is a daily commitment. Now, this changes all the time. Right now, for example, I’m in a heavy writing phase, and so I have a daily commitment to myself that the first 30 minutes of my work day is focused writing time. Consistency is so important in research. We can get distracted, or be asked to re-prioritise to help with something else in the lab, and end up disconnecting from our own work for weeks at a time. We need to carve out a set amount of time in our day that cannot be interrupted by other tasks, whether that’s five minutes or two hours. A little bit of time each day on the tasks that move our research forward is far more productive than cramming all of our work into one week.
Implementing these strategies can pave the way for a healthier work environment, increased productivity, and a more positive outlook on your journey through research. As you embark on this new chapter, remember that small, consistent changes can lead to significant transformations over time. And finally, remember that, just because the new year has come and gone, doesn’t mean that you can’t make positive changes to the way you work starting now.
This article was written by Sara Zsadanyi and edited by Rebecca Pope. Interested in writing for WiNUK yourself? Contact us through the blog page and the editors will be in touch!
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