Working Hours: A Synthesis

[Warning: Long Post]

Thanks for all your comments on my previous post! There were many really interesting points made, so I thought I would continue some of the discussion here.

First, the previous post was not intended to disparage people who work 40-hour weeks. Nor is the distinction between 40 versus >40 hours necessarily along the lines of blue- versus white-collar jobs. I have aunts, uncles, and cousins who work blue-collar jobs. Some work fewer hours than I do and some work more. Most people I know, including me, strive for shorter work weeks as EcoGeoFemme does.

The problem is that, for many of us, 40 hours a week is insufficient for achieving the level of success in our professions that we desire. Perhaps we ought to heed Arbitrista's and CAE's suggestions to get our priorities straight and develop healthier and more realistic perspectives on work and success. But as Propter Doc points out, some of us are simply too much of overachievers to be willing to ease up on the gas pedal.

Is working long hours really necessary for success? Clearly, being efficient at work helps by allowing Arduous and EcoGeoFemme to accomplish more during their work days. Incidentally, I hate the idea of "face time," which is one reason I favor an unstructured system in which I can set my own work schedule and am judged by my productivity instead of my work hours. Academia supports such work habits fairly well, but it's not possible in all professions.

But efficiency can only get one so far. An experiment I often perform is started on Day 0, must be manipulated again on Days 3 and 6, and must be analyzed on Day 7. If I were to never work on weekends, I would only be able to do two of these assays a week, whereas someone who is willing to work on weekends can start seven of these a week. Even if we work equally efficiently, that person would still beat me to publishing the results and, by extrapolation, out-compete me for jobs and funding.

This is the crux of the matter: long work hours are driven not by excessive workloads per se, but by competition amongst scientists for limited resources. I hadn't even thought of competitiveness in the global economy, as Arduous discusses...I'm still fixated on competition with the people I know! Propter Doc and I both have overachieving colleagues who consider their work to also be their hobby, passion and life. And as Doc-In-Training points out, we additionally have to compete against scientists in our field worldwide.

One competes for resources via publications; the more papers the better, and the higher profile the papers, the better. Getting scooped on a publication by a competitor decreases both the number and profile of one's publications. So one works harder and longer in an attempt to stay on top of the game. It isn't necessarily true that longer hours translate into more and better papers (there's an element of luck involved), but it's definitely true in my field that perpetually working shorter hours than one's competitors results in fewer and lesser papers.

Is there a solution to the problem of long work hours? EcoGeoFemme suggests adding more people to the workforce to decrease each individual's workload. I'm not sure that will help in academia since it will result in more scientists, each with fewer first-author publications due to credit-sharing, all competing for the same number of faculty positions. If we increase the number of faculty positions to compensate, that will result in more faculty competing for the same amount of funding. If we had the power to increase funding to a level that would support all the extra faculty, we wouldn't be in our current state of intense competition to begin with.

One could also choose to work in positions that are less demanding, as Propter Doc suggests. There is great variance in work hours between labs, departments, and institutions, but there's a catch: places that are less demanding also tend to be less highly-ranked. And there is definitely a "pedigree effect," based on the prestige of one's PI or institution, that influences one's chances of getting grants funded, even at the postdoctoral level. At the faculty level, working at less highly-ranked institutions will affect one's ability to attract high-quality graduate students and postdocs, which in turn affects one's productivity and ability to get funding.

So perhaps the best course of action is to follow Academic's advice and try to find a decent work/life balance by setting aside some work-free hours each day. I think it's also helpful to have a realistic notion, as ScienceGirl does, of how many hours one is willing to devote to work, and whether that will accommodate the kind of personal life one wants to have.

I decided at the end of my postdoc not to pursue tenure-track positions in part because I knew that the number of hours I was willing to put in would not allow me to be competitive in the type of institutions I would want to work at. What I have now is a compromise between career ambition and personal life. And at least so far, it's working out fine.