How do some people apparently do "everything"?

[resistingreality]

Hi all, I've been thinking about this lately. I have a new job and I am under pressure to publish and generate research funding (I am in the social sciences - my research does not need that much money but my institution does). I happen to do quite a lot of public engagement and impact work, and of course have all the normal teaching and admin etc.

I just cannot work out how people find time to do everything - and I know some people do. I have a family (and a life!) but so do many other people, so that's not entirely an excuse.

I have ideas for new projects but I desperately need thinking time to execute those ideas properly. I just don't know how it works. I feel like a headless chicken who doesn't get anything done (publishing for me is also VERY slow).

And then I look on Twitter* and right left and centre people are announcing book deals, and awards, and new papers, and funding bids they have won. It makes me feel utterly overwhelmed and a bit depressed. Does anyone have any amazing time management strategies? How do you carve out the thinking time you need?

(*I recognise I would have a bit more time if I don't look on Twitter).

Hi, I had three thoughts that may be of relevance.

1. For each of those winning awards/grants, getting published - many are not. Look at how many colleagues are not able to do it all either.

2. Multitasking is now proven to be bullshit. If you are busy with public engagement work, set aside other things - but also diarise time to attend to them wholeheartedly in future & commit to that. Get grant deadlines in your calendar early and block some time to start writing.

3. Build thinking time into your day, or week. Prioritise it. Slow down a bit to achieve more in the long run.

I’m not in the same field, OP, but I was a hospital doctor, widowed with a baby and a toddler to raise alone to adulthood, one of whom was autistic, and I also taught Sunday school. There was no internet then either, so every item of food and clothing involved a 20 mile round trip to the nearest shops.
You just have to be ruthlessly organised, make lists and plans of everything, delegate where possible, and prioritise carefully. In my case it meant having almost no social life for 18 years.

I think if you were a weirdo, and tracked people on twitter with a spreadsheet, you would see people don’t do it all. The people with big research grant don’t teach much; the people writing books might not do much public engagement; maybe the public engagement specialists don’t have big admin roles. No one can do all those things, but the key is to pick one you like and really go for it. Doing all roles badly makes you unhappy but also means you are never going to progress in any area

Also agree about blocking time out. Block out two hours per day for research or impact or engagement or whatever your bag is. Not emails, anyway!

I have an odd theory that the people who tend to be superhuman overachievers in work related things (awards, publications, media articles etc) are heavily neurodivergent. The ones who are superhuman achievers in personal things (immaculate kids, beautiful home, great social circle) are heavily neurotypical. The rest muddle through somewhere in between.

You don't say if you're in a new role in a department you were already working at, or if you changed employer. However, as someone who is also fairly new into a job, I'd say also don't underestimate the time and energy it takes to just get to grips with your new role. I find that quite a bit of my time is taking up with both understanding how my new department/university works, setting aside time to meet with new colleagues, etc..

However, even just coming to grips with the requirements of my new role itself takes time: My new role has been a real learning curve in how to deal with the multiplicity of demands that come with it. I'm still figuring out how to most effectively schedule my week, how to not let all the small bits of 'stuff' take up so much time, etc. So no advice from me on how to do that better, but I do think it's fine to accept that the early days in a new role might not be your most productive and that it takes a bit of time to find a new rhythm.

I'd agree with all the above posts. I'd also add that it requires a singleminded focus on your own career goals. if you want to support students and colleagues that is generally secondary or completely missing from their working life.

Definitely agree that it’s not possible to do absolutely everything expected of academics well, so you do have to pick a focus for your non-teaching time. The pressure is to do everything at once for yesterday, but that’s not really possible!

Also in my experience some senior academics who appear to be ‘doing it all’ do little of the actual work but then take the credit for the work of more junior researchers. Which perpetuates this idea that their claimed work output is sustainable and possible in a normal academic workload.

IME the ones who do it all are absolutely ruthless with their time management, and only do things that will benefit them and they can shout from the rooftops. @bge is right as well in that no one is literally doing everything, people tend to have one big thing iykwim.

Also, in my department, the vast majority of overachievers are men with wives who are SAHM or very part-time, or young go getters with no family yet. There are a few women with young DC doing great things, but most of us are drowning tbh.

