“Ask Me Anything” about Self-Management

Academics are trained experts in their fields, but many struggle to find time for family, friends, and other commitments beyond work.

Managing people, including students, staff, and volunteers, is a big part of managing a research lab and requires a set of skills that are not often “taught” in graduate school (see AMA #1: Lab Management and Mentorship). Something equally important to our professional success is how we manage ourselves. That is, how do we balance our professional goals with our personal needs for self-care, family and friends, and overall enjoyment in life?

This past summer we asked three leaders in the Design Lab to reflect on the following questions during an “Ask Me Anything” panel discussion on self-management:

1. Does quality of life need to be the cost of productivity?
2. How do people think about the boundaries between work and life?
3. What are the opportunities and barriers to change at the institutional level?
4. When do we consider saying “Yes” and “No” to unfunded work?

The Ask Me Anything session was the third in a series of panel discussions hosted by the Cultivating Culture Working Group (CCWG), which was created to investigate opportunities for the Design Lab community to reflect on and promote a healthy lab culture. The CCWG includes Camille Nebeker, Brian McInnis, Elizabeth Eikey, Steven Rick, Maryam Gholami, as well as Emily Knapp.

This article is a synopsis of key insights drawn from the panel discussion on self-management. The panel included Design Lab faculty: Elizabeth (Lizz) Eikey, Nadir Weibel, and Camille Nebeker. The hour-long discussion was facilitated by Emily Knapp with Steven Rick managing questions from the audience.

Through this series of panel discussions, we are working to identify best practices and strengths — as well as challenges and areas for growth — to enable supportive research environments. For us, cultivating the research culture of the Design Lab is an opportunity to turn inward, applying the community-centered and community-driven design practices we strive for in our projects to our own day-to-day practices.

In addition, we want to learn from people beyond this Design Lab community. To promote online discussion, we have also included an extended list of questions related to Self-Management at the end of the article and encourage you to use the Medium commenting features to share your thoughts, experiences, and beliefs. Follow this link for instructions about how to share a comment on Medium.

Prioritizing yourself, family and friends, and people on your team

There are more opportunities to pursue in academia than there is time to pursue them. The opportunities are endless — from writing grant proposals, research papers, and patent applications, to developing course material, mentoring trainees, and committing time to volunteer for professional associations and civic initiatives. With all the possible opportunities to pursue, it can be challenging to find time to reflect on yourself and what opportunities you want to pursue.

There are many things to prioritize above work. Personal happiness and wellness is a top priority. “Exercise and enjoyment are things that are not rewards for work, they are things that everyone has a right to because I’m a person.” Preserving time for yourself is easier said than done, particularly when it appears as though the other people you work with are not taking time away from work. “We need to reduce the stigma around not working 24/7, rather than wear our exhaustion as a badge of honor.” A panelist recommended building a mind-body awareness to pay attention to your personal happiness by listening to the signals, the “physical and emotional responses” to try to maximize joy through each opportunity you pursue.

What are you going to do this week to intentionally step away from work?

Panelists shared how their commitments to family and friends shape how they structure their work. “Family is the key relationship that I need to maintain.” Juggling the needs of a family can be tricky. One of the panelists shared their daily routine. “We have three kids and both parents work, so we have had to find ways to work together as a team to create dedicated time for our family.” Their strategy includes dividing each day into four parts: “(1) We take our kids to school together in the morning, (2) Focused time at work until 4:30–5pm, (3) Family time, and (4) Additional work later in the evening.” However, the line between work and personal time became blurry during the COVID-19 pandemic. It has been a very intense period, with near constant work, “being available and doing things all day and all weekend, it’s not sustainable.”

After sharing this structure of how this specific panelist organizes their commitments, another panelist remarked how “elated” they were to hear such boundaries, in practice. “What I personally found most compelling about this is that [the panelist who shared this] I perceive as productive and cares a lot about work. I assumed that they worked 24/7, so when they said here’s how I structure my day and make time for family, I was surprised but elated that we can set boundaries, hold them, and still accomplish work and be perceived well by others.” By simply talking more, we can help each other to recognize opportunities to advance our wellbeing.

