I’m writing this blog post while my toddler watches a cartoon in the background, and I feel drained by the constant need to multitask. This morning, I peeled clementines for her while leading a Zoom meeting, trying to keep my hands out of frame and appease her without needing to mute my audio. I’m currently five years post-PhD graduation, and have worked remotely ever since: through my husband’s process of immigrating to the U.S., COVID-19, and parenthood. I think often about the lessons I’ve learned since finishing my doctorate about work-life balance. Because my life was so much less complicated during graduate school, I had the luxury of “winging it” when it came to work-life balance, and I didn’t achieve it very effectively. Now that I have to actively grapple for work-life balance as I change diapers while returning phone calls, I have a much different appreciation for what I could have done differently during graduate school.

I work as a dissertation editor, so I deal with graduate students on a constant basis and I am continually impressed by the juggling act many of them I meet are achieving. Graduate school is a difficult enough endeavor without any external factors. PhD students are underpaid, and often need to balance their dissertation writing process with teaching, university service, or campus job responsibilities. Many need to take other jobs, and many are pursuing their degree alongside a full-time job, caregiving responsibilities, or a host of other life and household roles. 

There’s also a cult of excessive, all-consuming work in academia. PhD students and academics alike wear exhaustion and overwork as badges of honor. I remember being the same way, and—while I still struggle with barriers to work-life balance—I wish I had the benefit of what I’ve learned in the remote work years since when I was in graduate school. Here are my four top tips for work-life balance for academics, along with examples of how I didn’t apply them in graduate school.

Normalize Doing One Thing at a Time

During graduate school, I remember always being proud of how many tasks I was juggling at once. It felt like in an hour of “focused” work, I might make notes on an article I was reading for my dissertation, then turn to grade one student paper of the 27 I had on my desk, reply to an email from my advisor, and plan a meeting for the graduate student association. While there’s an argument to be made for the benefit of making incremental progress toward multiple goals at once, I didn’t realize until after finishing my PhD how draining it often is to toggle between so many roles so quickly. 

As a working parent, I find that my mental wellbeing is inversely correlated with the amount of time in a day I have to spend multitasking. The feeling of finishing a day feeling like I’ve done a lot of things mediocrely, rather than one thing well, is extremely similar to the feeling of imposter syndrome I had in graduate school. Even if just for short intervals at a time, my advice to my grad school self would be to let yourself be one thing at a time (i.e., just be a dissertation writer for an hour, whilst letting your Teaching Assistant self have a break from responding to student emails). 

Especially important, is to make sure you have time where you get to just be a version of yourself where you’re not agonizing over graduate school. Again, I know it’s not realistic to totally unplug from your responsibilities for an extended period of time, and some degree of multitasking is inherently required in graduate school. However, the key lesson I’ve learned since my PhD is that even taking 10 minutes to just be me, no work, no looming dissertation is so important. For me, this looks like the half-hour workout before my daughter wakes up, or when I leave my work phone in my office while I play blocks with her for a few minutes— it really can make all the difference. 

You Deserve (Healthy) Self-care Regardless of How Much You Accomplish

One of my most problematic patterns of thought during graduate school was a system of rewards for having accomplished small goals. I did it with both beneficial and detrimental things I found enjoyable and comforting: I can have a cocktail this evening if I write 1,000 more words; I can go to the 7am spin class at the gym, but only if I get up early enough to work on my literature review for 45 minutes first; I can have another sip of this latte when I finish reading this page. I’m honestly still in the process of trying to reframe some of the ways I think about how productivity connects with rewards and self-care practices.

The main problem this created for me was that it enhanced the level of self-doubt I already felt. If I “succeeded,” and attained my reward, I felt a nagging sense of guilt that I should have been more willing of accomplishing my PhD work for its own sake, rather than as needing a reward (particularly when my reward wasn’t necessarily something conducive to my mental or physical wellbeing). If I “failed,” I was in a position of neither benefitting from a feeling of accomplishment, nor getting whatever thing I told myself I couldn’t have. This way of thinking could easily have led do much more problematic practices or abuses, and caused me to feel constantly guilty at not having achieved arbitrary milestones. 

