Binge working

Yesterday, ScienceGirl commented here that, "As a grad student, it is so easy to fall into the procrastinate/work all the time, and never really have guilt-free time." How true. Without a boss who dictates your work hours and monitors your time, it's so easy to procrastinate. Often, the procrastination takes the form of work avoidance, where a less urgent/important task is done first at the expense of something more important but less appealing. Yet, since the important job never got done, there is the lingering weight of Unfinished Work. It's a nasty cycle because you've been working all day but not getting the high priority jobs done, so you have to work more. After many days of not really getting much done, an approaching deadline will trigger many people to really cram the work in. They will pull an all nighter to end up with a less-than-perfect product that they aren't 100% proud of. Binge working. It's so inefficient.

In my struggle to adhere to a 40 hour work week, I have tried to reflect on how I spend my time so that I can feel good about what I do at work and then feel good about what I do at home, which I want to be not work. I have found that when I am really honest with myself about how I spend my day, I see where I waste lots of time*. I know when I'm "working" and when I working, really doing only the things that need to be done and nothing else. No checking google for an image I could kinda use, no playing around with numbers for the heck of it, and certainly no chatting about what I made for dinner last night. Sure, those things can be useful, but should not be done until the essentials are done. That way, I can go home at the end of the day and not feel guilty for relaxing, because I know I got my work done. It's amazing how I will rationalize to myself just like I would to a boss, like, I couldn't get those figures made today because first I had to blah blah blah. Yeah, right. I know what's up with those excuses I give myself. I just wish I could have a touch more self control so a greater proportion of my time at work could be working because man, I really want to graduate.

I suspect that this doesn't end with grad school but that the most successful people typically have good time management skills and thus, greater efficiency. There is a great article on this topic at Science Careers which is really worth a read.

*I only really have this trouble when I am working at my desk on data analysis or writing. I am very efficient at lab work.