I don’t know but if you figure it out let me know. I’ve been trying to get started on a new project for over 5 years but just don’t have the headspace for it on top of the endless admin and teaching demands (oh hello - yet another request from the higher ups to reformat our module descriptors or some other nonsense) and other stuff that just fills my brain with so much noise I can’t focus on actual research. It’s frustrating. But I think the single-mindedness observation above is spot on. Personally, I need to cut back on the peer reviewing and external stuff - I’m crap at saying no to those requests. But I also enjoy it (and the extra little bits of money help a lot)

In my department (also social sciences) I have noticed that the really productive people:

Stay within a fairly narrow research lane so can churn out publications more quickly
Have a lot of PhD students whose research and writing they draw upon
Tend to ignore their admin and tedious duties
Do the bare minimum re teaching, both in terms of hours and in never really updating their lectures/readings etc.
Don't worry that much about public engagement

I don't really want to follow this path but personally I'm finding myself more productive every year simply because I'm now building upon what I've already done versus creating all new projects, and because I don't worry as much about everything being perfect. It doesn't need to be.

Also I do think as women we need to resist all the things we're socialised to do -- e.g. the endless demands in admin, I constantly see the women in my department doing all these things to a high standard whereas a lot of the men just don't bother, and there really are no consequences for this. So I do often ask myself, what would [male] Dr X do about this? It helps.

I have to say I am living proof that this is not always the case.

I have sacrificed a family (children) and relationships (unloveable workaholic). But I haven't sacrificed caring for students and being a team player with colleagues.

I'm in the humanities and have managed to secure a lot of research council funding over the years. This has got me through long periods as HoD, or director of research (I've done every REF from 2001 to 2014) and as a committee member /chair with a number of national/international scholarly associations.

Having research grants which require collaboration really help - you get to work with a team, you can bring on more junior colleagues as post-docs or PhD students, and I've actually done a lot of co-writing with PIs and Co-Is on grants.

But I'll die in a lonely old age probably. As opposed to my male colleagues who - ever since I was doing my PhD - have had their wives' assistance. One of my fellow PhD students had his wife "do" the footnotes. It's unfair and makes me rage.

To @EveryWitchWaybutLoose 's post I would also add: it's a long-term game, and the more time you spend in academia the likelier you are to be able to "do it everything" (or give the impression that you do!).
For example, at least in the Humanities, I find that it takes a while for people to notice your publications (and for the publications to come out in the first place!). These days I am getting invitations for collaborations or guest appointments for research I started doing about 7 years ago, and which in a way already feels quite 'old' to me - but this is what is on people's radar right now and in a way it's like getting interest on an investment I made years ago without necessarily having to put much effort into it (of course I still try to do the best job that I can whenever I am invited to do something but it's not comparable to the effort of getting a new research area established).
Same for people who dedicate a lot of energy e.g. to develop a new taught programme or research team, which then starts running quite efficiently without needing a lot of input, etc.
I think it can take a while to have an instinct for which kinds of activities, publications, admin jobs, etc. will yield "interest" in the future and which ones are a dead end. And in any case there is always a degree of unpredictability. But maybe talk to people in your institution or discipline who are ahead of you career-wise and who you identify as "doing everything" - ask them, or try to figure out, what choices they made earlier in their career that qualify as "high interest".
I would particularly advise focusing on or talking to female colleagues, as women are more likely to be burdened with "low interest" things and more likely to say yes without complaining. (For the first 3 or 4 years in my institution, I happily accepted basically all admin jobs and all teaching that either no one wanted to do or were temporarily vacant because of research or sick leave, and thought that this would show how much of a team player I was and how versatile. I learned the hard way - failed promotion application - that these things count for very little).

Hello OP.

I know the kind of people you mean. My reflections and experiences are that these people are:

• Lying. Or at least embellishing. Or at least making their achievements seem a lot bigger or more current than they actually are. I have a colleague who regularly tweets about her writing as it relates to current events. The first post will be "This has been in the news today, I've published on this" followed by a long thread of her writings. It's panic-inducing but digging into the thread shows most of her writings are blogs, not academic articles, or things she wrote years and years ago.

• Doing things badly. They'll either be doing 100% of things at 50% effort/quality. Or they'll be doing 50% of things at 100% quality and 50% of things at absolutely piddling effort/quality. No-one is doing 100% of things at 100% quality. You need to pick your model.

• Married to a woman. Seriously. So many men who are managing to do everything are doing so because they're being totally supported by a woman at home who either doesn't work, or who has a 'job' (rather than career) which caters to supporting him. This can be everyday things like doing the shopping, cooking, childcare that allows him to stay late and network. Or it can be 'big' things like being willing to relocate countries for his promotion.

