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I'm a postdoc in Physics and I have very rarely worked on a weekend. Actually I would say that my workload even during my PhD has been far less than most people

I'm a postdoc in Physics and I have very rarely worked on a weekend. Actually I would say that my workload even during my PhD has been far less than most people in the industry. IMO it is a combination of luck and "work smarter, not harder". Most of the people I know who worked extremely hard produced about the same amount of work as me, the difference was that they spent literally hundreds of hours down strange corners that are not very helpful to their work. For example, one guy I know when writing his thesis did a huge amount of research into the theory of gravitational waves, because his work was related to gravitational wave detectors, but it wasn't directly related to his work. I also worked on gravitational wave detectors, but I just left the theory out, because it has been covered so many times. No one asked about it. You could make the case that it was interesting or important to learn the theory of gravitational waves, but he didn't really seem to be enjoying it; actually his life seemed quite stressful at that moment due to the high workload. I would actually make the bold statement to say that, outside of cases of time consumption that are unavoidable, e.g. a lot of time in the lab/experimental difficulties, a huge amount of time is spent in academia because the student simply doesn't understand what they should spend their time on. This is because academia feels directionless or self-directed and the future of the research is uncertain, however you really should pause repeatedly and consider whether what you are doing is actually relevant to your research, and if it is "extra-curricular", you should ask yourself whether you are actually considering it with that mindset. Too many academics take their "research for fun" far too seriously.

was_a_dev 4y ago
I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the week, 9-5. All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.
- bowsamic 4y ago
  Yep. Scientists need to learn to differentiate between what needs to be done, and what they want to do. Many are woefully bad at estimating what needs to be done, and therefore they spend many hours doing what they want to do with the stressful mindset that it is something that needs to be done. It happened to me a few times, it happens to everyone to some degree, but the sooner you get a good compass for what you need to do the far smoother your life will be. My personal example is when I was doing a theoretical project that had a very intense pure mathematical underpinning. I thought I needed to understand it, but my supervisor kept saying "just work through examples that you know the solutions to". I could have spent 100s or even 1000s of hours learning all this pure mathematics but actually if I would have done so it would not really have helped me today. Instead I just needed to do a few simple examples, which took maybe 20 to 40 hours? And then I was basically done with the research and could write the paper. Maybe if you ask some they will say "you didn't really do it, you didn't know the theory, you were just pretending!" but in the end I got the work done that I wanted to get done, and then went and had a beer.

was_a_dev 4y ago

I agree with this, I have read the theory for context sake but it has already been done. I'm building/using an instrument - that's where my focus is during the week, 9-5. All those interesting corners are my free-time reading, because I enjoy it.

bowsamic 4y ago
Yep. Scientists need to learn to differentiate between what needs to be done, and what they want to do. Many are woefully bad at estimating what needs to be done, and therefore they spend many hours doing what they want to do with the stressful mindset that it is something that needs to be done. It happened to me a few times, it happens to everyone to some degree, but the sooner you get a good compass for what you need to do the far smoother your life will be. My personal example is when I was doing a theoretical project that had a very intense pure mathematical underpinning. I thought I needed to understand it, but my supervisor kept saying "just work through examples that you know the solutions to". I could have spent 100s or even 1000s of hours learning all this pure mathematics but actually if I would have done so it would not really have helped me today. Instead I just needed to do a few simple examples, which took maybe 20 to 40 hours? And then I was basically done with the research and could write the paper. Maybe if you ask some they will say "you didn't really do it, you didn't know the theory, you were just pretending!" but in the end I got the work done that I wanted to get done, and then went and had a beer.