(No. 4)

Balancing Life and Work: Three Perspectives from Tenured Faculty at the University of Virginia

Reflections on Juggling Family and Career in Academe
Angeline Lillard
Associate Professor
Department of Psychology

Many assistant professors experience a particularly intense set of demands: they are trying to accomplish what is needed for tenure while raising young children. Even for those with tenure, having a family and an academic career poses claims on one’s time that often come into conflict. There is never enough time, and setting priorities is crucial.

The priorities for academics with families are quite likely these: to achieve excellence in teaching and research, while enjoying a healthy, well-functioning family. How can one manage all this? People have different criteria for what makes for a healthy family, and those criteria and what fulfills them change as children grow. Young children need only one good outside-the-home situation—excellent day care—but they need a great deal of one’s time and supervision when they are awake at home; older children, on the other hand, need to be part of many outside organizations and activities, but can in many ways function on their own at home. The changing capacities of children mean that where parents need to put their time—into diapering or driving—changes over the life course. And someday (all too soon!), children even grow up, leaving much more time for other activities. But during the earlier years, how can academics manage? In this essay I relay some views and tips gathered from colleagues along with my own experiences managing this dual challenge.

Helping students is a given part of our lives as professors. We are not only teaching students how to think and work in a discipline; we are also exemplifying values and leadership. In this way teaching is a lot like parenting: they both ask us to be our best selves leading the generations that follow. Giving our full and best attention to students when we are on the job, and becoming the best teachers we can be (with skills honed through teaching workshops, help from senior faculty, and so on) are tremendously important. Yet teaching has to be in concert with, not at the expense of, excellence in research. Fulfilling this second goal, excellent research, is more often a tenure-costing stumbling block for academics with young families. Yet many do manage it, and the question is how. As I see it, really great contributions in academics stem from two capabilities. The first is creativity: seeing the old in new ways, finding patterns others have not seen, or making applications from one field to another. The second is dissemination: letting the products of one’s creativity be known. Between creativity and dissemination comes doing the research for whatever are the products of one’s field, but getting research done is not usually an issue for people who have creative ideas and who keep the dissemination goal in sharp focus.

To allow these two elements of creativity and dissemination to flourish requires that academics set up their lives so that they can be creative and can write. This requires three things: a place to think and write, time to think and write, and a certain level of something like life satisfaction or spiritual/mental health so that those thoughts and words can flow. How one acquires each of these is a practical matter, and I now turn to some ideas about how to instantiate them.

Making a Place
It can be helpful to have a sacred place where nothing else happens except generating creative ideas and writing about them. This could be a spacious desk at work or home in a beautiful room where one keeps nothing but the materials for the current writing project. Bills, recommendation letters, notes about errands, children’s school reports, etc., should never venture into that space, because one has to be able to focus only on work in that place. Some people cannot work at home because messy sinks beckon, or there are children about; but the office also has its distractions. Assistant professors during my graduate years often taped notes on their closed doors: “Writing, please do not disturb.” One could sense that something very special was going on behind that door. Whether a library, or a café, or an office at home or work, one needs some place where there will be no disturbances, to delve into ideas, be creative and write.

Making Time
One also needs time to be creative and to write. The major challenge in having a family is that it takes time, and most of us thought we were entirely too busy before we had a spouse and children! Until someone figures out how to make each day have 80 hours, prioritizing and streamlining are essential.

To save time at home, consider farming out meaningless tasks so there will be more time for what really matters: time with family and time for work. For example, if one cares about a clean house but doesn’t really enjoy mopping floors, finding a way to hire household help is a good option. Some people find buying pre-cooked meals is worthwhile; others cook a lot on the weekend and freeze it. The extra expense has to be measured against the cost of not getting tenure.

Unless a couple has very flexible schedules, help with children is necessary to get really creative work done. The priority is to get people one feels good about, who have good values and personal characteristics. If a hiring mistake becomes clear, it’s essential to act quickly. Getting good work done depends on peace of mind, and parental peace of mind depends on good childcare. As for how much childcare to have, faculty with young children should probably buy as much childcare as they can afford and as they might possibly need. Knowing help is there reduces stress and one can always let help go home early.

How can one save time at work? My strategy is to establish a weekly schedule that I adjust each semester. At the beginning of the semester, I print a blank schedule of the week, Monday through Friday, 8:00-5:00/6:00. First I block out time periods with no options: teaching time, as much teaching preparation time as I need before each class, and other set appointments. Then I scrutinize when three- or four-hour blocks are available to save as times to write. I block off writing times, then schedule in individual graduate student meetings, office hours, advising appointments, regular committee meetings, and other smaller time blocks. It is very important to set the time for class preparation, because keeping it in limited blocks keeps it focused and productive. I stray from this schedule only for occasional events or meetings that are extremely difficult to schedule at other times. A different strategy of many professors is to work at home every morning, never scheduling anything else then. Academic productivity researcher Robert Boice advised setting aside even 45-minute blocks to get writing done. One has to find one’s own optimal pattern, but the important thing is to be sure that as much time as possible—once one’s teaching and service requirements are met— is free for creativity and dissemination. Teaching and service, important as they are, can easily take all one’s time if one allows them to.

Regarding the number of hours in a work week, there are periods, in the thick of each semester, when I find it impossible to get what I need to do done between 8:00 and 5:00/6:00; and during those times I work after the children go to bed or before they get up in the morning. I try never to work in the house when the children are up and about, because work requires too much concentration, and it feels unfair to my children and the work. But these times are limited: my creativity and dissemination lag when my hours are too long, and I find that if I put in good solid time from 8:00-5:00/6:00 and take the rest of the time, including weekends, completely off, I get more good work done all around. Put another way, burn-out is easy to create in academic careers, and keeping it at bay by minimizing the amount one overworks—wherever that line is for you—is extremely important to doing well.

