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From the article: > I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to w

From the article: > I started my master's degree in 2018 and my PhD in 2020, and one of the most important things I learned during my master's was how NOT to work on weekends. I learned how to structure my time, deadlines and classwork in such a way that everything actually fits in an eight hour workday. I was also quite proud of this achievement, and barring my master's thesis and other major deadlines, I was moderately successful in defending my freedom. Not working on weekends seemed like a graduation from the messy life of an undergrad into the more structured life of an adult. The rest of the article talks about the various pressures leading the author away from the disciplined 5-day work week. Competition and a desire to get ahead is the obvious one. The competitive pressure is especially prescient for academic jobs, where universities are busy churning out huge numbers of grad students but the number of open academic positions can never accommodate more than a small percentage of them. Anecdotally, I've noticed two types of weekend workers: The first type simply works all the time. Instead of going idle, they gravitate toward their task list and start working on the next thing. For whatever reason (drive, anxiety, perceived pressures, boredom) they are wired to return to work by default and the 40 hour work week doesn't contain them. The second type of weekend worker is not actually producing or even "working" more than 40 hours per week, but they struggle to contain their work into the Monday-Friday bounds. Their weekend work isn't to get ahead or go the extra mile. They work weekends because they spent half of their weekdays doing fun things (meeting up with friends, exploring hobbies, exercising, messing around online) and the only way to accomplish their work is to repeat this half-focused schedule 7 days per week. Much like the author, they could contain their work neatly within a M-F, 9-5 schedule if they made an effort, but at every juncture they choose to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead. Some of them may even like the eclectic and flexible work schedule that allows them to do the things they want when they want and to get their work done in the boring gaps in between. There's also a 3rd type of person who doesn't really work much on weekends, but will wait until Saturday or Sunday to send out important e-mails and type up a storm in Slack so that it looks like they're working hard on the weekend. Frankly, this is the type I see most frequently at tech companies in the past few years: Try to engage with their messages on a Saturday and you won't get a response until Monday, but they'll go to great lengths to look like they were working hard all weekend or tell you that they worked all weekend on something.

andreyk 4y ago
Nicely said, I think this is a mostly accurate assessment. A lot of grad students are type A, a lot are type B, and plenty are both. Still, I do think a fourth kind exists (or a sub type of B) which is people who struggle to balance all the things in their lives and despite their best efforts end up with work on the weekends. Not everyone "choose[s] to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead.", many people do their best to not procrastinate or to plan things out well, but particularly when there are deadlines it's simply hard to do. I can also tell you from experience, although this is not regularly the case, when it comes time to try to submit a paper to a conference it's definitely possible that there is so much work that there is no way to contain the work to M-F. Which is of course how people get burned out, depressed, etc. And it's all too common in academia, with grads students having to balance teaching, research, classes, and more.
thomasahle 4y ago
The competitive insentive is why social pressure not to work is important. It's a basic zero sum game: If you work more, I also have to work more, and the competitive advantage evens out. If we can collectively decide (and enforce) not working weekends, we all benefit.

andreyk 4y ago

Nicely said, I think this is a mostly accurate assessment. A lot of grad students are type A, a lot are type B, and plenty are both. Still, I do think a fourth kind exists (or a sub type of B) which is people who struggle to balance all the things in their lives and despite their best efforts end up with work on the weekends. Not everyone "choose[s] to follow spontaneous whims or to relax or procrastinate instead.", many people do their best to not procrastinate or to plan things out well, but particularly when there are deadlines it's simply hard to do. I can also tell you from experience, although this is not regularly the case, when it comes time to try to submit a paper to a conference it's definitely possible that there is so much work that there is no way to contain the work to M-F. Which is of course how people get burned out, depressed, etc. And it's all too common in academia, with grads students having to balance teaching, research, classes, and more.

thomasahle 4y ago

The competitive insentive is why social pressure not to work is important. It's a basic zero sum game: If you work more, I also have to work more, and the competitive advantage evens out. If we can collectively decide (and enforce) not working weekends, we all benefit.