• Sewing up one tiny area. As PP have said, they're doing everything because they are totally immersed in an area, its literature, its opportunities, its networks, its debates etc. So when, for example, a grant call comes out, they're able to immediately assemble a team and be incredibly responsive. They also become a 'go-to' person for other people's work as a collaborator or co-author so their opportunities increase. Personally, I hate the idea of just working in one field for my whole career though.

• Collaborating. Working alone to produce publications, impact, grants, teaching etc. is very hard work and far too much work for one person. I think a lot of people who are seemingly doing everything aren't shouldering 100% of the effort themselves. So, they'll announce an article in a massive journal, for example, but if there's four authors on the article then their contribution is less, freeing up more time to do more things. I love writing with people and its allowed me to massively increase my outputs.

Fundamentally, as you say, stay off Twitter. I got rid of my academic Twitter years ago and it was a revelation. I can't get stressed about how much other people are doing because I don't physically know what they're doing.

I'd also push for some concrete expectations from your HoD - how much money do you need to secure in grant income over a particular period? How many articles do you need over what time period?
I'm in social sciences too and we have a rhetoric circulating right now which goes "We under massive pressure to increase our grant income". This is repeated all the time in meetings.
I pushed back, I asked where the pressure is coming from, how this pressure translates into individual targets, and what happens if we don't meet those targets. Ultimately, the HoD didn't really know but kept repeating that we're under pressure. So I'm ignoring it. I mean, I'm still doing my job - I'm still trying to get grants, I'm still writing articles. But I'm not internalising the pressure.

It's so different from DP who works in the sciences where they have a very clear set of expectations - a certain number of articles graded 3/4* over a two year period, and a specific income target adjusted for career stage. But, still no actual consequences for people who don't meet these expectations of course!!

I'm in social sciences too and we have a rhetoric circulating right now which goes "We under massive pressure to increase our grant income". This is repeated all the time in meetings.

I think this is very important, and also something in which likely discernment will come with experience (at least it did in my case!). There are all sorts of "pressures" on us at any point, some of them will be threatening and real (e.g. attract X number of students or the department will close), others will be part of the promotion criteria, others will be things that people say and that have little consequence if not met, and might even change from time to time depending on who is in management and what their flavour of the month is. And some of it is also self-imposed.

Thanks so much for your responses everybody. I have a feeling that one of my biggest problems is I have few to no collaborators - if I do anything (paper, grant application though rarely do those) I do it alone. When I have had co-authors they have not written anything - they just comment on what I write and to be honest, I could manage without. Working alone is partly because I am very poorly networked - there's a lot of reasons for that (lack of confidence, natural introversion, and also kicking off my academic career when I had babies/very young children and a husband whose work meant he was not available to help - I think one implication was that I had no additional bandwidth other than the 'basics'). Anyway, I have been asked to join some other academics on papers recently and I have realised I have a very limited sense of how this 'game' works - I think other people are happy to take a fairly hands-off role and still be named as co-author? I have seen glimpses of 'writing circles' where a group of academics seem to just stick their names on each other's papers. That doesn't feel enormously ethical to me but maybe I am over-thinking this? I am not new to this game, not at all. But I do often feel I have a very poor understanding of the rules, even well over ten years in.

Hi OP,
I had similar difficulties in establishing collaborations earlier in my career (also I am in a field where co-authorship is not the norm). What I found worked for me was to collaborate with scholars who were 3-4 years behind me career-wise. This meant that we were still all early career when I established those collaborations, and so still had quite a lot of energy/new ideas/an incentive to put in our best work, while at the same time I could take a mentorship or leadership role in a rather non-hierarchical way - i.e. through all of these collaborations it was assumed that in terms of our research ideas and work we were all at the same level, but because I had been around for slightly longer I had a bit more of an insight into how publications and funding worked.
This kind of set-up worked for me in that it allowed me to feel that I was having a significant steer in these projects while at the same time feeling that I was working with peers whose ideas I was truly excited about, and presumably vice-versa.
I am not saying that this set up works for everyone, but rather that you have to figure out what kinds of dynamics work for you. From your e-mail I get the sense that you don't like the more 'transactional' dynamics where a senior scholar stamps a seal of approval and more junior academics do the work - that's fine, and there are certainly other ways to collaborate.

