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For most higher education professionals, summer is when we recover after high-intensity work that occurs during the rest of the academic year. Semester breaks are one of the more underappreciated aspects of having a job on a college campus.
There’s a “collective restoration” in higher education. You can take time off during the summer without worrying about too much work stacking up while you’re gone.
“We know this in academia where, in between semesters, everyone is taking a beat,” said Cal Newport, a Georgetown University computer science professor and author of “Deep Work,” who discussed “work cycles” on an episode of his podcast. “That rhythm works well.”
Humans have always worked in cycles. In Newport’s article published in the New Yorker, he shared anthropological research suggesting that our prehistoric ancestors didn’t do their hunting and gathering for more than 40 hours per week. Survival requires some periods of rest or leisure. It’s no wonder modern knowledge workers are stressed and burned out. Our current hustle culture is both unsustainable and unnatural.
The academic work cycle isn’t perfect. Higher education professionals experience burnout more than most occupations. Some, like admissions counselors or fundraisers, are on separate work cycles that don’t benefit from semester breaks.
And who’s to say the work cycle of the academic calendar fits everyone’s preference? Maybe you’d rather have shorter intervals instead of working like your hair’s on fire for an entire semester before needing three months to recover.
Newport pointed to the employee handbook for 37signals, the tech company that makes the Basecamp project management software. They break their year up into six- or eight-week work cycles as a way to designate projects into a “presentable scope of work.” They end each cycle with a two-week “cooldown” to reflect, fix bugs, and plan for what’s next. It’s an antidote to the constant “go, go, go!”
Regardless of the collective work cycle within your organization or profession, you can create your own rhythms. It just takes some planning. For example, you might block your calendar for two weeks to focus on a project, explore an idea, or simply recover. Then, allow meetings and routine work to resume the following six weeks. Or you might go hard for four days and cool down on a Friday.
“You can do this without having to make any declarations, or getting it signed off by a boss, or without attracting that much attention,” Newport said. “It’s a matter of making your weekly plans sparse during a cooldown period (…) and being really careful about scheduling things during cooldown periods to the degree you can get away with it.”
According to Newport, people who have these “stealth work cycles with stealth cooldown periods” can be more effective and valuable to their employer because the quality of their work is going to be better. They anticipate the cooldowns and benefit from the restorative effects. And people overestimate how much their employers will even notice any lapses of availability or interrupted periods of productivity.
“What they’re going to notice is your peaks,” Newport said.
Get published in the top journals. Reach your goals for the semester. Focus on what’s most important. Employers don’t measure success based on the number of emails answered or time spent in meetings. If they do, look for another job.
There’s more to cooldowns than recovering from intense work. Otherwise, this advice would be to use all your vacation days (and a majority of Americans don’t). It’s about varying your pace and concentrating on one working sphere that will enhance and sustain your career.
Google has long institutionalized a work cycle to stoke innovation with its “20% Time,” where employees are encouraged to spend 80% of their time on core tasks and 20% of their time working on projects that they think might benefit the company. It’s how Gmail was created.
Think of the cooldown within a work cycle as a mini-sabbatical or a working holiday. You’re still working, but maybe you’re exploring a side project, partnering with another department on campus to solve a neglected problem, or simply nurturing relationships.
Researchers at the University of Washington who studied types of actual sabbaticals found that people returned to their pre-sabbatical jobs with “greater confidence” and “a need for balance,” or, depending on the type of sabbatical, with a desire to change their position or employer.
However you structure your work cycle and cooldown, don’t just follow the rhythms of the academic calendar. Practice a work cycle that supports your career growth. If you don’t cool down every so often, you will eventually burn out.
