Workloads in academia

I recently had a short discussion on workloads in academia, after seeing in my ManicTime charts that I had worked 100 hours a few weeks earlier – which pretty much translates to working every waking hour. You can find the Storify of these tweets at the bottom of these posts.

In this discussion, I mentioned that I can keep up this rhythm for just a few weeks, otherwise I will come down with some sickness. In the end, I did get sick 3 weeks later (not sure if you can get a stomach bug from exhaustion, but I know that working and not exercising and sleeping enough sure undermines my immunity system).

To avoid this burn-then-crash scenario, I have now posted a list with my basic self-care rules on my desk. I’m going to try to not do any work after 6pm (except for blogging and studying for fun and reading) – note that I usually start working some time between 7am and 8am, and that I teach over the lunchbreak hours (leaving me without time for a real lunchbreak), so that still leaves me with a good number of hours to work in a day (as of now, I’m very OK with working 60 hours a week).

My other newly imposed self-care rules include at lest 20 minutes of movement per day, daily meditations, and a 9pm curfew for myself, so that I can sleep by 10pm.

Let’s see how this goes…