I think some of this is about 'good enough'. Marking doesn't haven't to be full of the most amazing feedback, good enough will do. Teaching, ditto. And some other jobs we do as academics.

So, if you want to be an innovative teacher, doing amazing things in the classroom, good enough teaching won't cut it. But if you want to be researching and publishing, something else has to be just good enough to allow you the mental freedom to excel at something else.

I'd most certainly echo @aridapricot on collaborating with more junior colleagues where you can. I've found this incredibly rewarding and really intellectually stimulating.
From a practical perspective junior colleagues are a lot more willing to actually do some work on collaborative projects (like actually write sections, rather than just comment on drafts of papers). This means your workload decreases but also means it feels like a true collaboration with equal input.

The model I have now is that I tend to have one or two collaborative writing projects on the go at any one time, as well as a solo paper. That way I can balance isolation with collaboration which I find works really well - sometimes I want to be left the hell alone to write on my own but other times I want to talk ideas through with others, my approach lets me flit between both.

But I hear you on the challenges of working alone. I did so for many years early in my career and it was absolutely horrible. But I hate networking. I hate working with other people that I don't really like, trust and respect.

There’s normal someone or multiple people picking up the slack.

Thanks again everybody, this is really useful advice. I get that idea of writing with junior scholars but must admit I don't quite feel comfortable with that. To be honest, I think very few would look at me as somebody who could provide them with much useful advice or support - so what would be in it for them? Maybe that's partly lack of confidence, which is something I know holds me back - after some vicious rejections in the past, there have been times where I have slightly withdrawn and turned my attention elsewhere. I'm starting to realise rejection happens to everybody (I have always known it from an intellectual perspective, but found it much harder to internalise that knowledge). Maybe though I need to accept that for a variety of reasons I just feel more comfortable working largely alone and that will have a serious impact on my productivity. Hmmm.

Can we unpack your last comment, please, OP? There's a lot going on there.

Firstly, why do you feel uncomfortable writing with more junior colleagues?

Secondly, why do you think junior colleagues would be so dismissive of you?

Thirdly, of course there'd be something in it for them - a publication that might not otherwise have happened!

Fourthly, everyone gets rejections. Everyone gets savage, brutal and nonsensical rejections. It took me a very long time to realise and make peace with this. Following accounts like "Reviewer 2 must be stopped" and "Shit Reviewers Say" really, really helped me. Writing collaboratively also helped me deal with reviews for a variety of reasons.

Fifthly, you say that "I just feel more comfortable working largely alone". I'm not sure that's true at all. You've come to MN to start a thread because working alone isn't working for you. I don't think you need to jump in at the deep end with collaborations - doing everything collaboratively. But I do think you need to take some pressure off yourself by some things with other people.

Do you have a mentor, OP? What career stage are you at?

Hi @KStockHERO (me too by the way 😀). I recognise I sound a little pathetic. I'm an SL - around 14 years since Doctorate though. And languishing. I'd really like to progress.

I'm in a funny position I think as my publication record is relatively poor (I mean what I have is OK-ish but there's not that much of it) but I think I might be a little better known in my field than I should be, partly because I do a lot of engagement and impact work and I also research a very specific 'thing'. I also published a book recently that spent some time on the bestseller list (admittedly in a fairly niche category, but still)!

However, I don't think of myself as a 'natural' academic at all. I still find myself capable of reading journal papers and finding them utterly incomprehensible and also, for example, failing to be able to write in what I feel is an academic style. I use theory, I'm not great at developing it. Essentially, I feel a deep sense of imposter syndrome and so the idea of collaboration which could increase productivity carries the risk of exposure. I guess it's easier to stay 'small'?

I should say that an irony of this is that all these themes are quite closely reflected in my research (this is possibly outing but never mind). So I can 'see' how this works - but find it difficult to respond! As I say, this reads like a rather sad story so apologies for that! Feel free to tell me to buck-up!

If your strengths are in engagement/impact OP, have you thought of approaching your research office/research lead and ask about turning your work into an impact case study for next REF?
At my place they insist a lot that impact needs to be underpinned by high-quality published research - so maybe having a chat with an impact champion or the like can give you a sense of focus, perhaps identifying areas in which you should publish, with specific collaborators, etc.?
At my place, a range of people develop impact case studies but not all are submitted to REF - I understand the actual submission process is quite stressful, so I'm not suggesting you go all the way unless you want to, but rather that you get a sense of how an impact case study around your work would look like