I’ve been a bit busy.
At a conference recently, a few people commented that I haven’t been writing here much, which is a fair assessment. The simple answer is that I’ve “been busy” but I’m wary of that excuse, because I’ve been busy plenty of times before and still found time to write.
This phase has felt different. It isn’t a low-grade pile of little jobs and neither has it been a run of specific deadlines to hit (though there have been those mixed in too). It’s a chronic combination of clinical and research workload, sustained over a long stretch.
People tend to assume the on-call weeks are the hard bit. In one sense they’re the most straightforward part of the job. For those weeks I cover the service 24/7 and I concentrate on nothing else. It’s rare that anything on the research side is so pressing that I have to interrupt an on-call week to deal with it. [N.B. On the few occasions I’ve left a research meeting/deadline in the middle of an on-call week, it’s been impossibly stressful because its a fixed commitment dropped into an unpredictable clinical service week.]
So the on-call weeks, oddly, feel okay. The challenge is everything else: the outpatient work, following up complex patients, and the research, all at the same time. What I keep running into is a consistent feeling to need to split myself in two, which (unsurprisingly), I’ve found difficult. That’s really why I haven’t written about academic life lately. I felt I needed to sort out my own house before I was in any position to comment on it. [Is that imposter syndrome?]
As I’ve written before, the jump from registrar to consultant was substantial and that adjustment is still ongoing. It took about nine months of on-calls before I felt I had a routine that actually worked. Evidently I still haven’t cracked the non-on-call weeks. I’ve tried completely blocking out academic time (i.e. not opening my NHS inbox at all for a few days or a week) but it feels like things get missed. I’ve tried staying on top of both and weaving them together, and I lose focus, never quite getting into the deep work that meaningful progress requires.
One big help has been my recent funding from Action Medical Research, which means I now have a postdoc in the lab. That brings its own new challenge, of course: learning to supervise and support someone else in the lab.
The solution I’d have proposed a decade ago is to simply ‘work harder’. I have tried that this year too but it was unsustainable. I also have come to the conclusion that I have a reasonable work ethic/rate and if I’m finding it difficult, it probably is objectively a bit difficult.
The line I keep telling myself is that this is a heavy investment in career capital before forty, and that afterwards I’ll land in a job with the right mix of exactly what I want to do. I’m not sure I fully believe it, but it helps.
So, what was the point of this post?
- I haven’t written much because I’ve been busy.
- A 50:50 clinical–academic post is hard.
- I still haven’t worked out the right strategy: compartmentalise or inter-weave.
Hopefully the next update will be more positive.
