Dr. Workload, or: How I learned to be more productive and put self-care first

Amanda L. Glaze (@EvoPhD) is an Assistant Professor of Middle Grades and Secondary Science Education, Georgia Southern University, USA. In this story, she appeals to professionals in academia to strike a healthy work-life balance and “celebrate all the steps.”

This story was originally published on October 9, 2018, on the Errant Science blog (available here) and has been republished here with permission.

Being a grad student is hard work, being a post-doc is hard work, being a professor is hard work. I remember the constant state of stress, lack of sleep, concerns about deadlines and massive workload I carried as a doc student. Now, looking back five years later, I can say with certainty that it did not get any lighter but has been a learning process in how to juggle fifty things at once, sometimes successfully, sometimes eh, not so much.

The pressure to be successful, to find funding, to publish, to get results, it is just as much if not more with each change in level. Factor into that equation that I am a single mother of two maintaining the schedules of a 6 year old and 17 year old and the mental image is hair-raising. At any given moment you are juggling 50 things, from the household chores and dinner to the next NSF proposal and four publications that are in progress. It is more than enough to make any one person crash and burn and honestly, I did.

But in that crash I came out with something amazing. I found myself again after years of living in my workload. Forget corny advice and rays of sunshine, you won’t find them here, but you will find my candid reflection on how putting self-care first has completely changed my life and, in turn, made me a better mother, friend, and academic.

Intrigued? Click here to read the rest of Amanda’s story.