Working hours
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9 responses to “Working hours”
I have found https://www.sortd.com/ to be an excellent tool for planning your day/week.
Hi Michael
I fall into the clinical academic worker category and I am finding this first message about setting hard work hours really challenging! It feels like a huge leap of faith to set work boundaries and trust that everything will be alright. As a chronic, fairly non-productive (well, with respect to high value academic activities) over worker, committing to laying down tools at the end of the day at a reasonable time is super scary, especially when I look at everything I want to get done alongside my clinical commitments!Hi Nicky. Thanks for the comment. I completely understand your perspective, especially in the context you describe. I think there are a few things I’d like to comment on. The first is that you’re not simply going to trust that everything is going to be alright. After setting your hard boundary, it’s essential that you allocate enough time to complete the non-negotiable tasks in your schedule, and prioritise those. In the clinical context, this probably means ensuring that all your patients are seen. However, if this means that there’s no time for anything else, including academic work, and if this situation continues indefinitely, you may need to consider that your role responsibilities aren’t being appropriately managed. A clinical academic who has no time to do the ‘academic’ part is ‘just’ a clinician. It may be that your contracted hours aren’t well-aligned with the expectations of your role, which would need to trigger a conversation with your line manager. If the role requires some kind of academic output, but there isn’t any time in a regular working day to produce that output, then the only way to make progress in that domain is to work overtime. Which doesn’t seem reasonable.
Hi Michael,
I enjoyed this idea about setting boundaries, although sometimes it’s difficult, especially when you have multiple jobs. In addition, I wouldn’t say I like working in the office, so I work where and when I can.
Is that bad?
Hi Tak Wing. I get what you’re saying; it’s hard to set (and respect) boundaries, especially in some workplace cultures that have certain expectations. I’d say that having boundaries is even more important when you have multiple jobs; you need to have a moment when you switch contexts and change the focus of your attention. And when you have unfinished tasks from one contexts, that’s going to have a psychological cost when you move to the next working context.
Thanks for the point about working in an office. I’ve edited the text slightly to remove that assumption. I also like working in different spaces. The principle here is that you decide what time your working day ends. That may be 14:00 instead of 17:00, with a plan to make up the time on the weekend. That’s absolutely fine. One of my favourite things about being an academic is the autonomy and flexibility that comes with determining my own schedule. The point is that you’re able to manage your tasks in such a way that you don’t feel an obligation to work unscheduled hours.
This first leap of faith is an incredibly important element in my working life. However, with planning and commitment I have started to achieve this. I can generally hold myself accountable, unless a time critical piece of work comes across my desk, and then I find it difficult to remain focussed on the goal of time-boundary working. This is often caused by a colleague springing something on me at short notice, and I don’t say ‘no’ – I try to help them.
Also, one of my challenges is that I’ve got school aged children which I collect on a daily basis and then commute home which takes an hour. So, nearly 2 hours of my working day get squeezed, and then I find myself working all night too, ‘making up’ the time. I’ve become more disciplined in the past 6 months with this point, but it remains a challenge for me.
Thanks for the lesson, a great start.
Hi Trevor. Thanks for the comment. You’ve made a couple of points that are so important to highlight.
The leap of faith. This isn’t something I’ve articulated (or really acknowledged), but it’s a big ask, especially when you’ve spent any amount of time in a higher education context. We get so conditioned from early on in our careers, to think that, just because we can work any time, we should. And because it’s such a normalised part of academic culture, it so often doesn’t even occur to us to ask why it’s reasonable to work outside of our contracted hours.
The second point you make, which is more nuanced, is the idea that our commitments outside of work may require some flexibility in our working hours. For me, this comes down to an agreement that we’ll work a fixed number of hours per day, rather than setting a specific time when those hours need to be completed by. I love the idea that I can leave the office earlier in the day, so that I can attend a school sports event in the afternoon, and then make up the hours that evening (or on the weekend). So I guess the point, again, isn’t that we finish at 17:00 every day, but that we fix our allotted hours for the week.
Thank you for the valuable advice Michael. I do find it difficult due to a large workload but as I am planning and applying the principles it will get better. It takes time to change old ways of doing.
Hi Yolande. You’re right that it’s only through making change that we’ll get different outcomes. It’s when the workload is most challenging that these principles are most useful. I know it’s something I struggle with as well; when you’re going through a rough period, the natural inclination is to put in more time, and try to work harder. But this cycle then becomes the norm, making it harder still. Coincidentally, the newsletter coming out later today will be especially relevant for your point about change. I look forward to hearing your thoughts on applying the changes in the course.
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