Goal setting is absolutely crucial in graduate school, and it was extremely helpful to me to have both short- and long-term goals in mind at all times. However, if I could do it again, I would try hard to think of goals and self-care as separate entities, rather than allowing them to become as intricately entangled as I did. Rather than an “if…then…” model, I wish I had thought of productivity and self-care (and enjoyable but less-than-healthy treats) as two separate aspects of my life, rather than as interrelated items. 

Don’t Forget the Importance of Scheduling and Spatial Boundaries

One of the most classic examples of a barrier to work-life balance is the fact that work and non-work responsibilities/leisure time often occur in the same space for the remote worker, which makes it more difficult to disconnect from work and be fully present in home or family life. This problem is exacerbated by the excessive work culture of academia, as well as subpar campus facilities. My on-campus office was a shared, fluorescently lit graveyard of broken printers, so I spent most of my time working in my small apartment: ranging from my desk to kitchen table, to bed, to balcony chair. While this flexibility was nice in some ways, it intensified the problem of failing to disconnect from work. I wish I’d preserved the “commute” from the library to my apartment, or even from my desk to my bed, in order to cultivate some spatial distance between work and time to relax. 

Perhaps more importantly, temporal boundaries can be near-impossible to cultivate in academia. While I still have a difficult time limiting my work hours to their set parameters, the helpful confines of a 40-hour work week are often absent in academia. According to a 2022 Nature survey, 68% of graduate students cited the difficulty of maintaining work-life balance as one of their primary concerns. While both locational and time-based flexibility is a significant benefit of academia when it means that you can work in a location and to a schedule that suits your needs, it is also a significant risk to work-life balance. Flexibility can be beneficial, but it can also facilitate overwork. In other words, if you’re working 80 hours a week, how much does it matter that you had the flexibility to select which 80 hours? I wish I could tell my graduate student self that a balance between availing of positive flexibility—working in a nice coffee shop or a different country—and setting boundaries—not writing your results section from bed when struck with insomnia at 3am—is a better approach than complete fluidity.  

It’s Okay to Ask for Help

Based on my experience in graduate school, and working with graduate students in my professional career since, academics often seem to be under the impression that they need to do absolutely everything on their own. High-achieving individuals, especially graduate students, often consider their competence part of their identity, and have a difficult time asking for help. I think this is of course most problematic as it relates to seeking mental healthcare services, but it can be present in small-scale aspects of graduate school work as well. I recently encountered a client who was having a difficult time paginating his dissertation, needing the front matter to have roman numerals and the body of the text Arabic. I provided a quote, a nominal fee for the minimal editing work it would require, and he hesitated. He eventually told me he didn’t think he deserved to earn the degree if he couldn’t overcome this last formatting hurdle on his own. Despite my best efforts to convince him otherwise, and offering to help him free of charge, he wouldn’t accept my help. I sent him on his way with a few links to resources I hoped would help, and was painfully reminded of the late night I spent in a study room the night before my master’s thesis was due, struggling with the same issue, which felt like the end of the world at the time. I too refused to ask for help. 

This level of stubborn independence is conducive neither to work-life balance, nor to a sustainable career in graduate school or academia more generally. In terms of writing projects, a visit to your university writing center or hiring a professional editor can be a great way to get out of a writing slump (or avoid fighting with your table of contents). Most importantly, mental health resources are increasingly available. Your student fees likely entitle you to counseling or other psychological services through your university; telehealth counseling can offer improved affordability and convenience compared to in-person services; and national resources like the National Grad Crisis Line are available. However you choose to navigate the difficulties of work-life balance in academia, please don’t go it alone.  

Dr. Lauren Saunders is the Vice President of Editing and Research for Dissertation Editor, where she previously served as an editor and managing editor. She earned her M.Phil. in Irish Literature from Trinity College, Dublin, and her PhD in Literary Studies from the University of Denver. She lives in Colorado with her husband and daughter. Her book, PhDone: A Professional Dissertation Editor’s Guide to Writing Your Doctoral Thesis and Earning Your PhD, is available at all good bookstores. Please feel free to connect with her on social media (Instagram, TikTok, and LinkedIn) or at dr.saunders@dissertation-editor.com 

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