Professional relationships are another priority. The panelists stressed that one way to affect cultural change is through their interpersonal relationships with colleagues. For example, a panelist shared that they “try not to email students and staff on the weekend, because it seems like work is all the time right now.” Another panelist tries to demonstrate that they are balanced, by choosing to take breaks, so that their colleagues feel comfortable doing so as well. It is important to recognize the power that we each have to create, sustain, and abandon cultural norms around work. “The bean counting of papers and grants is important, but if I am not having fun doing what I am doing and am not around who I want to be around, then it really isn’t fun.”

What is one fun activity that you are going to introduce to your work environment?

All panelists felt that exploring their self-management priorities is as critical as their professional objectives. By demonstrating that we can protect time for ourselves, our family, and our friends and, subsequently, modeling this behavior for the people on our teams and within our academic community, we set the tone for a healthy workplace.

Feeling confident about saying YES and NO to additional work

Volunteering “service” outside of research and teaching is a criterion for promotion in many academic roles. For example, serving as a peer reviewer for a journal, contributing to a professional society as a conference editor, helping with a campus research conference — all are activities that qualify as “service” but, are also not paid work. A panelist asked others on the panel, “When do you say Yes to additional work that is not recognized or paid and when do you say No?” For example, many people might contribute to writing a grant proposal, including graduate students, research staff, and trainees, but are not automatically listed as “Investigators” for the grant.

Being able to say Yes depends in part on “personal bandwidth,” as another panelist explained:

• What other personal things do I have going on?
• How much time can I really commit to this?
• Can I contribute in a way that produces that quality that I want?

In this way, being able to say Yes means having some control of the existing demands on your time. However, being able to say Yes also depends on your ability to perform the requested work: “If I can’t perform at an acceptable level, how will that affect me?”

How have you thought about monitoring your “personal bandwidth”?

Additional work should be rewarded as well. A panelist expanded on this point, by adding the following questions to help people determine when to say Yes to additional work:

• How would this strengthen or support my goals and career?
• If I participate, even if it’s not formally recognized, then how might it benefit me?
• Will saying Yes to this help me to build or foster a new or existing relationship?
• Is the additional work something that I care deeply about?

Volunteering can be a way to learn new skills, but it can also be personally taxing. An audience member shared that they would only say Yes when asked to do something that was not paid or recognized, if they could say “Hell Yes!!” to something truly exciting.

What strategies have helped you to say No to additional work requests?

Many professionals in academia depend on grant funding to pay some, if not all, of their salary (referred to as being on “soft money” as opposed to a full-time equivalency position, referred to as “hard money”). Volunteering work is a risk reduction strategy for people who depend on soft money. A panelist with experience working on soft money responded, “I think you should say Yes to something that is really exciting, but if it’s tied to your salary, then you have a tendency to say Yes to everything.” Speaking about the stark difference between being on hard versus soft money funding, another panelist remarked, “when I came to UCSD I needed to think about how to get paid, rather than getting paid to think.”

Panelists recommended thinking strategically about your priorities to mitigate this tendency. When you are on soft money, “you should try not to spread too thin, you should try to build a portfolio of projects based on your passions.” However, your time must be rewarded, for example, “you can’t expect someone to be paid 5% on a project to be productive.” People need to be compensated for their time, effort, and contributions to research, whether this means direct funding in the short-term or a commitment to funding (among other benefits) in the immediate future.

Shifting our mindset to shift the expectations around work

The path into an academic career can feel like an endless series of hurdles:

“The longer you are in academia the target just shifts, getting a postdoc, then a faculty job, then it’s tenure […] put your head down and get the work done, you can do everything else after you reach a specific milestone.”

The vagueness of how much work is enough to advance to the next hurdle can leave people feeling breathless. The panelists shared a few strategies for shifting their own mindset around professional expectations, to carve out more time for themselves.

Cultivating your own self-respect is a good first step. When evaluating whether to say Yes or No to an opportunity, look for ways to “push back and create choices that respond to your skills and interests.” Saying Yes does not mean consenting to participate in every aim of a project, every meeting, every decision, every Slack thread, and so on. Develop the confidence to negotiate your role and responsibilities within an opportunity.

Create non-negotiable time to get support cultivating your own self-respect. “I try to incorporate a walk into the day and started therapy this year and am trying to treat those things as non-negotiable.” Another panelist chimed in, “+100 for therapy — we need external human debuggers to help us improve our software!” Find non-negotiable time away from your computer and other devices over the weekends, so that you can develop routines where you are not always able to respond. However, many people lack the time and access to health care and wellness services.

