Time Management and Self-Organisation in Academia

List the institutional and external factors that limit your freedom! Consider external constraints due to teamwork, dual commitments, several simultaneous jobs, pressure due to constant evaluations, time contracts, perceived compulsion to publish, ...

Consequences

The academic freedoms, their internal problems as well as the typical constraints outlined previously, result in an enormous demand for personal responsibility—perhaps more than in any other profession. You can and must select, develop, and structure projects, define quality benchmarks, set priorities, and implement all this with a great deal of perseverance and discipline and often with little support. The planning horizon covers several years, during which you must not lose your intrinsic motivation.

There are three levels of motivation: The basic level consists of the need to survive and to acquire the necessary means for survival. The second level, namely external motivation through punishments and rewards (milder forms include criticism and praise or recognition), is in the long run not sufficient for getting through the lengthy qualification phase. Ultimately, one depends on other people’s goodwill, acceptance, and fairness.

The highest motivational level is self-motivation due to mastery, autonomy, and meaning.4 On these three factors, scholarly activity scores quite well: After all, scholarship is based on knowledge and its application; moreover, despite all institutional and informal constraints, scholars are allowed an above-average measure of self-definition. However, this motivational factor of autonomy does not ensure achieving an appropriate, stable, growth-conducive place within the system. As far as the third intrinsic factor is concerned, beyond Bachelor’s, Magister’s, or Master’s degrees, people choose scholarship as a profession because they recognise a meaning that goes beyond immediate usefulness—whether it be, classically speaking, the finding of truth, the identification of beauty, or the promotion of good.

•What originally motivated me to choose a scholarly career?

•What motivates me to stay with it today?

•What can I do to strengthen my intrinsic motivation?

Surely, while thinking about the factors that help condition your personal situation, you have ideas or demands for improving the external conditions. These are important and you should fight for them together with others. However, you will be able to engage in this struggle only if you are successful with your own academic projects and tasks with the help of good time management. Since only a few academic administrators in German-speaking universities have limited research and teaching duties, the possibility of improving the system depends on remaining in the system through your research and teaching and also on acquiring a reputation in your discipline.

Only if you yourself are reasonably successful under the given conditions without becoming cynical—in other words, if you advance in a psychologically healthy and liveable way—then you can work for long-term improvement of these conditions.

That is why our book starts with you as an individual, to first optimise your self-organisation within academia. In doing so, we look at your entire life so that you can develop sustainable methods, habits, and rhythms that fit your personal situation. Motivating yourself to achieve top performance at the cost of other important areas and goals in life only works sometimes and rarely in the long run—even less so in academia than in industry with its frequently more effective monetary and other incentives.

This has large- and small-scale consequences, especially in the field of research.

1.In looking at your whole life, also in the long run, you yourself are responsible for your career and life planning. As is well known, it is no longer the case that after a good doctoral dissertation, you can expect an assistantship where you can stay until your post-doctoral qualification (or habilitation) and/or tenure, while the professor feels a moral obligation to ‘place’ his ‘disciples’ somewhere. Of course, it is also no longer the case as it was for Immanuel Kant at the end of the 18th century that ten years without publications seemed acceptable, during which an ‘opus magnum’ like the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ could be worked out. You must know when you will take which career steps and what you want to do if, at a certain point, the chosen career path turns out to be a dead end. This means that at an early stage you should think about career alternatives and how to prepare for them. You must be aware of the price you are willing to pay for the precarious freedom of a life dedicated to scholarship. (See especially Subchapter II.3 on these big questions.)

Especially in the doctoral phase, many people in their late twenties pursue the strategy of first obtaining their doctorate and then seeing if any doors open. This comes at a high price: the risk of having to completely reorient oneself in the fourth decade of life or in midlife, while one is already considered overqualified, too specialised, or simply too old on the job market.

If you are not sufficiently sure that your academic career will work out: Develop at least one alternative life plan, ideally also in discussion with a trusted person or a coach. This will enable you to make provisions at an early stage by adding other professional qualifications and networks and will prevent you from feeling later that you have driven your life into a dead end.

2.Life and career planning involves time management with a long-term perspective, but also inspires and influences the day-to-day organisation and use of time. In the planning horizons of month, week, and day, you must not lose sight of your long-term goals and alternative scenarios. If you allow yourself to be driven by whatever is pushing at you, you no longer decide for yourself what to do. Think and plan from top to bottom, from the important to the urgent, from the values to the deadlines, from the big projects to the small tasks. Create space and regular blocks of time in your time management for self-reflection and planning, and, before anything else, the bigger and long-term goals. By using the autonomous space that you already have (be it large or small), you expand the possibilities for self-determination.

To the extent that you can control your own time, also adapt your time management to your individual goals and values, to your personal behavioural style, and to your personal circumstances (see Chapter II). Of course, the specific academic culture in your discipline and at your institute must also be considered.

•How much of chance do I have to implement my own planning and decision-making? Am I perhaps already trapped in a victim mentality and letting myself be driven by the ‘academic business’?

•Can I answer the question of what I would do if the next career step should fail? And what am I already doing today for this eventuality?

•Am I also implementing my big goals within the smaller planning horizons?

3.The planning of research requires knowing and applying the basic rules of project management. Particularly in the case of teamwork, but also when working alone on a research project, phases must be objectively identified and planned in their logical sequence according to the subject matter under consideration. Even where no research exposé and timetable had to be submitted to receive funding, you should nevertheless work this out in a professional manner (see Subchapter VI.1). If you plan target dates for the individual phases and subgoals of your project, when integrating this into the chronological planning in calendar form, you should also take into account the requirements of your subjective life situation and ‘private’ life goals such as non-academic training, partnership and family, and other interests and activities that increase motivation, provide recreation, and create meaning. You will learn how to do that in this book, especially as of Subchapter II.3.

Personal Challenges and My Commitments

The most important ideas to improve my self-organisation:

My commitments and SMART goals:

1The determination of (core) working hours naturally varies from institute to institute.

2The current structure in universities is partially characterised as ‘presidential feudalism’ (präsidialer Feudalismus), partially as a transition to an ‘individual-centred negotiation jungle’ (individuumszentrierten Verhandlungsdschungel): Christian Scholz und Volker Stein: Überlebenskritische Fragen zur Struktur von Universitäten; in: Forschung und Lehre (January 2011), 26–28.

3In Germany, 98% of full-time academic and artistic employees under the age of 35 (excluding professors) have fixed-term contracts; between the ages of 35 and 45, the figure is still 77% (92% overall, little changed since 2010). An employment contract of doctoral students lasts on average 22 months, of post-docs 28 months. About one-third of young academics are employed part-time; see Bundesbericht Wissenschaftlicher Nachwuchs 2021 (www.buwin.de/dateien/buwin-2021.pdf, 14.4.2021), 108. The mid-level faculty, the many teaching assistants and outside lecturers, i.e. post-doctoral lecturers with teaching duties, however, provide a large part of the total teaching, see https://www.gew.de/aktuelles/detailseite/neuigkeiten/professorinnen-und-professoren-in-der-minderheit/ (14.4.2021).

4The terms ‘mastery’, ‘autonomy’, and ‘meaning’ are fully described in Daniel H. Pink: Drive, the surprising truth about what motivates us. Penguin, 2011. Behind this are older concepts for example by Alfred Adler and Viktor Frankl.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.