You know there are questions that nobody want to answer honestly?
At a recent conference (hello #chi2025), I started asking people I know (and some I didn’t) a pretty simple question: “How much do you work, really?”
You should have seen the reactions.
Some took this as a chance to flex their academic misery: “This job is just not for people who count hours” etc. This is surprisingly common by the way, somehow attributing the madness to the environment alone. As if.. as if it just can’t be helped?
But with a few seniors (academic stage, not age), the question hit differently… In an almost guilty tone, they silently…almost whispered… “Maybe about 3-4 hours per day.”
EXCUSE SIMO WHAT?
While the rest of the world grinds hard, skipping holidays, reviewing papers in a hospital after their newborn kid is sleeping (true story by the way), some just…chill and get results?
3 hours per day and absolutely murdering it! Publications, grants, invited talks, the whole dream.
Which leads me to my this morning’s real thought:
Academia is a Design Problem
What if academia is a design problem, not something we have to conform to?
There’s a famous architect Buckminster Fuller who challenged reality in a nice way: “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
And I get it, you can’t make the model around you obsolete. But a grain of truth starts to emerge from Fuller’s words. We take the model and don’t even fight back. We don’t even question it.
We don’t question it because most of us don’t design our academic lives. We’ve got requirements. External pressure. We have been told what the academic BrUtAL (they say) reality is. We follow the unspoken rules without questioning if they’re even real.
We don’t even SEE it as a design problem. We just see it as something that has always been.
Tell me. When’s the last time you truly sat down and questioned all these beliefs about how things should be? And who even makes the rules of how your life should be?
Because clearly, some people have built something different for themselves.
Designing and building. That’s where it’s at. You design and build your own marvelous academic solosystem that works for you.
And those three words are key: Works for you.
Arnold Schwarzenegger says the most important thing is having a vision in life. Because if you don’t have a vision, you’re just following.
Oh, and in academia… we have so many things to follow that we lose our own vision. Not to mention, many don’t even have one! (You wouldn’t believe how many people tell me in our discussions their next year’s goal is to “write papers.” What a great idea! More “papers” to the world! Yikes.)
In academia, we have so many commitments and so many external metrics to fill that sometimes we feel there’s no space for a vision.
But there must be space for a vision. I’d even argue there’s no point in academia at all, if you can’t do it following your own vision. It’s not “just a job”, it’s a space you can design.
And that design starts with that vision.
Craft Your Academic Experience
1: Define YOUR Version of Success
What does success actually look like TO YOU? Not to your supervisor, not to your department head, not to some random LinkedIn academic influencer.
TO. YOU.
Write it down. Be honest. Maybe for you, success isn’t publishing in Nature or Science. Maybe it’s working on problems you find fascinating while having time to pick up your kids from school. Or teaching brilliantly while publishing at a sustainable pace.
Or long (but intellectually productive, I hope) coffee breaks with your colleagues. That could work too.
Whatever it is, write it down.
And stop apologizing for your vision of what a great life would be.
Now, you have something that differentiates your ideal future from all the external noise.
2: Review Your Vision Daily
Don’t just write and forget it. Look at your definition of success, this vision of yours, daily and check if you’re actually pursuing it.
Because I can promise you, you’ll forget it if you don’t remind yourself. The external pressure, the endless inbound tasks, it’s just all too much. They will steal your thoughts, if you don’t redirect them back.
Is what you’re doing driven by dopamine hits from external validation? Or is it actually aligned with your vision?
Because here’s the scary part: if you don’t consciously design your academic life, someone else will design it for you – through deadlines, expectations, and institutional pressures.
Keep reminding yourself: This is YOURS, not based on what others expect from you.
3: Tap Into Drug-Free Optimism
Okay this is a bit harder to explain. A buddy of mine used the term “alcohol-induced optimism” the other day and I think that’s a pretty funny way to put it.
Something else than your “normal state of mind” articulates your vision, and then it’s hard to believe it anymore later. During those times, you design these visions in a peak state (yes, be that highballs or just after everything has been going great for a long time) and it just FEELS SO EASY!
The restrictions fall away. Constraints? None! Expectations imposed by the environment? None!
Realism? NONE!
And that’s why staying optimistic is SO important.
Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier – Colin Powell
I also shared this the other day:
Challenge your beliefs. Find a way to make it work.
And do yourself a BIG favour: Choose to believe in your vision, and start to slowly chip away everything away from your academic reality.
As if it’s a design. Because it is.
Life, just like your academic life, is what you make of it, and you don’t have much time. So stop waiting. Stop conforming. Start designing. And since you’re doing it anyway, makes sense to design something beautiful, doesn’t it?
Oh, and just in case it’s not clear: No, I am not saying everyone can get by with four hours of work.
Our laboratories are different.
Our peers are different.
The available labour to us is different.
The entire environment for everyone is very very different.
What I am saying, however, is that there is a lot we can change but just haven’t decided to change. Because we don’t see it as a design issue. This is true in everything in life.
And academia is just too d**n busy for the majority of us, so we don’t stop to think!
So… think?