How I spent my time in Spring 2023

As always at the end of the semester, I have evaluated how I spent my time in the past semester.

The good news is, I’m slowly reducing my tendency to overwork. My longest weeks have been of 55 hours – still more than 40, but certainly less than the 65 – 80 hours I have been logging at certain points in the past. So, I’m going to pat myself on the back for this.

Then, when it comes to the breakdown of how I spent my time, I have the following:

• Teaching: 19.1%
• Research project that started in October: 14.39%
• Service: 10.43%
• Papers: 6.6%
• ACI Avances (the journal of which I’m the Editor-in-Chief): 6.27%
• Teaching TU Delft: 6.01%
• Blog & podcast: 5.57%
• Admin: 4.4%
• Planning: 3.21%
• PhD candidate 1: 3%
• Conferences: 2.91%
• Research project that started in March: 2.83%}Meetings: 2.62%
• Meetings TU Delft: 2.52%
• PhD candidate 2: 1.78%
• PhD candidate 3: 1.62%
• Collaboration with colleagues from Another University: 1.26%
• Research proposals: 1.02%
• PhD candidate 4: 0.96%
• Learning: 0.77%
• Email sorting: 0.53%
• PhD candidate 5: 0.48%
• PhD candidate 6: 0.47%
• Research (not categorized into a project): 0.46%
• Postdoc 1: 0.34%
• PhD candidate 7: 0.23%
• PhD candidate 8: 0.12%
• Doctoral candidate: 0.09%
• Postdoc 2: 0.02% (I’ve mostly logged time here under papers we are coauthoring or on the project we are working)

All in all, I would have wanted to spend a bit more time on writing papers, and a bit less time on service, but I think the overall breakdown is along the lines of what I’d expected. Teaching takes most of my time, as expected, and I’ve put a fair amount of time in the project that started in October as we were understaffed until our newly hired postdoc could start in May.

What I’m learning from this for my weekly template, is that I need to foresee a bit more buffer time for planning in meetings, and that I need to see better when I can put in more time to work on my papers.