“That girl is a robot.” said one of them referring to me while checking the publicly published exam results on the board from one of our many practice exams before we took the real university entrance exam. I was behind them waiting to check my results, but thanks to their comments I now knew that I got the top score again.
I wasn’t sure if I should reveal myself to them. They didn’t actually know me. They knew me only by name. I have been a straight-A student most of my educational life up until the point I started my PhD. I am not saying this to be douchey, this is a fact of my life. Even if people didn’t know me, they may have known of me because of my grades in various schools I attended. I didn’t intend that this fact became a defining fact for me. I just wanted to do my best in the subjects we were studying. That desire and ambition came naturally to me back then. So I didn’t mind working hard, as hard as I could.
In the end, I decided not to reveal myself to them. I thought this would save all of us from embarrassment. I was for a brief moment upset that they called me “a robot”, though. Why? I thought. But I let go of it quickly as I knew that they didn’t really know anything about me. If they had known me, they wouldn’t have had called me a robot.
When I started my PhD, I was all of a sudden “the lazy one” despite being the same me. People in the lab didn’t tell this to my face, but I got to learn that behind my back I was criticized by some people (not all) a few times for leaving the lab early in the evenings instead of being there till 10pm or so every day. Instead to my face I was told things like “If you worry about this much about the internet connection at your home, it means that you aren’t working enough.” while I was talking about internet being down at my apartment that I just moved in; or “You are too honest” after saying that “I preferred watching a movie or reading a book after I was finished with course duties during college instead of coding extra stuff that isn’t needed for my studies”, as if this was a super crazy confession I was supposed to be ashamed of.
While on holidays at my parents’ house in Istanbul, I did a code-commit on New Year’s Eve, while I still worked in that lab, and was congratulated for that. The code didn’t work well in the end. The corresponding paper submission received a reject. I had to leave the lab after a semester. The good news was that I started having my period regularly once a month again, instead of the irregular almost twice a month behavior that semester, as soon as I stopped working in that lab.
I ended up changing two advisors in my first year. After that first year in my PhD, I swung between “lazy” and “workaholic” depending on the person I met. In practice, I was still the same in terms of how hard I worked, but with a slightly hindered ambition and desire for the work I was doing. It took more energy to motivate myself now compared to my high school self who was called “a robot”. I realized that despite doing very hard work, you can still fail many times with suboptimal experimental results or various forms of academic rejections, and you can be perceived as lazy, while at the same time being perceived as workaholic.
Toward the end of my PhD, I realized that hard work still pays off in the long run despite how people perceive you. The rewards just come from a different route or at a different moment in time than you expect sometimes.
My swinging between “lazy” and “workaholic” continued while I was working in Bay Area at IBM Almaden, where I had my first job after PhD. To be clear, for people at Almaden, I was just working the normal amount. The various perceptions came from outside Almaden.
Then, I revealed that I want to leave Bay Area and move back to Europe. A few people indicated that this move should be because I preferred not working all the time.
I ended up in Denmark, where I became “the workaholic” all of a sudden. I heard from Danish people things like “If you stay too much in the office, people would think something is wrong with you.”, “In this country, we work 37 hours a week. You don’t have to stay here this late.”, “It is Friday evening, it is time to leave the office.” … Then, in Danish class, we were reading about how the Danes leave the office at 4pm to have time for family and friends and activities, and a frequent discussion topic was pros/cons of being a “career person”, where one of the cons is typically family neglect.
I was again a person who didn’t know how to fit similar to the first year of my PhD. This time, however, with good regular menstrual cycles, but terrible PMSs in terms of how down I felt and how much I cried. I also had a weak support system in Denmark at the time, which amplified this situation.
As a side note, I would like to highlight that the sentences mentioned above came from very well-intentioned people, and these are all nice people that I like. In contrast, I had more of a love & hate relationship with the Danish class reading materials and discussion topics, and I am happy that I passed the big Danish exam and don’t have to go to those classes anymore. I am grateful to my Danish teachers, though, and the ability to read and watch Danish materials of my own choosing.
My problem is that such attitudes could be unhealthy as well, similar to the attitudes I received during the first year of my PhD, even though they are way more well-intentioned. We people don’t have to be uniform in the way we work or form a family or social life. Even for an individual, what he/she prioritizes typically changes over their lifetime.
I was a new academic who wanted to have a good career trajectory. I have always been an ambitious person. I like working hard and long for reaching my ambitions. The reason I don’t have a husband or kid isn’t because I work too much. I don’t want to be labeled as the “wrong person” or “workaholic” for these. Similarly, I have always invested in having a fulfilling social life with friends and family I interact with regularly. I have always needed my time during the week to watch movies/series or to read books, otherwise, I become an unhappy person, which impacts my work creativity and productivity as well. I don’t like working while enjoying my coffee, even though this becomes inevitable during the work days. I don’t want to be labeled as the person who doesn’t give high importance to her career or “the lazy one” for these habits.
I worked a lot more than I worked for IBM during my first two years in Denmark as a junior academic, as I was teaching and writing grants for the first time (this is without counting the Danish classes). However, I didn’t really count my hours back then, so I don’t have data to reveal here. I remember feeling a lot more tired for sure compared to now. I have recently started counting my working hours. I can tell you with confidence that today I work on average 8 hours a work day. This is really the average time. I may work more one day/week and take it easy on another. I may take a break to meet a friend during the day on a work day if I don’t have meetings, and compensate for it in the evening or over the weekend. I don’t limit myself in terms of when “work time” is vs when “free time” is. I prefer a flexible and non-uniform schedule, where I have more control over my time, which is one of the reasons I love academia. The only goal I have is that I work ~8 hours **on average** per work day.
I started doing this counting thanks to the advice I got from my colleague Björn Thór Jónsson during a period I was feeling desperate in terms of my time management. I needed a way to know when to stop working without feeling stressed about my TODO list as well as knowing when to say “no” at work. I appreciate that I receive a lot of good opportunities in this job and I love to help others as much as I can. However, everything takes time, especially if you want to do a good job. Saying “yes” to one thing may mean that I cannot invest the necessary time for another thing that I find very important. Counting my time helps me to see my limits and realize when I should say “no” or when I should be satisfied with an OK job instead of perfecting stuff.
Since I started counting my hours, I also realized that working more than 8 hours on average a work day doesn’t really work well for me. If I work more than this, I start to eat unhealthy, ignore too much my other house duties or non-work-related bureaucratic paperwork, or become unable to invest the time I want to invest in family, friends, books, movies, writing this blog post, etc. I understand that different people may have a different balance and needs in their life, and my flexible-8-hours rule may not work for them. I do respect people who choose to work less or more than this number as well as people who prefer a more uniform work schedule. We aren’t uniform, so what works for each of us can be different.
I am well-aware that I may not be the best person to give advice on how much one should work. My initial years as an academic were quite productive looking back, but wasn’t much of a success based on the publication-based success criteria of this job. However, I just know now that I am neither lazy nor workaholic (nor a robot), and I neither want to use any of these terms to label anyone I know in my profession nor indicate that there is one and only one correct way of pursuing this profession. Please avoid being impacted by external labels and putting labels on people as much as you can. Please beware that other people’s solutions may not suit you, and your solution may not suit everyone. Please don’t be afraid to seek for what suits you best, and don’t be afraid to change it over time.
