Friday bonus: Wednesday focusday redux

Read this alongside "Coping 4: Wednesday focusday" and "Friday bonus: The cult of busy."

I'm very fortunate to do a job that, in general, I believe in and like. On the one hand, it's great to be able to do something that I think is, in the end, good for society, and that I find interesting and motivating. On the other hand, any job that can be seen as a vocation, or that people do out of intrinsic motivation and care, is at risk of being weaponized for the benefit of the employer, and to the detriment of individual employees. On the third hand (because this is a post about systemic overwork and the increasing use of GenAI in workplaces, so a third hand seems appropriate for many reasons), individual attempts to make healthier work environments are only as good as the ability of colleagues to internalize their meaning, and of organizational structures to accept their existence.

Writing this from the position of working as a researcher in a higher education institution, some of the patterns I see are specific to academia, but most seem to be increasingly present in any kind of "knowledge work." Chief among those is the drive to do more in the same amount of time. Lots of factors contribute to that one (for example, in higher educational contexts, cuts to government funding don't help), but there's increasingly the spectre of "AI" looming over the productivity push. It looms in many ways, whether it's a mandate by an employer to start using an LLM for certain tasks, or a self-imposed attempt to keep up with excess emails by getting a chatbot to generate some replies. These two actions may seem to come from different places – one is mandated by the employers, the other is a solution coming from an employee – but they both come back to the problem of excessive expectations about what each individual should be able to do in a normal working week.

But I mentioned Wednesday in the title of this post. If you've clicked the link at the top, you know what Wednesday focusday is. If you haven't, the tl;dr is: I work five days a week, but on Wednesdays, I never book meetings or look at my email. I do that so I have time, within my allocated working hours, to do things like write (because publishing journal articles and conference papers is one of the expectations of my job). Wednesday is my day for work that requires focus.

My attempt to carve out a day to do an essential part of my job is in contrast to something that's increasingly normalized: focus work happens in evenings and weekends. I see this among my colleagues at all levels, whether they're junior researchers or full professors. The workday gets filled with reactive tasks and contact tasks – answering emails, attending a never-ending string of meetings. Maybe some corners are left between these things, but not reliably enough to read, think, conceptualize, and do the other things that are required in synthesizing information into insights. All of these are precursors to the bit where you actually write the paper, which also requires focus.

Because there's a lack of time to do those key tasks, something has to give. For many people, that's working far more than full-time. For others, it's increasingly the use of LLMs to do some of these tasks. This is contributing to a crisis in academic publishing, where the push to publish is at odds with the time and capacity to do so. LLMs fill the gap, leading to the appearance of increased productivity, while the glut of slop papers makes the already creaky and volunteer-driven system of peer review less and less capable of doing its thing effectively.

This is why I'm militant about Wednesday: if we're serious that knowledge production and dissemination are among the core tasks of those who work in research, we need to make time. We need to respect colleagues who do make time for those things, and we need to create incentive structures and internal cultures which make room for work that may be harder to measure and oversee, but which is at the core of the endeavour of all kinds of knowledge work.