Comments on: What is your work/work balance?

By: Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 15:11:11 +0000

In reply to Holly.

@Holly – oh my goodness, that sounds terrible! Here’s hoping that after a while you will have reinvented all these processes, made everything better, and people won’t even be able to believe that the organization functioned before!

By: Holly

Holly — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 10:44:38 +0000

I’ve been thinking about this lately, and will thinking about it more as a result of your podcast interview! My job right now is unfortunately probably 60% non-promotable tasks. And what’s really sad is not only is it non-promotable work, it’s completely meaningless work. My organization has an incredible mission, and very interesting scientific work, but I got hired into upper management, and now my life is mostly trying to figure out bureaucratic process. Not even DO bureaucratic process, but, spend unbelievable amounts of time trying to figure out what part of the “official” guidelines are 15 years out of date and which are current, *what* form to fill out, whether my boss needs that form in paper form or electronic or an official memo, etc. It’s crazy. I live in a very hierarchical world of lots and lots of unwritten rules, and unfortunately my admin is also new so she doesn’t know the rules either. The simplest tasks takes weeks, and I randomly get yelled at for not doing things “right”. I’m 3 weeks into trying to figure out how to get my boss to “properly” approve my staff member request for roaming minutes on her phone, for an international business trip. And because all of that takes so much time, I have very little time for the things that I actually consider my job – helping my team set priorities, going after funding options, improving the quality of our research and software development, etc. I try to look at this as a chance to make things better for everyone, by documenting what the process is once we figure it out, and creating checklists with useful things, like links to the correct forms. Hopefully just my first year will be filled with this chaos and then I will have more time to focus on the real job. But it’s completely insane and I never would have believed an organization could be so poorly managed. And I feel I’ve gained no useful skills in this time. But this is making me think about being more intentional about carving out protected time do to the meaningful work.

By: Cb

Cb — Fri, 09 Dec 2022 08:12:30 +0000

That’s really interesting. I am supposed be 30% teaching, 50% research, 20% service but teaching can gobble up all your time if you let it. I try to contain the teaching by giving myself one day for teaching prep, and doing as much as I can. I will assign the day based on how fragmented it is, I won’t dedicate a nice clear day for teaching prep, that’s for proper writing, but if I’ve got lots of meetings or am just tired, I can make slides, etc.

I want to do a good enough job teaching – engaging, supportive but I am not going to reinvent the wheel or throw my whole soul in it because, sadly as my mentor said “no one ever got promoted because they are a great teacher”.