Tag Archives: work-life balance

Time tracking over an 18 months period: what was learned

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“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” 

– Steve Jobs

The COVID pandemic made many of us realize that we were spending a lot of time on things that brought very little in terms of quality of life or productivity. Transit time was a clear example, with many of us spending hours daily in traffic. This time suddenly became available, and we loved it. We discovered that tasks we had been putting off became “easy,” or at least easier to tackle. For me, the second item I was trying to get a handle on was the time spent on emails.

After listening to the Time and Attention podcast by Chris Bailey, I decided to try Timeular, which combines a physical device with software. The device is an eight-sided tracker that detects which face it is resting on. In the software, each face is associated with an activity. Tracking stops when the tracker is placed on its holder, though you can also manually enter time in the software.

After using it for more than 18 months, I wish it had 10 or 12 faces, as there are things I would like to track in finer detail (and I do not want to buy a second tracker). However, it is sufficient for a broad overview in an automated fashion.

I set up the tracker with the following categories:

  • Review/Write: This includes all reviews of trainees’ manuscripts, master’s and PhD theses, as well as my own writing. I would prefer to have writing as separate categories.
  • Research, Planning and Mentoring: I combine these since much of the mentoring is linked to planning research projects, experiments, data taking, and analysis with trainees.
  • Teaching: This encompasses formal undergraduate and graduate teaching activities, including preparation, in-class time, and grading.
  • Email!
  • Maintenance: This primarily involves my weekly review and a few related tasks, such as annual reviews, all ensuring that my system works and is always up to date.
  • Administrative Duties: This includes institution committees, CAMPEP program-related activities, etc.
  • Scientific Meetings and Conferences, self-explanatory.
  • Break, lunch time and other distraction that arise during the working hours.

Note that I do not track my vacation time, transit time (though perhaps I should!), jogging/training time, screen time outside of work, social media time, etc. Timeular now has (in beta) an automatic tracking feature for the applications you use, in addition to the tracker itself. In the Apple ecosystem, Screen Time tracking across all your devices is also available.

In 2023, the first full calendar year I recorded, I logged over 1900 hours despite being on strike for several weeks and taking my full vacation allotment (23 days vacation + 12 days spread out through the years). It was an excellent year, with significant achievements including graduating 15 trainees, contributing to committees for 6 more, and publishing 14 manuscripts, one of them being an international report and another a first-in men clinical trial for a novel technology project I have been involved with since 2011.

For those who wonder about break/lunch, only 11% of these hours were in that category. This is on the low side for a creative field such as scientific research. Note that if you take a 5-minute break every hour, 1 hour for lunch and work 8 hours, this results in a 580-minute day, with 100 minutes (17%) being break/lunch time. According to one extensive time-tracking study, the top 10% most productive people take even more break with a 17-minute break for every 52 minutes of work.

Interestingly, teaching was only my fourth most time-consuming activity. This includes time spent in class as well as preparation and grading. This is because during the summer semester, when there is no formal teaching, I dedicate 100% of my time to other activities, primarily research. In the Fall and Winter semesters, the time dedicated to teaching increases significantly.

In 2023, I spent 6% of my time on emails, totalling 115 hours. Think about it, this is close to 3 weeks per year!  When I started time tracking, my average was nearly twice that. I very quickly changed my email habits by:

  • Avoiding emails in the evening (I really try to stick to this as much as possible).
  • Using a VIP list for urgent emails.
  • Reducing the frequency of checking my email during the day.
  • Avoiding emails on weekends.

Within a few weeks, my average email time reduced to an average of 34 minutes during workdays. This includes an end-of-day inbox cleanup, when quickly reply to things that take less then 2 min and transform into a task anything that needs more serious attention or work. I do a deeper cleanup of all of my inboxes, including e-mail, during my weekly Maintenance session. I further notice that my average tracking entry length when up from 38 min to 61 min, leading to better use of larger chunk of time during the day.

I schedule a Maintenance event in my agenda every Friday afternoon for 90 min. This is were I review all of my inboxes, get everything sorted in my task manager and document manager, review ongoing projects, Waiting For tasks, backburner projects, …,  review the previous week and plan the upcoming week. Some weeks, I need less than 90 min and others I will take a full 2h. I am also planning 1.5 days before the Holidays break for a full review and cleanup of all of my completed projects (archiving documents and e-mails associated with those projects as needed) and set the stage (high altitude planning) for the upcoming year. Overall, this account of 5% of my time (110h last year) but this is an investment and the return on that investment pays for itself.

In 2023, mentoring, research planning, and reviewing documents took up the largest share of my time at 37%. Including time spent at scientific conferences, this accounts for nearly 50% of my time in direct service to research activities.  I suspect that this will and should be true every year. This is also quite interesting as for a long time, I held a position where I was 50% clinical medical physicist and 50% research physicist. Moving to a university position, did not change the amount of time dedicated to research (and related activities) in the end…

Administrative tasks represented about 16% (or 307h) of my time in 2023. Some of these are built-in my job e.g. the direction of our CAMPEP program, our department faculty meetings and so on. 

Comparing the Fall semesters of 2022 and 2023, I noticed a pattern. September (start of the school year for us in Canada) and November are particularly busy, with a higher workload due to grant proposals, recommendation letters, and administrative tasks. December is also intense due to year-end activities.

