One of the biggest struggles a lot of us had / have in academia is the problem of overwork. At 7pm on Sunday, there are nearly always papers to grade. Over the winter “break,” there are syllabi to write for the following semester. Summers often require teaching to pay the bills, and research happens in the nooks and crannies of time left over from the teaching and administrative tasks we’re actually paid to do.

Add in a family, a hobby or two, and some friends, and it’s no wonder so many academics are running around bemoaning their to-do lists and glaring at their calendars. In fact, the sheer levels of exhaustion many people experience in academia directly contribute to their misery in the profession.

Think about that for a minute. There are many people — and you may be one of them — who love this profession, love this work, and yet are miserable because they’re always buried under more things that need to get done, more people who need to be taken care of, and fewer and fewer opportunities to do the things they themselves love, including spending time with their loved ones.

That’s more than just a recurring personal problem. Academia needs the people who love it, and it needs them whole and happy and engaged, because the work people do in academia — expanding the world of knowledge and ideas and training up the next generation of professionals and thinkers — it’s vital, important work.

Now, like most jobs, the structures of academia aren’t set up for personal satisfaction or balancing anyone’s workload. But unlike many jobs, academia comes with few boundaries around time or work. It’s the dark side of all that vaunted flexibility — sure, you can get your oil changed at 2pm on Wednesday, but your whole life can get eaten up with the kind of work that expands to fill the time it’s given.

In other words, we have to set some boundaries. And before we get started, let me say this: I’m not pretending any of the below is easy. It’s not. It’s incredibly difficult because of the way we’ve been socialized into the profession, because of the way the profession is structured. And so, in enacting some of these things, it’s important to listen to the resistance that comes up and investigate it — because often it’s the messages we’re sending ourselves that keep us trapped.

A few practical strategies to see the forest instead of the trees

So let’s talk about some strategies for managing all of the overwhelm.

Know that you aren’t alone. For all kinds of reasons, not the least of which is that everything is judged by a jury of one’s peers, academics tend to boast both about their endless, overwhelming workloads (and there’s a kind of perverse competition — whoever has the worst one wins) and yet imply that while they’re harried and can’t possibly do what you’re asking, they’re also on top of it better than you are and if you can’t handle the heat, best get out of the kitchen. It’s a lie. Every academic I’ve ever talked with has struggled to figure out how to balance everything, and then they have to do the same thing the following semester when everything changes.

Think A B and C time. Some of the best advice I ever got about writing my dissertation was from a book by Eviatar Zeruvabel called The Clockwork Muse, and it’s applicable much more broadly. He pointed out that we all have times when we work best and times when it takes all of the caffeine in Starbucks to get anything out of us. (Okay, he didn’t say it like that, but you get the point). If you can figure out what your personal rhythms are, you can schedule your work to take advantage of them.

I, for instance, am a classic morning person. My best thinking time happens between, oh, 8 and noon. I’m okay in the afternoon until about 4, and I’m useless for thinking work after that. For me, then, blocking off morning time to write, teaching and having meetings in the afternoon, and relaxing in the evening worked well. A friend of mine was useless early in the day, needed something scheduled to get him going, was okay in the afternoon, and really hit his stride after 6pm. He liked to teach in the late morning to get himself out of bed, have meetings and do teaching-related work in the afternoon, and write after dinner.

Whatever your particular rhythms are, the more you can let them drive what you’re doing when, the more energy you’re going to have for the right tasks.

Learn to say no. Service tasks proliferate, and they’re a direct consequence of faculty governance. However, younger professors, and especially women, can get buried in endless committees and support work. Figure out where your contributions will be the most valuable (because of your particular skills and interests), say yes to those, and say no to everything else.

One of the most successful female academics I’ve ever known was a master at saying no. Now, she didn’t say no more than the boys did — but she said no a hell of a lot more than the girls did. And she got her book published and sailed through tenure when most of the other women we knew were sweating it out.

So it’s not about not doing service. Service is a crucial part of participating in the academic community and making the whole enterprise work without creating a cadre of managers who aren’t on the front lines of teaching and research. But it is about being choiceful, doing what you can excel at and manage, and not picking up work because “someone has to do it.” Someone may have to do it, but it doesn’t always have to be you.

Build in self-care. Self-care tends to drop to the bottom of the list, because there are so many other things to get done and they have deadlines! And people who will be disappointed! And there’s a tenure case or promotion case to build! But let’s face it — we’re none of us as effective when we’re exhausted and stressed out as we are when we’re well-rested. Have you ever had the experience of taking a really good vacation, the kind where you spend three days face down and by the end have actually rested enough that you’re excited to go home and pick your work back up? What would it be like if you could do that every single week? Every single day?

Don’t you think your teaching would be more energetic, your research more creative, your service more effective, if you felt filled up with the joy and fun of the universe? Build it in not just because it’s a good idea or good for you — build it in because it’s critical to your work.

So figure out what fills you up and what helps you recover and relax, whether it’s cheesy novels, hikes in the woods, playing fetch with the dog, sleeping in late, or painting. Build it in.

Good enough is good enough. There’s no clear finish line for any academic project, whether it’s teaching a class or writing a book or chairing a committee. There’s always another source to read, another experiment to conduct, another hour you could spend preparing for next week’s lecture. Instead of torturing yourself with what else you could be doing for this particular task, figure out what “good enough” looks like in terms of the objectives and hit that. Then stop.

No one makes it out of graduate school, in my experience, without a pretty crazy work ethic. In fact, there’s no way through graduate school and the dissertation experience without a pretty crazy work ethic. So when your inner critic starts flagellating you for “not working hard enough,” take a real look at what it’s talking about — because I’d bet cold, hard, cash that it’s not operating in a reality the rest of us would share.

Create no-work zones. Having defined periods of time when you are not working — not answering work email, not grading papers, not planning anything, not writing proposals or articles or book chapters — can help you be present to everything else in your life. And in doing so, it can help you be fully present to your work when it’s time to work because the rest of your life has already been attended to.

So consider closing down work email after 7pm. Consider reserving Saturday or Sunday as a no-work day. Consider blocking off an hour for lunch every day. Consider taking a solid week over the winter holidays and two weeks in the summer for the rest of your life and only the rest of your life. Everyone’s no-work zones will be personal and particular — but having definite time will help limit the resentment and enable you to actually get some energy back.

Spaghetti arms…

Academia, because of the way it’s structured, doesn’t have many boundaries. Long before smartphones and vpn let everyone else take their work home with them, academics had little separation between work life and home life. And so we have to impose boundaries upon it, because those boundaries are what enable us to work in academia sustainably and happily.

If you really love the teaching and the research, if you thrill to watch a young adult finally find the thing that excites him or her, if you’re passionate about education, don’t let academia walk all over you until you hate it. It’s too important and you’re too valuable.