Daily Routine

Today, from an email to a trusted friend and colleague of many years asking when I might be coming to visit and re-starting our collaborative research:

An “ideal-typical” day for me probably looks like this:

6:15 am  Rise

7:30 am  Depart house, bring kids to school

8:20 am  Arrive office

6:00 pm Leave office

6:30 pm Dinner

7:00 pm  Bring kids to bed

8:00 pm  Talk with Nicola

9:00 pm  Start work

1:00 am  Bed

Office time is mostly spent with teaching or teaching preparation on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays.  Thursday is usually catching up on administrative issues, or engaged in meetings.  I am also involved with managing work of the team at my Chair including 3 academic staff, 3 additional funded PhD students (now increasing to 6 students), and running a monthly study group.  Friday is “journal day” working on Socio-Economic Review and the British Journal of Industrial Relations.  Another variation involves leaving the office earlier to help the kids organize themselves or transport to their afterschool lessons or activities.  If I endeavour to do any research work, this is usually limited to Saturday and Sunday at the expense of family time. 

After two years of doing this, I am exhausted and finish most days feeling like there is more new things to-do than have been completed.  What makes the working time so ineffective:

1. Too many commitments (strategy: do one small thing after another, do it well)
2. Lack of administrative support (observation: every form that is filled out and sent somewhere will come back to require more work... at least twice)
3. Time slots are too short to complete the tasks, so things get postponed, dropped, left for later completion (rule: every time a task is stopped and restarted, an additional 50-100% energy must be reinvested to re-establish the starting point and move beyond it)
4. Fremdzwang als Selbstzwang or the problem of external agenda setting to raise funding or succeed in competition for other resources 

Here one of my favorite GC aphorisms applies: The necessary is possible, the optional is expensive, the unnecessary is unlikely.)

 To be continued....