How much do professors work?  It’s complicated.

Jeffrey P. Bigham

@jeffbigham

I’ve watched with some amusement as the question of how much professors actually work has gotten everyone riled up again. This is always a hot-button issue among faculty. Nevermind the fact that the current uproar seems to have been started by some preliminary research in an undergraduate project at Boise State^[1], which probably had some flaws. Many professors do work a lot. And, the aggregate of the work we do is difficult to track and thus not tracked very well.

Everyone feels like they work a lot, because they probably do, and feelings about people advertising how much they work are mixed, because sharing seems to normalize doing too much work.

Case in point, the Atlantic found this quote from Philip Guo’s blog, which seems to confirm the Boise State undergrad’s findings:

Despite broad consensus among professors that their job isn’t for slackers, they tend to disagree, primarily among themselves, about exactly how hard they work. While some scholars say they maintain a traditional 40-hour workweek, others contend they have a superhuman workload. Take Philip Guo, an assistant cognitive-science professor at University of California, San Diego, who on his blog estimated that in 2014 he spent 15 hours per week teaching, between 18 hours and 25 hours on research, four hours at meetings with students, between three hours and six hours doing service work, and between 5 hours and 10 hours at “random-ass meetings (RAM).” That amounts to as many as 60 hours per week—which, he noted, pales in comparison to the 70 hours he worked on average weekly as an undergraduate student at MIT.

Philip’s blog is amazing, but I don’t think this is the most relevant quote from it in helping to understand how much professors work. Instead, I would point people to this excellent article of Philip’s about why it’s so difficult to say “no” as a professor. The gist is that unlike in a “real job” where you have set hours or a single boss who is the ultimate gatekeeper of your time, academics are free agents, and no one asking them for time has any idea about the other demands for their time. As a result, it is very easy for work to expand to fill any available time.

This is further complicated by most of us not having great separation between work and the rest of our lives. Some of this is by choice. I really love hanging out with my colleagues, all of my substantial travel is oriented around my research (giving talks, attending conferences, etc.), and in my “free” time I write software and blogs posts like this one.

So, what is work, and how much of it am I doing?  I really have no idea.  When I’m feeling down, it feels like I work all the damn time. On the occasion that work interferes with my family time, I feel burdened by it. But, most of the time, I’m doing things I enjoy, which at least resemble living life to me, and so I feel good. I like getting a lot of stuff done.

As I’ve become slightly more senior and received tenure, I’ve gotten pretty aggressive about removing the parts of my job that I don’t like to do from my schedule. For instance, I’ve worked really hard to cut meeting bloat. It’s just simply the case that many meetings do not need to happen, and that meetings have a real cost in their disruption to other work.

Look at my schedule this week, it is awesome:



But, of course, my schedule hides a lot. So, what did I really do yesterday (2/7)?

It turned out it was a snow day, and so my kids didn’t go to school, and so I overslept until almost 9am (eek!). I had forgotten to put a phone meeting I had scheduled on my calendar, so I missed most of that. I joined late and it turned out my amazing student carried it through and I probably wasn’t needed anyway. Then, I worked from home for a bit (mostly emails and related things). On my way out of the house (around 10:40am), I shoveled the walk, and then ran into school for a student meeting at 11:00am. But, it turns out my student wasn’t feeling well and had canceled, and so I talked with her co-advisor for 45 minutes. Then I chatted with another colleague for half an hour. These were super useful chats. I went to my office and did some work (paper editing, email), and then headed over to my lab. I met with another student, talked with the other people in my lab. Then I ran home early (around 4:30pm) because it was one of my kids’ birthday. We had dinner, and ate some birthday cake. I responded to some very short emails and slack messages while home. Around 7:15pm, I went to a restaurant with the master’s team I’m helping to advise this semester for a kickoff meeting. I got home around 9:30pm, and wrote some emails, and did other light work while watching TV, until 12:30am (or thereabouts).

Technically, I was doing something related to work (including commutes) for all but 2 hours or so of my waking time. But, I also was doing a lot of things that I enjoy, because I’ve built my schedule for that.

Today, so far, I woke up about 8am, had some coffee while answering emails. Joined a phone meeting with some great remote colleagues. Then I was answering emails, doing other various things related to work (slack’d students, etc.), when I saw Philip’s tweet and so spent the last 30 minutes or so writing this. I’ll run into work pretty soon to join our group’s hackathon, and have coffee with a colleague. Then I’ll work until the official end of hackathon (5pm), and have a short happy hour with my group. I should be home by 6:00pm, and the kids will be in bed by 8:30-9pm. I’ll probably fit another 2-3 hours of light work in after the kids are asleep before I go to bed. If I had a deadline or was particularly inspired, I’d fit in another 4-5 hours of mostly uninterrupted work.

I don’t think this sounds so bad, and these are pretty typical days for me. There are certainly atypical days around deadlines or other big events, and I have no idea how to count work-related travel. But, I think I get a lot done in my limited time. I publish a lot, manage to get enough funding to stay afloat, do (I think) an above average level of service, and even write the occasional blog post (although nowhere near as much as Philip). It mostly works for me.

But, this is probably why we argue so much about how much professors work. We work differently. Also, the Atlantic article didn’t say “how much” it said “how hard,” which I think are completely different and yet often conflated. But, “how much” depends on how you count, and how you organize your life. I think I could fit all of my work into 8 hours a day. I don’t think I’d enjoy it as much, and I think it would be really difficult unless the people I work with (students and colleagues) also adopted this schedule. But, it would be an interesting experiment to try.

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