Burnout crops up on a micro-scale too, and it is important to keep tabs on one’s level of engagement in writing, and take a break when it flags. If I work at something too long one day, I have trouble getting back to it the next day; if I stop when there is still something I want to say, and I leave a note on my desk telling myself where to begin tomorrow, my writing keeps flowing. In the middle of a long stretch of writing, I sometimes find it helpful to take small breaks and attend to other tasks.

Other tips I have collected from particularly productive people:
Buy time whenever possible (use grant money for teaching relief, always use your sabbaticals to the fullest extent possible), and don’t sell time unless absolutely necessary. Offers to do summer advising for more money are tempting, but can be done as well by people who are not juggling the demands of work and family. A publication might well be more important than that $1,000 in the long run, and indeed the publication might indirectly contribute to an annual salary raise that will compound over time and far exceed those earnings.

• Get and use whatever assistance is available for any task that someone else could do: If someone can help you file articles you’ve pulled from drawers, type in references (better yet, use EndNote), or move books, enjoy that help.
• Always say no to invitations that are not meaningful to you personally or to your career. Ask senior colleagues for advice on what matters in your discipline, and FOLLOW IT!—too many assistant professors ignore good advice, and then wonder why they don’t get tenure—unless it is a situation where taking a different route means more to you than tenure.
• Always keep a clear eye on priorities, and stop occasionally to reassess them. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Effective People is worth an occasional glance to help keep your priority-setting system sharp. One sure priority is to get articles or books out, whichever drives your field. When revision requests come in, turn them right around; never wait.
• Think about who has made really great contributions in your field, and what their pattern of work is. In my field, most successful people have turned out stellar article after article in a fairly small domain, exploring one issue in depth. Other fields are different. Get advice from senior colleagues.
• If you are full to the brim and are asked to do one more thing, say “yes” only if there is something else you can eliminate. You might want to show the requester a list of what you are doing, asking for advice on what to give up so you can have time for this important new task.

Other Rules to Save Time at Work:

• Keep email on a setting that checks for new mail only when you ask it to. Turn if off completely when you are spending a chunk of time writing or preparing for class. If you find email disruptive, consider having it on for only a set hour each day when you handle correspondence.
• Set goals: decide you are going to work for two weeks on this task, one afternoon on that. You will not always meet your goals, but they can help you stay focused when the mind wants to wander. Thinking, “I have to get this done by Friday!” can be motivating.
• Don’t travel more than X/times a semester (whatever your personal limit is, with an eye to your field’s expectations).
• Keep your desk and email inbox clear: the minute a paper or email arrives, deal with it, even if it is to put in a “to do” file.
• Keep extensive and organized files. I have one for future updates to my CV, one to save ideas for each future talk I know I will be giving, another for each paper I will be writing, one for notes on classes I will be or am teaching, and so on. Drop stuff in the appropriate folder as it arrives.
• Try to use everything you do for more than one outlet if possible: when you give a talk, try to turn into a paper; when you write a grant proposal, see if the introduction can become part of a chapter, and so on.

Peace of Mind
Along with enough time and a place to be creative and to write, one also needs enough peace of mind so the ideas and words can flow.

If one is in a lifelong relationship and hopes to stay that way, one has to prioritize the relationship, and that priority has to come from both partners. Most couples have to work regularly at a good relationship to sustain it. Children distract one from that mission—indeed studies show that marital satisfaction declines every year from the birth of the first child until they leave home! It is surely better for children to witness a healthy relationship than to have more time with a parent in an unhealthy relationship, so for peace of mind parents need to take the time they need.

Equally important to peace of mind is keeping one’s mind clear of upset and bother. Research shows that clearing one’s mind of emotional bugs by writing is worthwhile. People who write just 15 minutes a day for 3 days about an emotionally upsetting event are less likely to go to a physician over the following three months than are people who write about non-emotional events. If something is bugging you, consider taking a short break and writing about it—the time lost will be regained.

Guilt is an emotion we all experience, and working parents can feel more than their share. There are two things one can do with guilt. Either use it to make yourself get work done—it can be a very useful emotion—or send it out the window, because, after all, we are trying to do a lot; and it is no wonder we cannot always achieve it!

Conclusion
Remember: the children-at-home years are short-lived. The vita of one star in my field shows she did next to nothing the first ten years of her career (just one article and a book, barely enough to get tenure at her institution in the mid-80s). Another star once poignantly lamented, when her son turned 18 and was leaving home, all the hours spent at overly-long, unproductive faculty meetings when she could have been taking a walk with him. (I am not advocating skipping faculty meetings, only keeping them efficient.) It’s just a blink before children grow up, and careers keep on going—cherish the days.

Finally, consider the issue of fit. If you cannot lead a reasonable life at the university where you are, consider going somewhere else. We all have a personal level of productivity, and it should match the expected level in one’s department—no one wants to be the departmental dud, or to hurt one’s family to stay at a place where one does not fit. Some might be better off considering other career options. There are many ways to lead a meaningful life, and being an academic with a family is just one wonderful one of them.

References
Boice, Robert. Advice for New Faculty Members: Nihil Nimus. Boston: Alleyn &
Bacon, 2000.
Covey, Stephen R. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People: Restoring the
Character Ethic. New York: Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1989.