This morning, I woke up at 4 am (as I normally do) and started writing. It’s a Saturday, and I really do not like working on weekends nor long hours. However, this week I’ve been putting in 12-16 hour days, just to catch up. It’s the beginning of the semester. This pace won’t be sustainable, and I am looking forward to reclaiming my evenings and weekends again, once the semester’s fast pace normalizes. My health has been compromised before because of overwork, and I’ve learned my lesson the very very very hard way.
I have very clear physical limits to what I can sustainably do and how much I can work and I will not kill myself over a job.
Not today, not tomorrow, not ever.
What made me ponder as I completed a full day’s worth of work (I tweeted my rant around 3pm) was that yes, I’m really happy that I can spend the entire day at home writing (on a Saturday), but at the same time, I know this long stretch of time to write and reflect won’t last. On Monday I have to go back to meetings, reading students’ drafts, teaching, preparing lectures, doing administrative paperwork, etc. I’ll be feeling like I’m running again as a headless chicken.
Don’t get me wrong: I love my job. I love being a professor. I love being a researcher. I adore my students, and my colleagues. I feel very fulfilled. BUT I am NOT happy about the fact that we don’t have enough time to reflect and think. My rant on Twitter is posted here for posterity.
I’ve tweeted, blogged and ranted about the importance of legitimising reading as part of the scholarly enterprise. https://t.co/lQSxjOEV5G I have also written about how we can’t rush things and we need to spend time with our research https://t.co/7PpCeVzqUI where I see a big gap
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 24, 2019
Want tenure? Publish lots, publish high. I get it. I really do.
The problem is that (and I’ve tweeted about this), we lack spaces for scholarship. Not just the physical spaces, but also the mental and temporal ones. Blocks of time to really THINK.
Like, not write.
THINK.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 24, 2019
“But… but that’s what sabbatical is for… that’s what research leaves are for… that’s what the PhD degree is for…”
Well, yes and no. Yes, because obviously. But no, because if our DAILY lives are built on doing good scholarship, space and time to think should be baked in.
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 24, 2019
What I would like is that the actual conditions to do our jobs were actually baked into our daily processes and lives.
That we have time and space to think.
</end rant>
— Dr Raul Pacheco-Vega (@raulpacheco) August 24, 2019
I just had to get this off my chest. Back to writing!
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