How I spent my time in Spring 2025

As always, at the end of the semester, I check in my Toggl data how I spent my time. I know that this has been an intense semester, for various reasons, and that I spent a lot of time writing proposals – and the data shows.

Here’s the breakdown in categories, with the names of current and former students anonimized:

• Research proposals: 18.29%
• Research: 14.91%
• Service: 9.58%
• Conferences: 8.18%
• Papers: 8.11%
• ACI Avances: 7.83%
• Teaching: 6.21%
• Administration: 4.10%
• PhD project – Student 1: 2.99%
• PhD project – Student 2: 2.40%
• Meetings: 2.05%
• Professional development (Learning): 1.91%
• BEST (Staff Exchanges project): 1.88%
• PhD project – Student 3: 1.27%
• TU Delft meetings: 1.19%
• Planning: 1.17%
• TU Delft teaching: 1.08%
• Blog: 0.96%
• Fire resistance project: 0.81%
• Poligrant 2025 project: 0.76%
• Email + general admin: 0.75%
• PhD project – Student 4: 0.72%
• PhD project – Student 5: 0.69%
• Miscellaneous: 0.38%
• Collaboration with Denmark: 0.36%
• PhD project – Student 6: 0.26%
• PhD project – Student 7: 0.22%
• Seed fund project (CIRCA): 0.22%
• PhD project – Student 8: 0.18%
• Adstren: 0.18%
• Student support (mostly recommendation letters): 0.12%
• Former PhD Student 9: 0.11%
• Former PhD student 10: 0.10%
• PhD project – Student 11: 0.04%

Here are a few observations:

• I have worked a lot of hours. It has been an intense semester.
• I have traveled more, so more time on conferences.
• My research projects themselves also take time – it’s a balance between writing proposals and doing research.
• A bit less of my time has gone to actually writing papers.
• The journal of which I am editor in chief takes a good chunk of my time., even though I have all my editorial tasks down to a science nearly.
• All in all, I am quite happy with how much I achieved this semester. I knew it was going to be a lot, and I pretty much did everything I wanted to do.

How do you spend your time and what does the breakdown between different activities look like?