What strategies can people in a place of privilege, such as university faculty, take to promote time and access to health care and wellness services for people in need?

Set boundaries during the workday. The natural breaks to grab coffee, stroll across the campus, or visit the restroom can be difficult to find during a day filled with back-to-back virtual meetings. “You have to push yourself to set boundaries,” for example, “stop creating one-hour meetings, all my meetings are now 45 minutes long, because I want time between meetings to think.” Additionally, when scheduling meetings try to build in more time for wellness and self-reflection. “I try not to take any meetings before 10 am, this is time for me, so that I can think or go to the gym.” We have choices about when we are available and for how long.

Take advantage of the perks. Work travel has been a benefit of being an academic, for example, become a “pro at work-life vacationing,” look for conferences in places that you want to visit and “make time around those trips to sightsee and visit museums.” Work travel can be a way to spend time with family and friends. “Every work trip is a family vacation. Before COVID we were out at least once a month for a conference or work trip and we would schedule fun activities over the weekend.” Academic conferences are starting to create space for families, “at one of the main conferences in our field we had a kid’s exhibition — bring kids into the meeting if you can.” We can have ways to make family and work (work) at the same time.” However, many people contributing to academic research may not have the resources to create a family trip from an opportunity to attend a conference, e.g., graduate students, research staff, external collaborators.

How might we improve access to the “perks” of academic research?

Use your performance review and promotion materials to advance new norms for the institution. For example, performance and promotion materials often focus on traditional forms of “impact” such as winning grant funding, publishing papers, and graduating students; however, there are other forms of impact, like the societal impact associated with sharing information about a study back with the people who participated in the research. “When I wrote my promotion letter, I included a Societal Impact section, and I think by doing that I can effect change in how my department recognizes and measures performance.” The invisible work associated with societal impact is not always recognized, including working with communities, trainees, and “taking time and space to connect as people so that we can work through concerns and missteps […] that behind the scenes stuff is not easily quantified based on the incentive structures that we have put in place.”

In what ways can you recognize the positive impacts that members of your team have on your research, organization, and toward society?

Background on the Panelists

Elizabeth (Lizz) Eikey is an Assistant Professor jointly appointed with the Design Lab and the Herbert Wertheim School of Public Health and Human Longevity Science (HWSPH). Lizz is a first-generation college graduate with a background in information science and psychology from the Penn State University. Lizz has a passion for people and understanding their behaviors, which she explores through the Mental Health In Design Lab (MiD Lab).

Camille Nebeker is the Director of the UCSD Research Ethics Program and an Associate Professor with appointments in the Design Lab as well as HWSPH. Additionally, Camille is director and co-founder of the Research Center for Optimal Digital Ethics Health (ReCODE Health). Prior to joining UCSD, Camille was Director of Research Affairs at San Diego State University and helped to create the Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).

Nadir Weibel is an Associate Professor in the Computer Science department in the Jacobs School of Engineering and a faculty member in the Design Lab. Nadir also directs the Human-centered eXtended Intelligence (HXI) lab and is a co-founder of ReCODE Health. In addition to his background in engineering, Nadir speaks multiple languages and studied Italian Literature, communication, and computer science in college.

Panel Discussion Questions

This article was co-authored by members of the cultivating culture working group — with feedback from the panelists — and will be used to inform community-centered design work to enhance our lab culture. We decided to share this article broadly, because we felt that the insights as well as the panel discussion questions might help other lab groups at other universities to reflect on and promote a healthy and sustainable lab culture.

What steps will your lab take to promote a healthier culture? We encourage you to pick up some of the questions that we considered for the panel (copied below) and facilitate a similar conversation within your own lab group (please share what you learn!). We also want to encourage you to comment directly on the questions below, by using the Medium commenting features. Please share your thoughts and beliefs about self-management, so that other readers can learn from your experiences.

1. Mindset: Acknowledging that academia and beyond is focused on productivity, how do you construct a sustainable mindset that allows you to thrive and not deplete everything in the name of success?
2. Boundaries: Setting expectations of ourselves and one another in terms of responsibilities. Tell us about what you do to support your own self-care and enjoyment? How do you model these boundaries for your staff and trainees?
3. Productivity metrics: Does quality of life need to be the cost of productivity? What metrics do you use to evaluate your own wellbeing?
4. Personal and career pathways: Who are you in your career path? What has your course/pathway looked like? Where does self-management fit in your pathway?