How I spent my time in Fall 2023

Fall 2023 has been a very busy semester for me, as you can see from the time breakdown. The shortest workweek had 47 hours, and the longest 73 hours. I didn’t get a chance to take much holidays at all, and even on long weekends I ended up catching up with projects.

The full time breakdown for this semester was as follows:

• Teaching: 22.5%
• Learning: 16.1%
• Service: 9.3%
• BEST Research project: 7.0%
• ACI Avances (editor in chief work): 6.6%
• Papers: 5.3%
• Admin: 3.4%
• Research proposals: 3.2%
• Career things: 3.0%
• Blog: 3.0%
• PhD Candidate 1: 2.9%
• PhD Candidate I don’t officially supervise 1: 2.3%
• Meetings: 2.3%
• Planning: 1.8%
• PhD Candidate 2: 1.7%
• Research project with post-doc supervision: 1.5%
• Research: 1.4%
• Meetings TU: 1.3%
• Research project with Industry: 1.2%
• PhD Candidate 3: 0.9%
• PhD Candidate 4: 0.8%
• Collaboration meetings: 0.8%
• PhD Candidate 5: 0.4%
• PhD Candidate 6: 0.3%
• Email + admin: 0.3%
• PhD Candidate 7: 0.3%
• PhD Candidate I don’t officially supervise 2: 0.2%
• Personal emails during work time: 0.2%
• Post-doc I don’t officially supervise 3: 0.1%

Unlike previous semesters, a major chunk of my time was spent on learning: I had applied for a Coursera license from my university (and received it by surprise, so I had to take advantage of it), and I took an excellent Python course for structural engineers.

I also spent extra time on teaching: both on teaching an MSc course for TU Delft, and I’m taught Bridge Design for the second time in the BSc program at USFQ (so I still had quite some work in improving the course).

The result is, of course, that I got significantly less time on writing papers. I’ve managed to move all my research projects forward, but I’m behind with some of the journal papers I want to lead.

All in all, it’s been quite an exhausting semester. I ended up getting a cold towards the end of October, which I could not shake off (I tried to ignore it, which was admittedly a poor strategy). It turned into a throat infection and sinus infection in early December, and I’m still sniffing and coughing (I have done various COVID tests, all negative) – a clear sign that I should allow myself some rest to recover fully.