Rather facetiously got a suggestion to keep track of how my workdays are spent, but that did prompt me to start keeping track since I have gotten into the phase of my job where I’m feeling somewhat burdened by non-research responsibilities and I like having data in hand. As I’ve noted on my other website, my workdays are now largely constrained by daycare hours. Thus, I do have pretty limited hours in a day to get everything done, requiring a fair amount prioritization; doing one things often means not doing something else.

I’ll sporadically hit “run” on my analysis script and the below plot will update. The n values are currently pretty small, but I plan to keep doing this indefinitely.

Keys for the above plot:
Red dashes are mean values across all days. Gray dots are values for individual days.
“Research_internal” denotes activities that directly impact my research group (eg. meetings with personnel, data analysis, benchwork).
“Research_external” denotes research activities that don’t have to do with my group (eg. Science-centric meetings with other faculty, emails to people requesting reagents).
“Administrative_internal” denotes general paperwork (eg. Filling out my annual performance reviews)
“Seminar_director” denotes work related to running the immunology portion of the Dept seminar series (eg. More emails…)
“Postdoc_affairs” denotes work related to trying to manage postdoc affairs for the dept (and in some ways, by extension, the SOM).
“Other_service” denotes other service activities for the school (eg. Corresponding with CWRU undergrads not in my group).

But I can break down some of these activities further. For example, for the the “Research_internal” section where I’m handling things directly related to my research lab, it can be further broken down as follows:

And, well, since so much time seems to be spent writing emails nowadays, this how much time I spend writing emails each day (note: I do all internal communication with lab members via Slack, so this is mostly administrative matters):