So, here’s a crazy thing.  I’m writing this on a Wednesday, and as I left work today I was actually feeling a little excited about my job.

This shouldn’t be a crazy thing.  I work in Astronomy, as a Scientific Programmer, which is a combination of two things I really, really like and am good at.  However, for a variety of reasons, not all of them to do directly with my job (you can probably guess one or two), the past few years have been pretty rough, and I have been struggling with a massive case of burnout.

And I’m maybe, very, very cautiously hopeful that I’m starting to see the light at the end of that tunnel.

Part of that definitely has to do with my boss really working with me to try to shift things around so that they’re better.  But part of it is definitely also to do with the thing I’d like to ramble on about today:  It has been over four months since I implemented a new work schedule, and I think it’s to the point where it really is paying off!

First, I should possibly note that I am maybe a rarity in the field of trained astronomers in that I am not a workaholic.  The number of hours I have been working this whole time is really, extremely, perfectly reasonable.  I actually do just work 40 hours a week.

Even still, I have been Overwhelmed.  A lot.  For a long time.

That overwhelm really wasn’t/isn’t anything to do with the amount of my work, and was/is much more to do with the number of things I’m responsible for.  Before my new schedule, I was doing way too much switching, leaving me very frazzled and practically unable to make any progress on the big, long sorts of projects I was originally hired for.  Around about last October or so, I realized a) I really wasn’t going to make progress on those big, long projects unless I could carve out some truly dedicated time for them, and b) it really was reasonable to insist that all of my other work really shouldn’t be taking up more than half of my time.  My boss agreed with me that my big, long projects were and are high priority, and therefore I was officially allowed to divide my work into two separate shifts.

Now I alternate, one week doing Operations (Ops) work (all the niggling little tasks that pop up on short notice needing nearly (but not perfectly) immediate attention and/or otherwise keeping an eye on things that might need attention), and then the next week doing Development (Dev) work (the big, long projects that are difficult to move forward without dedicated stretches of worktime).  And – at least when it works the way it’s supposed to – it is really so much nicer.  And so I want to tell people about it.  Maybe it will help somebody else, or will spark an idea that will help somebody else.

Of course, I’m not sure how applicable an Ops/Dev split is for most people.  And there are definitely lots and lots of jobs where devoting a whole week to one thing and then a whole week to the other is a no-go from the start.  Also, from my limited perspective, this seems like a particularly Astronomy sort of problem.  Lots and lots of industries definitely need both Development work and Operations work to happen.  Astronomy, though, seems to be particularly prone to having Ops and Dev work sort of blend together into one job.  (You built the data pipeline, you run the data pipeline.  While working on this other pipeline over here.)

Anyway, there are multiple great things about changing to this new, divided schedule.  The first was an almost instantaneous decrease in mental load.  If I’m only doing (and thinking about) half of my work in a given week, that means I don’t have to be fretting about the other half.  I don’t have to keep my vigilance up for the needs of that other half, whether it be monitoring an Ops pipeline for problems, or taking the long-term Dev implications into account for the work that’s currently in front of me.  And I don’t have to be constantly worrying whether I’m taking too much time for one sort of work versus the other, trying to squeeze one sort of thing in between the cracks of the other one, with the deadlines for both hanging over my head.  There is time.  I’ve made sure of it.

Actually, now there’s more time, because I’m not spending nearly as much of it wondering which of the twelve important things I’ve currently got up in the air I should be working on just this moment.

The next thing that is so much better is the momentum.  In both types of work, there are a lot of specific details I need to keep track of, and if I can devote large blocks of my time to doing one thing, then I can hold all those details in my head longer, can make better connections about how to proceed, and just actually bang out the work while it’s in my head what exactly I want to get done.  This is why, for me, it really is important to have an entire week on one thing and then the other.  I am a big-projects sort of person, and during my Dev week I am rarely guaranteed to finish the thing I’m working on.  I need as much time and momentum as I can get to take as big a bite out of the current project as possible, with only a small fraction of the total time being used to spin my brain back up to what the project plan is in the first place.  For Development, switching is not my friend.  And even for Ops, the momentum is so much better when I have a week to plan things out in.  Mondays are usually chaos, but then I’ve got my rough map for the week, with room in it for surprises and shifting priorities, but also for really checking some things off the To-Do list.  (And, after a Dev week, that can actually feel pretty nice.)

And then there’s also a sneaky benefit to my every-other-week schedule: It has a much more natural trimming-out process than when my work is all mixed together.  After all, if I haven’t gotten to something in my current set by the end of the week, then it needs to be very clearly defined and/or clearly important if I am realistically going to pick it back up again in more than a week’s time.  As much as I want to get to every item on my list, lots of things sneak onto that list by seeming important in the moment, but then never actually rising up to top priority, leading to a list that gets longer and longer, and to me feeling less and less in control of my workload.  By taking a one-week break from the list (for Ops work or for Dev work) the actually unimportant stuff will either end up forgotten, or else more clearly recognized as something I’m not going to get to and that’s okay.

Of course, my new schedule doesn’t always work perfectly.  Sometimes the Operations stuff, which just keeps piling up no matter what, can kind of take over despite one’s hopes for the contrary.  I started this schedule in November, the same month I went to a conference and when the holidays really start to take over, and that definitely made juggling two different realms of work not amazingly smooth.  And meetings and collaborations don’t tend to heed Schedule.  I can’t completely banish ill-timed interruptions.

But it’s still been really nice.  And I’m still really looking forward to the more and better work I think I’m going to be able to get done in the future working in this system.  I’m actually looking forward to things again.