How Do the Best Professors Work?
October 2nd, 2007 by joseNote: this is a contributed post by Cal Newport. If you like this, check his study hacks blog for more. If you have an interesting idea that supercharges your productivity and want to share it with our community, feel free to send it to us using the contact form. We’d certainly want to hear it!
-Jose
I’m a graduate student. A fourth year PhD candidate at MIT, to be precise. And I have an annoying habit. Whenever I get a chance to collaborate, chat, or hang around with successful professors in my field, I like to find out about their work habits. In doing so, I’ve discovered the following two trends:
- The best young professors carve out a day each week to do nothing but research. This prevents the administrative nonsense that dominates their early professional lives from bringing their research momentum to a complete stop.
- The best, distinguished, older professors — those who have earned light teaching schedules and have paid their dues on enough committees that in their final years before retirement can begin to untangle themselves from these obligations — isolate administrative nonsense to a small number of days. They might even, for example, have a single day each week to take care of this crap, and then spend the other four thinking big thoughts.
Graduate students exist in an interesting middle ground between these two extremes. We don’t have the administrative burden of a young professor. On the other hand, unlike older, distinguished professors, we can’t get away with mainly just thinking big thoughts. They can do this because their young grad student collaborators — i.e., us — will take care of the time-consuming grunt work on actually writing papers.Keeping these two examples in mind, however, I devised an innovative schedule for my graduate student work week. I’ve used it for over a year now, and have been really pleased with its results. It works as follows:
The 3 + 2 Graduate Student Work Week
Designate one day each week to be your Administrative Nonsense Day
Spend this entire day taking care of any work on your plate that doesn’t directly connect to the task of conducting research and writing research papers. This is when I fill out forms, return library books, hand in reimbursement paperwork, call the cable guy, and add new publications to my web site. You get the idea…
Designate one day each week to be your Big Idea Day
Spend this entire day doing literature search and brainstorming on that research project you’ve always day-dreamed about, but have been to afraid to mention to your advisor. If you don’t set aside this time, you will get stuck in the rut of happenstance papers — the projects you fall into out of convenience or advisorial coercion. This work is fine. It’s how you earn your research stripes. But some time along the way you have to be fighting to make your own mark.
Use the Other Three Days to Get Your Normal Work Done
Most of what we do as graduate students is working on various stages of the paper-writing process. This spans cleaning up numbers in Excel to editing the related work section of a journal submission. Use these three days to get this work done. Because you isolated the administrative nonsense on another day, you might be surprised by how much gets accomplished in just 60% of the week. I like to make my Admin Day on Monday and my Big Idea Day on Friday, so this work can happen consecutively in the middle of the week; but preferences differ here.That’s it. A simple structure. But sometimes it’s the simplest changes that yield the most consistent results over time. This approach, of course, gets complicated by classes, group meetings, and collaborators who don’t know about (or, frankly care) that a certain day is your big idea day. So it will never apply perfectly. But even the attempt can make a difference…
Technorati Tags: productivity, paper writing, paperwork, graduate student life, lifehacks
October 2nd, 2007 at 11:39 pm
Great post, Jose. Sounds like a very effective plan.
However, you CAN avoid dealing with most of the “administrative nonsense” all together. All you’d have to do is partner with a Virtual Assistant and pass along most of it to her (or him). That would then give you two “Big Idea” days.
October 3rd, 2007 at 11:54 am
Then plan looks sound. But I guess, in my case, I should add debugging/hacking day.
October 3rd, 2007 at 3:23 pm
Carol,
Have you actually tried the virtual assistant approach in an academic environment? If so, I would love to hear about it!
- Cal
October 3rd, 2007 at 5:52 pm
Cal, I am a Virtual Assistant. You can check out http://www.divineva.com or email me at for more information on how a Virtual Assistant can help you.
October 19th, 2007 at 7:15 pm
[...] How Do the Best Professors Work? | Academic Productivity A guest post I wrote for Academic Productivity about how I schedule my work week as a graduate student (hint: it’s inspired by the work habits of top professors). [...]
October 20th, 2007 at 12:57 am
[...] worth of emails to return, forms to fill out, and papers to grade. This is the argument made by Cal Newport in a nifty discussion of “best practices” by professors and graduate [...]
October 26th, 2007 at 8:26 pm
Great in theory, except that administrative nonsense doesn’t behave sometimes — e.g., you call someone, they aren’t there, your appointment for X can’t be made on that day, etc.
And, that sometimes you can’t do your “normal work” for 10 hours on end — writers burn out, sore eyes, etc.
I am a young prof at an R1 and I save 3-5pm, my least productive time of the day, for administrivia, coffee mtgs, etc. I’m on leave so now I do it 5x a week, but when teaching I do it 3x a week, and have office hours on the other days during the same slot.
Just an alternative idea.
October 31st, 2007 at 1:10 pm
[...] couple weeks back, I wrote a post for Academic Productivity about how I structure my work week as a graduate student. I want to [...]
July 29th, 2008 at 10:45 am
it would be better to have an assisten and then you really get the big idea
October 14th, 2008 at 2:35 am
this is a great read.
although nothing is going to work out perfect,
the idea and concept of putting certain things to be done on certain days can definitely help with your focus.
you can concentrate on one thing that day,
not having to juggle your thoughts.
February 2nd, 2009 at 2:54 pm
With a bachelors, most teachers make between 30-50K a year starting salary. Professors start from 40-60K. If you want to know exact numbers, simply go to any school district or public university website and locate the “teacher salary scale”. By law, any public school or institution must publicly post salaries paid to its employees. You might have to search around their human resources site, but I assure you it’s there.
February 20th, 2009 at 4:13 pm
[...] and conquer… your academic workweek I was recently re-inspired by this post over at Academic Productivity. I had tagged it ages ago, but never gave serious consideration to [...]
February 14th, 2011 at 4:12 pm
[...] the lesson is, find your own style and go with what works for you. Academic Productivity posted some tips from how the best professors work that might be useful. Glean what you can and [...]