This short related-work podcast replays part of a previous podcast conversation with Katherine Isbister about working 8-5, reflecting on productivity and praising yourself. I set this up against some discussions in a meeting this week about the struggles seeing progress, our negativity bias, and recent research on stress in academia. Following the replay, I also relate Katherine’s approach to research around self-compassion and savoring.

Full transcript below.

Related work links

Katherine Isbister – previous podcast: On finding your fit, being productive 8-5 an praising yourself

Negativity bias 

Müller-Pinzler, L., Czekalla, N., Mayer, A.V. et al. Negativity-bias in forming beliefs about own abilities. Sci Rep 9, 14416 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-50821-w

Uni stress

Dougall, I., Weick, M., & Vasiljevic, M. (2021, June 22). Inside UK Universities: Staff mental health and wellbeing during the coronavirus pandemic. Retrieved from psyarxiv.com/23axu

Lee, M. et al. (2021) Our uni teachers were already among the world’s most stressed. COVID and student feedback have just made things worse. The Conversation.

Green Carmichael, S. (2015) The Research Is Clear: Long Hours Backfire for People and for Companies. Harvard Business Review.

Savoring

Kennelly, Stacey. (2012) 10 steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life. Greater Good Magazine, Greater Good Science Centre at the University of California, Berkeley

Bryant, F. B., & Veroff, J. (2007). Savoring: A new model of positive experience. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers. 

Self compassion

Kristin Neff https://self-compassion.org/the-three-elements-of-self-compassion-2/

Chris Germer https://chrisgermer.com/about/

 Transcript

Geri (00:05):

Welcome to changing academic life I'm Geraldine Fitzpatrick. And this is a bite-size related work podcast where we pick up on a single idea from literature and experience that may provide some insights or tips that will help us change academic life for the better

 (00:27):

In managing your own academic working life, how do you go about recognizing and rewarding yourself or judging the, how productive you are in your work and seeing progress? The focus of this short podcast is mainly to replay a snippet from a conversation that I had, a podcast conversation I had quite a while ago with Katherine Isbister who talks really well about the way in which she's managing her work life so that she can work eight to five, Monday to Friday, and in particular, reflecting on her own productivity and praising herself. And I chose this snippet to replay on the basis of two particular encounters this week.

 (01:17):

One was a meeting where one of the people in the meeting was talking about really struggling with some writing they were doing there. They were struggling to find the story across a number of studies that they had done to pull and how to pull it together. And in that struggle, they were also struggling to see any reward or great progress as they talked about it. They also felt that others were judging them as not being very good because they were having this struggle and those others being people who might've given them some constructive feedback on the writing is important. And so they thought they weren't very good, but I, you know, I can assure you that this is not the case. In fact, this person is really amazing as a researcher, but nonetheless, what we can see here, some of the sort of feelings of being an impostor not progressing. And we also recognize a negativity bias, which psychology literature talk will talk to us about being an, a natural tendency that we have that does have some protective properties and, and has an evolutionary basis. I want to draw particular attention to a 2019 Nature paper by Mueller-Pinzler et al called 'Negativity bias in forming beliefs about own abilities'. And they talk about negativity bias specific for learning. Can you know about our own compared to others performances and that being modulating by prior beliefs about ourself, and that there's a stronger negativity bias in people with who are lower in self-esteem and that social anxiety affect self related negativity bias when individuals are exposed to a judging audience and in academia, we definitely have a judging audience don't we in reviewers and supervisors and so on, or so it might feel.

 (03:16):

And so this triggered a conversation in the meeting with, with the others who were present about what were people's strategies for trying to, what did progress mean and how did they recognize progress and how did they handle the ups and downs of writing? And there was one other person in the meeting in particular who really impressed me in how they talked about having also struggled with these issues, but realizing that they needed to do something different and, and taking on a very deliberate strategy of trying to spend time focusing on what they had done, what they had achieved, and also just how lucky they were or how lucky they felt that they were able to do research on a topic that they were really passionate about. And to have this time to struggle with writing, even though it was a struggle and they were having, you know, having to do multiple iterations to develop the research story across their data as well.

 (04:18):

And the second encounter this week was just coming across a couple of particular research studies. One was of UK university staff that was reported in, that I saw in Times Higher Education, but reflecting a preprint article by Dougall et al from 2021 about mental health and wellbeing and people having high levels of anxiety one and a half times the national average, especially during this pandemic there was an, also a Conversations article about Australian and New Zealand academics that also similarly reported them being very stressed. And I also happened to come across Harvard Business Review article that talked about 'The research is clear: long hours backfire for people and for companies'. So it's not particularly about academia, but it does show clear research about long working long hours being counterproductive. And, and we're not as creative and we're not our outputs aren't as good. And also just the whole health and wellbeing impacts. And we know that we see similar articles reported on academic context. And I think a lot of what the, you know, that person reported in the meeting and, you know, it was leading to stress and that stress was related to performance pressures and the general stress of academe.

