As mentioned in a previous post, starting January 20th, 2023, I began doing detailed accounting of how many minutes I was spending each day performing different types of work. This was largely motivated by my involvement on a departmental “committee” where there were around 3 other members assigned to the committee (so, theoretically, everybody could be doing ~ 25% of the necessary work), but it became clear that nobody was really going to do anything, so I had to essentially do > 80% of the necessary work to have the whole thing not completely fail outright. As of today (March, 21, 2025), this time-stamped spreadsheet of my activity log has 5,075 rows. Well, aside from allowing me to keep “receipts” of how much of my actual effort was going toward this piece of departmental service (rather than the assumed ~ 25% ), it had the secondary benefit of allowing me to actually quantitate how long I was spending on any given work-related item (whether it was service-related or not). Here are some activities I was able to assess.

Manuscripts: So for the last 4 manuscripts from the lab, it’s taken me, on average, ~150 hours to go from “OK, time to start putting together the manuscript” to having~ it done. Actually, the number is probably closer to 200 hours on average, since two of these are still ongoing, and at lesat one of these I’ve been working on since like 2021. But ya, it really is still a big lift for me to get a paper published from the lab. Which, in one sense, is probably what it should be. But it is also exhausting.

Presentations: There were four presentations during that span, and it on average, took me about 20 to 25 hours to prep for each. I suppose this is because each presentation was a different topic (necessitating starting from “scratch”).

Grant_writing: This is going to be a completely anomalous number. Two were letters of intents (LOIs), and thus just short ~2-page descriptions, and one was a full-application that took an LOI-like condensed format (This was also a joint grant application, so I didn’t need to pull all of the weight on it). This is because all of my previous major grant applications were made before I started collecting this data. Next time I need to write something that is R01-sized, I imagine it will take me double that number, if not more.

Rotations: Each PhD student rotation seems to take about 15-20 hours of my time. Probably a somewhat moot point for next year, though, since it’s unclear whether I could / should take another student at that point.

Teaching, hiring, and editing fellowship applications: These seem to take between 15 to 22 hours of my time per (new) lecture, new staff hire, and per application. But n = 1 for each, so we’ll see what happens in the future (maybe).

RPPRs: 9 hours on average. Doesn’t seem unreasonable.

Reviewing manuscripts: 5 hours on average. Again, seems pretty reasonable.