{"id":178,"date":"2016-04-27T11:05:20","date_gmt":"2016-04-27T15:05:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ecologybits.com\/?p=178"},"modified":"2016-04-27T14:52:34","modified_gmt":"2016-04-27T18:52:34","slug":"scheduled-sanity-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/ecologybits.com\/index.php\/2016\/04\/27\/scheduled-sanity-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Scheduled Sanity Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of the challenges of academia is learning to work for yourself. Before my science life, I worked for a large bureaucracy, a small family business, and a medium-sized non-profit. And in all cases, someone else was telling me what to do. At the small business, my work was dictated to me on an hour-to-hour basis. At the non-profit, I had daily and weekly milestones to meet. At the bureaucracy, I had to give monthly updates on my progress on long-term projects. Being told what to do is, oddly, freeing. It give structure to your work life and makes it easier to see when you’ve made achievements.<\/p>\n

But in academia \u2013 starting from the time you enter graduate school \u2013 your time is mostly your own. Your goals are self-set. And if you have milestones to meet, you typically have no one to police their achievement but yourself. This sounds wonderful in theory, but working for yourself is a very hard thing to do. And the skills needed are not taught anywhere. They are one of the many things you\u2019re just supposed to \u201cpick up\u201d on your way through grad school (and beyond).<\/p>\n

The lack of formal training in things like project management and working efficiently is part of what causes\u00a0many (probably most) academics to lead\u00a0workaholic-style lives. There\u2019s always that sense that \u201cI could be doing more.\u201d And the academic culture encourages this mentality. As a result, academics sometimes aren\u2019t aware of activities that can increase long-term efficiency and well-being at a short-term cost.<\/p>\n

One of these things that I discovered about a year ago are Scheduled Sanity Days. Most months I pick a day \u2013 and importantly, schedule it on my calendar \u2013 during which I attend to neglected parts of my life. Now, I have two young kids, so this day is necessarily a weekday one, a day when I have paid childcare available and can concentrate on my activities without outside demands and interruptions. Being a weekday, it also means I am not getting academic work done. And this sometimes causes stress \u2013 especially if I\u2019m on a deadline. But I stick to my Sanity Days. I need them for my long-term well-being.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019ve ever read up on working efficiently, you\u2019ve no doubt encountered a diagram which is divided into four quadrants that contain tasks to do. The quadrants divide tasks into those that are urgent vs. not urgent and those that are quick to finish vs. those that require more time. [1]<\/span> Or more frequently, you\u2019ll see urgent vs. non-urgent and important vs. not very important<\/a>. I don’t find this distinction terribly useful, as it’s clear that one oughtn’t spend any time on not-important matters.<\/span><\/span> And the general wisdom is that we naturally attend to urgent tasks at the expense of non-urgent ones, but that to really accomplish things, we need to make room for those things that may not be urgent, but are long-term important.<\/p>\n

Each week, I create a task list for my household. My husband and I use it as a communication tool to make sure that urgent and important matters are attended to each week, and that non-urgent matters are not forgotten about. Sad to say, this list is typically 40 to 50 tasks long. We usually finish about 75% of tasks in a given week, and the ones that remain unfinished are mostly the ones that are not urgent and that take more than fifteen\u00a0minutes to accomplish. This is my Quandrant of Neglect. These tasks languish on the task list\u00a0for weeks, months, years. And they accumulate. Which for me, leads to a lot of stress.<\/p>\n

\"quadrant_of_neglect\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The thing is, many of these neglected tasks would actually make our lives easier or more efficient. But the up-front cost is high, and finding two or three hours at a stretch to work on a task that isn\u2019t fun or relaxing is pretty much impossible to fit into a life where my husband and I both work full-time jobs and then do second-shifts of child-wrangling in the evenings and on weekends, as well as try to take care of our own physical and mental health and nurture our relationship with each other. These neglected tasks are just never important enough in the moment<\/em> to rise to the top of the priority list.<\/p>\n

So I invented Sanity Days: a straight\u00a07-8\u00a0hour stretch per month of tackling the neglected tasks.<\/p>\n

What do I do on Sanity Days? Here are some examples:<\/p>\n