The number of hours/month logged in these 4-month periods is:

1- Higher on average than the rest of the year. Furthermore, September and November have the highest time logged in both years. The monthly average for the other months is around 153h/month (for 2023, the only full year I have). 

2- September (entrance, grants, letters, …) and November (everyone want their things done before the holidays and usually little happen past December 20th or 21st on the admin side, just the professors grading their finals) require a higher output, usually well above our work contract (on average this is always true, but still much higher)

3- October 2022 was low but there was also mortality on the family. In December, considering that I am out for a full weeks, it seems a lot had to be done in a short amount of time and this is true for both 2022 and 2023.

4- Notice how more hours logged in 2023 relative to 2022: record number of thesis to review and PhD thesis defence in addition to the normal workload!

In conclusion, time logging offers valuable perspective. It has helped me manage my email time more efficiently and recognize the actual hours spent “truly” working. As a creative professional, tracking time reveals that one might work fewer hours than perceived, given the brain’s limitations in sustaining concentration on creative tasks for extended periods. Since the pandemic, I have been trying to reduce my work week by concentrating on what I consider key tasks/projects, folding in the need for breaks. I have clearly failed in that regards for the Fall of 2023, but it was also an extremely satisfying four months 

On COVID, anxiety and finding balance…

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I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Paul Atreides, Dune

It has been sometimes since I wrote on this blog. I am ready, it is now time to get it going again!

The COVID pandemic has hit us fast and hard. We had to very quickly move our teaching online and rethink some of our laboratory courses. As a university professor, I had to learn to teach to black boxes on Zoom screens (being sarcastic but…). While not everything in that experience was negative, it became quickly obvious that the non-verbal component of teaching in front of a class takes all of its meaning: the curious face one or many students make when some concepts do not really get through, the fidgeting on the chair, … all of these get lost for the most part in translation when moving teaching online. This was a lesson learned for us professors (and some more on how to get beyond this issue).

On the research side, while numerical projects were able to thrive, experimental research programs were closed for weeks and it took months before we were able to get to full speed again. Scientific meetings got canceled and then moved online. Mentoring as well as our weekly group meeting moved fully online for almost a year. Travel all but got down to a trickle. Because of that, I had graduate students that never started their program in the fall of 2020. I will not be shy to say that two years later I can still feel the effect of this pandemic. The only positive aspect was how much materials my graduate students had been collecting before the lockdown, enough for manuscripts that they have been putting off it (procrastinating on!) for a while.

Let’s be frank, the whole situation was quite unsettling and worrisome. For me the lockdown happens right after an electrophysiology procedure to solve my tachycardia episodes (had it for years but got quite worse in the last two years before this procedure). While it was not the dangerous kind of tachycardia, I developed anxiety behavior associated with it in the few months prior to the procedure. I got to admit that the COVID lockdown did not help in that regard, and anxiety change to panic attack in particular situations. Two years later, I am still learning to live my anxiety. If any of you have any kind of triggers for anxiety and panic attacks, I understand what you are going through and do seek out help. It works!

That being said, the lockdown also had benefits. I decided to direct the time saved from commuting to start a Couch to 5K program. Never looked back and still jogging (yeah I do not call myself a runner, I think I am just too slow!) 3 times a week. In the 18 months that followed, I lost almost 15 kg (and my BMI is now in a much better range!), got my resting heart rate around 60 bpm and lower my blood pressure medication that I got two years before to the minimum available on the market and to the point that I could possibly get without it (maybe when I get rid of those last 2-3 kg to get back to my younger self!) I used Apple Fitness+ plus to start meditating and took advantage of the mindfulness trigger on my Apple Watch to introduce deep breathing moments throughout the day. I have to say, all of the above further help in decreasing anxiety and bring your mind to a much more calm (and also creative) state!

I must admit that I got hooked on my morning jog, to the point that to this day, I still miss the time when we could skip the morning commute to work: up, jog, shower, eat, deep breathing and start the day’s work by the same time I would get to work after commute. I was also able to institute a clear cut-off at the end of the day (OK mostly a clear one, but I used to never disconnect at all before the pandemic) . Wow, my evenings became so much more relaxing than my old routine.

Overall, this got me rethinking about work-life balance. When the pandemic started, I spent less hours/week working but I did not do less. In fact, I found out I was doing more. However, the unimportant stuff got evacuated very quickly, and focus on the important work, personal and family stuff suddenly got very clear. The concept of busy vs productive takes all its meaning and productivity becomes much more holistic in nature.

Furthermore, I think that many of us became more attuned not only to our well-being and that of our family and friends, but also mindful of others, in particular to the students that we are guiding, mentoring. I had always in the past told students to disconnect once in a while, not come to the lab during certain periods, like at Xmas. But now I insist much more that they take their 4-week vacation every year, adapt to flexible schedules and working from home, and so on.

Reflecting on my work-life balance before and after March 2020, I came to the conclusion that bearing obvious major deadlines (like a grant proposal!), if I cannot fit everything I do at work in a 40h/week time frame, then there is something I am doing wrong, most likely I am doing too much unnecessary/unimportant stuff, stuff that is not moving my key projects forward.

Coincidentally, I have started to track the time I spend on various activities (to take decision based on actual data), for example trying to get the time I spend on e-mail down to an acceptable level. But this will be for another post…