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Dear friends,
Hope these short winter days are finding you warm and cozy! This time of year can be overwhelming with a wave of family and social obligations in addition to work craziness. Do you experience the year-end game of Hot Potato in which everyone tries to clear their own plate by handing things to collaborators? I wish I could give you a clever hack to avoid that move! It gets me every year.
This month all credit goes to Elaine Khoong, who gave me the book Drop the Ball by Tiffany Dufu. The author is an accomplished business leader, with a partner and children. The book is well worth a read, but until you get to it, I’ll share some key points.
The first insight comes from the title of the book, “Drop the ball!” What are you doing that you don’t have to do? If you draw a blank here, you need to track your time. (And yes, I know I’ve given that advice several months in a row. Have you done it yet?!) Looking over your time log can help you identify low-value time. Then you need to look at those low-value tasks with the other people who benefit from them. Both domestic and professional tasks can be outsourced. For example, your mentor may have staff that can help with tasks like reference management or manuscript submission. I personally prefer that the junior faculty I mentor spend their time on creative science rather than uploading and approving pdfs! If outsourcing isn’t possible, there are other ways to problem solve. In the book, the author hands over responsibility for picking up dry cleaning to her husband, and he finds out the dry cleaner will deliver. Nobody needed to pick up the dry cleaning! It’s surprising how often a more efficient solution comes to light when two people discuss.
The author’s second key point is to have an all-in partnership at home. She writes this advice from a hetero-normative and female perspective, but I think her advice holds across all types of life partnerships. She emphasizes gratitude for a partners’ contributions, because it spurs a virtuous circle of wanting to contribute. You also have to accept that things may not be done the way you would do them. Needless criticism doesn’t enhance collaboration either at work or at home. Just in the same way you might accept phrasing that isn’t ideal in a paper where you’re a middle author, you cannot expect domestic perfection. If you put your partner in charge of bringing dessert for a potluck, and then they buy it instead of baking it, you need to proudly show up with that store-bought item (even if it makes you cringe on the inside!) So what if you already have a dynamic where you’re in charge of everything? Can you change it? The author did, little by little. What I observed from her story is that her mind shift came first and the shift in responsibilities followed.
I really liked the author’s four “go-to’s” or core activities for success. She identifies exercise and sleep as essential to success. It does bear repeating that if you neglect either physical activity or sleep for any significant period of time, you won’t be thriving. (If you have tiny non-sleeping children, it’s OK to be in survival mode until you’re sleeping normally again. I promise you will get there!) She also calls out “going to lunch” or networking, which I would suggest we interpret more broadly as meeting with current and potential collaborators, and “going to events,” which in academia would be actively participating at talks and conferences. We often think about papers and grants as our work. Consider that long-term success in academia requires that people know you as a person and know your work, which means you need to get out there in order to succeed!
As always, send me your good news so I can amplify your successes. I hope each one of you can take some time for yourselves over the winter break!
Wishing you peace, happiness, and success in 2020,
Urmimala