Challenging Traditional Metrics: What Does Productivity Mean in Academia?
The pressure to publish papers and respond to endless emails often obscures a fundamental truth about academia: we are, at our core, creative problem solvers. There is a misalignment between traditional productivity metrics and the true nature of academic work, which creates unnecessary stress and friction. While universities measure output in publications and grants, breakthrough ideas rarely emerge from rushing to meet arbitrary deadlines or clearing our inboxes. Instead, meaningful academic progress requires us to reimagine what productivity means in a field driven by curiosity, intellectual exploration, and innovation. Let's examine how we can shift our perspective on academic productivity to better serve both our research goals and our well-being.
Productivity is not about getting things done - It is about getting the right things done
The satisfaction of checking off tasks from your to-do lists can be deceptive. While each completed item triggers a rewarding dopamine release, this chemical reward tells us nothing about genuine productivity. You might spend countless hours responding to emails and running from one meeting to the next, often working evenings and weekends, yet you feel stuck in place – exhausted but making no meaningful progress.
The core issue isn't lack of effort, but rather a disconnect between your daily activities and your long-term goals. True productivity emerges when we align our work with clear objectives.
To break this cycle, you must step back and define your goals. Where do you want to be in three to five years? What concrete steps will take you there? These are the tasks truly worth prioritising.
"Unfortunately, people often take more time planning their next vacation than planning their goals."
Productivity is not about doing more or producing more - It is about quality
Driven by the pressure of publish or perish and the stress of fighting for tenure, we try to produce as much output as possible. However, a single breakthrough paper in Science or Nature can advance your career much more than ten publications in lower-tier journals or conferences. It might be even the same amount of work, but the impact is much bigger.
Practically, your output will be a mixture of high-impact and smaller papers since, typically, a PhD student's first publication targets much smaller goals. However, you still want to go for quality. Put effort into presenting the work clearly. Make the paper inspiring! Make the figures beautiful. Teach the value of quality to your students. Also, there is not a clear correlation between most your most cited articles and the impact of the journal.
Quality should be a goal for any other output as well. Put effort into your slides, make them beautiful, aim to be the best presenter at the conference so people notice you. If you have a poster, think outside the box to try to win the best poster award. People will notice, since high quality is still rare.
Producing consistently work of quality will pay off in more citations, more collaborations, and more impact.
Productivity is not about working more hours - It is about being relaxed and in the flow
It is well known and supported by a lot of research: the longer you work, the higher your error rate becomes. It's really hard to produce high-quality output when you are tired, even impossible when you need to be creative. I am sure we all had the situation where we wrote some text late at night and the next day had to throw away most of it because of the low quality. It would have been better to stop and hang out with friends or family and work on it the next day fully refreshed.
Productivity is not about time management, but about energy management. Learn to understand yourself. When do you have the highest energy? This is the time to work on the difficult tasks. Move all the tasks that need little concentration to times when you are more tired (e.g., admin after lunch, writing in the morning).
It's good to be in the flow state; however, this means also that you are working at the certain level of difficulty. Typically, it's something that you have done before. Make sure you explore new projects that kick you out of your comfort zone. This is where you grow! In those cases, it's hard to get into a flow because they are much more difficult (at least at the beginning). Embrace those projects. These are the ones where you can stand out and be remarkable since most people avoid them.
Productivity is not about being efficient - It is about being effective
There is a famous Peter Drucker quote: "There is nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency something that should not be done at all." If you improve your typing speed, you can write more efficiently, i.e., more words per minute. However, if the text is an unimportant email or a badly written text, it's not worth it. Think more along the lines: if I have now an hour available (e.g., because a meeting was cancelled), what is the most effective way to use it? What brings you the biggest steps closer to your goals? Or can you use this hour to get rid of any obstacle that prevents you from achieving your goal?
Efficiency is just the cherry on top. But effectiveness is the whole cake!
Tip: The focus on efficiency is also often hidden in getting new software or new gear with the hope to be able to work better (“New Shiny Object Syndrome”). While these things can help you, be aware of this trap. It’s a very subtle way of procrastination. You think you have to learn this new software to be more productive. People with a technical research background (computer science, engineering, etc.) like myself fall easily for this.
Conclusion
If you look at the “NOT-side”, i.e., productivity is about (i) getting things done, (ii) producing more, (iii) working more hours, and (iv) being efficient. They are all old measurements of productivity. They come from the industrial context. If you produce widgets, following these steps indeed makes you more productive in the literal sense; you will produce more.
However, academic work is a very different type of work. We are producing knowledge, we employ and transform it. Peter Drucker coined the term "Knowledge Worker" for this type of job.
Nowadays, a lot of white-collar jobs are knowledge workers. However, academics are an extreme case. We step outside of what is known and produce completely new understandings. We are highly creative problem solvers. Moreover, we also define our own problems. This means productivity needs to be measured radically differently. We have to focus on the right things that will bring us closer to our goals and produce high quality by using our time/energy in the most effective way.
Consequently, we have to approach our work differently. You will find a lot of ideas on how to do this in this blog. Below are a few links that might help you.
Additional Resources
To find the right task to focus on, have a look at the Pareto Principle.
To keep working on your large projects, have a look at the “Eat the Frog” technique.
Another technique to break down complex projects into manageable pieces is the Pomodoro Technique.
To exploit them all effectively and to build up a healthy productivity habit, explore the idea of a Morning Routine.
In general, have a look at my blog. I keep constantly adding new posts.
Work Smart and Be Remarkable!
Have a great day!
- Helmut
