Would you find this exhausting?

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I feel absolutely wiped out after a day’s work at the moment, which is not very helpful as I have small children to deal with as soon as I arrive home. Instead I just want to lie in a darkened room! I can’t work out if my current schedule is objectively exhausting and needs re-jigging, or if I’m just not coping very well and need to focus on that. I would appreciate any outside views.

E.g. yesterday:

2 hours: commute (bike, train, bus and then walk) to get to work.
2 hours: lecturing
45 min: emails/admin
15 min: lunch
2 hours: (v active) seminar leading
1 hour: committee meeting
2 hours: PhD supervising (2 separate students)
2 hours: commute (walk, bus, train then bike) to get home

Is it me??

No - that's a 12 hour day. Your commute sounds horrendous and is taking up 4 hours of your day.

It's not you. I'm not an academic but used to work in a job with similar hours and a similar commute. I didn't go back after maternity leave. I was lucky that we could afford it but I could hardly cope with the commute pre-dc. It takes a lot out of you.

Sounds exhausting to me, and especially the commute. The one benefit of a long commute can be that you're able to catch up on work, but that's impossible for you if you're cycling/walking.

That's a full day with very little free time (ie time you can allocate yourself). Is this a typical day or the worst day? If this is a typical day you have a lot of contact time, if I had the same every day I would be shattered. Your commute would kill me, to be honest, mine is 45 minutes and it includes a 15 minute country walk in the morning which I really enjoy so I do that rather than driving which takes half the time but is twice as stressful. You are spending 12 hours out of the house, anyone would be tired in that situation.

I never accept two hour lectures, I think neither I or the students can maintain a suitable level of engagement for two hours (I do have two one hour lectures on different subjects in one day, but that's very different). A two hour lecture would leave me exhausted by itself.

I do hate the commute, but that’s the part I can’t change! Would you find the rest of the schedule OK if not for the commute?

At the moment I’m stuck between trying to pack in even longer days on site so that I can have a day or two working from home, or trying to thin out my schedule so it’s less exhausting each day (but then I have to go in at least 4-5 days a week).

Lots of food for thought here - thank you!

I have days like this twice a week on average. Then a third day is mostly committee meetings, research seminar, etc, with perhaps an hour or two of unscheduled time in the middle. The advantage is that I can then have 1-2 days working from home which is bliss by comparison (if I’m not too exhausted to think straight by then).

My department has a policy of 2-hour lectures. I wouldn’t choose it like that either!

I would need to thin that out. I would be too wiped out after two hours of lecturing, a seminar and no real break in the middle to offer proper supervision to two doctoral students. Not fair on them or me. Do you have regular times/ days you see the PhD students?

The email is the thing you can do elsewhere I would think. Could you do that on the train/bus bit of your commute? Then you could have a better break at least.

My advice is to look hard at all the things you do, especially being on committees and thin it out. In academia people are very good at proposing things as "good for your career", especially things that are a lot of work for little personal reward. Learn to say no to these things. Observe whether your male colleagues get invited to partake in so many "career opportunities" outside their research and teaching.

Two hour lectures are great for timetabling and giving people teaching free days, they are, unless very carefully orchestrated, terrible for student engagement. This is a personal bugbear of mine, people who enjoy teaching hate two hour lectures, people who hate teaching love them. (Wild generalisation based on personal experience rather than any proper data, I'm ashamed to put it on an academic forum, really )

I have days like this twice a week on average. Then a third day is mostly committee meetings, research seminar, etc, with perhaps an hour or two of unscheduled time in the middle. The advantage is that I can then have 1-2 days working from home which is bliss by comparison (if I’m not too exhausted to think straight by then)

That's pretty much my week - although at the moment my teaching is 4 days a week & I really have to duck & dive to preserve one research day. I work Saturdays in the library.

So I think that without the commute, that's a pretty reasonable workload, particularly if that's just 3 days a week. The only thing missing is that there are no real breaks - but presumably you could schedule PhD supervisions differently. Could you do emails on the train journey?

Obviously what's exhausting you is the 4 hours commute each day.

I did 10 years of a 2 hour each way commute. All by train, with a short local, then a 90 minute long distance (against the rush hour which meant I always got a seat). Some weeks I was there 6 days a week, some only 3.

I used to teach up to 9pm some weeks, but the university was pretty well set up for commuters, with a good connection to the mainline, and my rule was that if I was arriving back home after 8pm, I got a taxi from the mainline station home.

I got HUGE amounts of reading & marking & lecture prep done on the train: on the way to work (at 7:30-9am) I worked; coming home I read novels. No Wifi in those days to distract me!

I had one year where I deliberately managed to get all my teaching & supervision work into 2 days, then a third day for admin. The 2 teaching days were long, but then I usually had Monday & Friday not commuting.

But I would tend to sleep most of Saturday, and I certainly had to sacrifice the gym & the dance studio, and socialising other than weekends.

It can be exhausting. But it was my choice not to live in the (tinpot, claustrophobic) small town where I worked, and to stay living in the large city 100km away - that was where my friends, my family & my partner all lived. It was a great job (although ultimately, in the wrong country for me)

If you are working from home two days a week, then that's a pretty average day- the real issue is spending four hours of it commuting, but you know that already

The lecture thing is interesting - when I was an undergrad, we had 3 x 1 hour lectures every week (3 modules, so a total of 3 hours contact time per week: those were the days!). Now, most places have two hour slots - largely student driven, from what I have seen, as they "don't want to come in for just an hour". My former institution, on the other hand, taught in three hour blocks (social science - those we were a joy for all concerned . Problem is that lectures generally aren't the best tool for teaching people - but they are the most cost effective. Splitting them, though, invariably means sacrificing a day of wfh/research - which is a sacrifice too far for most of us.

We have 2 hour lectures scheduled, but do 90 mins - I try to put in some sort of writing exercise or activity at about 40 mins in.

Problem is, you can't give them a break because they are terrible timekeepers & take the piss. Give them a 5 minute break just to stretch their legs or whatever and some wander back in 15 minutes later.

I think the wfh thing is slightly alien to me. The vast majority of my colleagues are in their offices or their labs all day, every (working) day. So doing two separate lectures is no big deal. I’ve always expected to be able to find any of them at some pint in any day. I have only recently come to understand that going to work every day isn’t normal in other disciplines.

Some point in any day, obviously!

Your commute sounds awful but I have two days a week like that too and two research days. I also feel wiped out but don’t have as far to commute.