(05:45):

So I thought it was really timely to revisit this podcast chat with Katherine. And I want to replay from about 34 minutes, 55 seconds into the original conversation with her. And I would encourage you to listen to the rest as well, if you haven't already, as, as there's really great stuff there that she shares. And I think Katherine's chat connects to both these themes. She very deliberately manages productive, working life, very productive working life. And she does it between the hours of eight to five and Monday to Friday because of what she said is as important to her. And that's time with family and friends outside of work as well. She also talks about some of the strategies that she's put in place towards this about taking time to stop and recognize what she has achieved, like reflecting on your own productivity and surprising yourself. So have a listen here.

<REPLAY of podcast extract from Katherine Isbister>

Katherine (06:46):

Well, I mean, one thing is I, I don't work weekends and I try not to work late nights. I mean, I said pretty strict boundaries on family time and also in the summer.

Geri (07:01):

So practically, what does that mean setting strict boundaries?

Katherine (07:05):

Well it means that I, I learned once <name> was born, I learned to work within sort of like eight to five weekdays boundary. I mean, the downside of that as I don't do a lot of water cooler chat, so I think it can affect your networking within your institution, but I was sort of willing to make that trade off to get the work done during the hours and the be there in the evenings and weekends. Yeah. So I think that's really helped. And then I think my husband's German, so we've always gone to Germany for part of the summer. So my daughter's always been traversing contexts and seeing that as a part of life. Now, now that we're settled in Santa Cruz, she's nine now I, I would not leave, you know, until she is done with high school. Right.

Geri: So it's a new phase in your life.

Katherine: Exactly. Yes.

Geri: Because deal with politics if ...

Katherine (08:00):

I will, I will, I can, I can do it now. I can be Zen about it. Yeah, no, I mean, I think kids, when they're younger, there is a lot of shuffling people do, but I think at a certain point it's pretty important. So I wouldn't do that to her now.

Geri (08:14):

So it sounds like the being very disciplined about working eight to five, if I, if I can just reinterpret that is about being very disciplined about how you spend every minute of that day. Because you, you said about not having so much time for the water cooler chats, which yes. Points to the fact that we might be, some of us might be at work for 12 hours or something, but you know, how much of that time is actually productive or what do we define as productive as and important and how do we prioritize water-cooler versus whatever other activity we need to do.

Katherine (08:45):

Well, and I think too, I wouldn't be surprised if there's more drift now that I'm at Santa Cruz. Because as I was saying about NYU, I didn't have colleagues where I'd have these cross-fertilization conversations. But at Santa Cruz that's much more likely. So I think when it's causing that to happen, it's really great to have water cooler conversations. Whereas the kind that aren't so productive or the sort of chewing on politics, or, I mean also, you know, if you form friendships at work, that's great. That's not a problem. Right. I think for me though, I just realized I have all of this family and extended friend and family network that I need to preserve. So the way I do it is I figure out when is my best hours for writing and then in the morning. And usually the very best time is right after a vacation or a weekend like that first slot is when I can think of almost anything really creative. So I know that, and I blocked that time, then everything else comes in the other time. Right. And I know the Friday afternoons are crap and they're not good for much, you know? So you just get realistic about,

Geri (09:57):

And do you do things like plan the night before what you're going to do the next day so that you are productive and disciplined? Or do you just know?

Katherine (10:04):

Oh yeah, I have I have like I set up the whole week. I have a little journal and I set up the whole week of what I'm going to do all week. And then I have every Friday I do a weekend review. So I look at what actually I did get done and I didn't, and then I kind of troubleshoot based on that because otherwise weeks can go by and I have no sense of, and then lately I've, I've been like kind of categorizing those things. Cause when I was associate professor at NYU, I got way too caught up in service duties. Cause I thought I had to solve all these things. And so lately I tag things as research intensive things and that has to be the majority of what I do every week. And if I start to drift off of that, then I just back off.

Geri (10:49):

So you have a strong sense of what the balance of the components of your work is. And I really liked this sort of Friday review back on the week and troubleshooting.

Katherine (10:59):

Yeah. And then I make sure to, I actually like write my own assessment every, because I sound so compulsive, but, and I was like, make a point of praising myself if I did a good job because the other thing, cause I used to always beat myself up. I'd be like, yeah, sure. He did those five things. What are the other three things? And then you don't want to work anymore.

Geri (11:18):

That's so important to do it is because one of the challenges in academia, we can always be doing more things.

Katherine (11:27):

Yeah. Yeah. And nobody sits you down and says, okay, that was enough Geraldine. You did good. Go home and take a break. And so I think I do that to myself. I say, yep, you did a good job this week. You get to take the weekend off. And it's, it's really nice. It feels like liberating. Yeah.

Geri (11:42):

So it sounds like a nice closure to the week as well. That really enables you to step into the weekend. Yes. Leaving that behind.

Katherine (11:48):

And that's why at that same time I try to plan the next week so that I I've queued it all up. I know it's coming because the other thing I think it does is it drops the things into my subconscious on that Friday afternoon. That need to be percolating for Monday. So then I'm ready.

Geri (12:06):

But not in the subconscious in the way of, I can't forget to do that because it's written down in the list. It's that sort of positive percolating rather than the stressing.

Katherine (12:15):

Yes. Yeah. That's the goal. Anyway.

Geri (12:17):

That sounds really amazing. There was something that we had that you had said yesterday when we were just talking informally about, you know, when you were working eight to five, sometimes feeling guilty about telling people that, can you just say a little bit around that?

Katherine (12:36):

Sure. Yeah. Like I, I think, I don't know how it is in Europe and in the U S there's this culture around oh, I worked more than you worked. I worked even more exactly. I was like, oh, I'm working 60 hour weeks. And, and I, I actually did tell someone one time, I remember one time saying, oh, I'm only working this amount. And they got kind of upset with me and I realized, okay, revealing that you actually have work-life balance. It will, it makes people angry if they don't and they're working overworking themselves, it kind of makes them question the narrative. And it also sort of makes people feel bad sometimes because they think, well, why am I overworking? And that person's not right. So instead of it becoming a discussion about a better model for working, I think it can sometimes become this like implicit critique of someone else's practice. And also the other side of it, when I was more junior was I was scared that people would think I wasn't to be taken seriously being a woman. And then once I had a child, it's like, oh no, she's gone out to pasture. She's not going to do anything.

Geri (13:44):

But you've clearly been able to negotiate a way of working. That's very productive, very effective where you sought after you're in a great position now. And you're a great role model for showing that it can work.

Katherine (13:56):

Yeah. Yes. I, I think everyone should have work life balance. I just, I think most of the research on when you're really like on your death bed and they ask people, you know, they don't say, I wish I had been on one more service committee for a conference. I wish I'd worked one more Sunday.

Geri (14:15):

Well, it's always challenging to keep that perspective in mind in the minutia of the day-to-day challenge.

Katherine (14:21):

And I think that's a good reason to reflect on your productivity and praise yourself. Because I think one thing about academia is you don't get instant, positive feedback from someone else, like in a design job. When I used to work in design, you had a manager who would review your work and say, yes, wow. You know, you did good. And they had a good overview of how productive you were compared to others, but we just don't have that in academe. So you kind of...

Geri (14:49):

We can start it. We can start being more conscious of praising people and saying to people, if that's good enough or that's enough. Yes. You could do more. But what at what cost, what exactly.

Katherine (15:01):

Exactly. No I really like, I like this podcast because I think also people exposing and talking about these like pressures and tensions as they move through the practice of their work is another way to, to notice and to say, oh, okay. It's not just me. It's other people have these issues. Yes. Yeah.

<END REPLAY>

Geri (15:21):

Isn't that great. And in terms of this being related work podcast, I just want to make some links to what Katherine has said and what research says as well. So in the last part of that conversation, Katherine talks about that. You know, we're not the only ones who experienced this. And this reminds me of the research on self-compassion, especially by leading psychology researchers in self-compassion Christian, Kristin Neff from University of Texas and Chris Germer from Harvard medical school and the center for mindfulness and compassion at the Cambridge health Alliance. And they talk about self-compassion as having three particular components. One is taking an attitude of self-acceptance rather than self judgment. And that means accepting reality. And just accepting that, you know, we do suffer or fail or feel inadequate and not, not I either not ignoring that. We feel like that nor, nor beating ourselves up with self criticism for not succeeding.

 (16:29):

And I think that's really important. So we, we just embrace the reality of yeah. Sometimes things aren't working out or sometimes things are hard and it's a struggle. The second element of this approach to self-compassion is recognizing that we share a common humanity rather than it just being something that just happens to me. And in this case, we can talk about recognizing that this is part of the shared academic experience. Writing is hard. We all struggle