When I ask parent-scholars my most pressing question—what their daily schedule looks like—I know I’ve begun an unstable interrogation. Kids are like slot machines: they’re more a game of chance than of skill. What works at one age, or even just on one day, doesn’t for another. Some things can be done with one child that can’t be replicated with two or three or more. And vice versa. In certain cases, more children make for less work once the older ones are are able to help their younger siblings. And so you can never be too sure what you’ll get on any given day. That obviously complicates setting expectations, to say nothing of executing them. Add to this the wiles of scaling the academic ladder and one can quickly become unmoored.
Everyone knows this already, so when I became a parent and went looking for guidance, I was surprised by how little of it I found online or in print. There was one sample itinerary in a NPR article by a Princeton psychologist and mother, some posts here and here on a professional development blog in my discipline, and scarcely much else. Although there is also a considerable body of empirical research on parent-scholars, the parts of it I have read primarily identify the challenges we face rather than provide actionable solutions to overcome them.
What should we conclude from all this? Is everyone unmoored? I think not. Some parent-scholars seem to be getting on just fine: the ones I have interviewed on the Anscombe’s Juggle podcast, for example. Sure their methods might be, shall we say, unorthodox, but they work all the same. Aghast, I have resolved to uncover their secrets, while continuing my blind battle against the chaos in my own life. What I give you now is my dispatch from those trenches.
I have carved it into three parts. In this first post, I will share my current daily schedules as they play out over the course of a week. This routine has worked remarkably well for the past few months. In that respect, it has outlived the predictable lifespan of all my other schedules, few of which survived more than six to eight weeks. But for the instability of schedules with which this post opened, I know to expect change, and so my second post will relay the broader rules of thumb I have discovered for formulating workable schedules. My final post will gather everything I tried that didn’t work, which is just as useful to know.
My Personal Responsibilities
My schedule is not limited to my academic responsibilities but includes all of my duties, since I have learned that I cannot perform any of them well unless I schedule every single one. So, before sharing my schedule, let me first tell you just what the responsibilities are that make up my day:
My children are aged 3, 2, and almost 1, the last of which is still nursing. We have not sent any of our children to daycare; they spend most of their days with me.
We homeschool our eldest and plan to continue this form of education long-term, with extracurricular and social supplements.
With the exception of grocery delivery, we do not outsource any domestic duties; I do all of the cooking, cleaning, and most yardwork. Moreover, we are a little health-nutty, so I make every meal from scratch, as well as many basic items such as butter, yogurt, bread, ice cream, and other specialty health foods like kombucha and bone broth. All that is just to say that cooking is more involved and takes longer.
We cloth diaper our children, which requires spraying and laundering them (the diapers, that is).
I have some caregiving responsibilities for a family member. The time commitment is variable but can be significant.
We operate a dairy business, for which I clean our used milk gallons, process the family’s dairy intake, and organize community events.
We have daily, weekly, and monthly religious commitments averaging approximately ten hours a week, although sometimes more.
As you well know, I run Anscombe’s Juggle. This takes a few hours every month.
We throw very large bi-weekly parties on Sundays at our house, for which I cook and clean.
My Professional Responsibilities
I am a research postdoc with no teaching responsibilities.
With the addition of our third child, I moved down to part-time so that I could work from home, since I live 80 miles away in an area accessible only by car. I now voluntarily go into the office once a month on average.
I belong to a research group and have some co-authoring responsibilities.
I strive to publish at least two single- or lead-authored papers per year in top-tier journals I know have quick review and production turnaround times. I have a new plan to complete these minimum two papers in the first quarter (or at least the first half) of the calendar year, so that I can reserve the remaining months for bigger projects like book manuscripts. That said, sometimes collaborative work requires me to deviate from this.
I perform peer-reviews and provide editorial assistance for academic journals.
I belong to two mentorship programs at my alma maters, but the time commitment is very sporadic and low.
I am on the job market.
I attend conferences but am highly selective about them because of the enormous disruption it poses to family life, particularly for nursing infants.
My Weekly Schedule and ‘Micro-Planning’
So, those are all my usual responsibilities. Some will apply to you; others almost certainly will not. Even so, their totality should give you a sense of what I have found to be possible at my career stage.
I schedule my duties down to the hour to give my week structure, which works much better than anything less granular in my experience. For the sake of privacy, I won’t relate how my family and I spend each hour, but I will give you the broad strokes by the day:
To reduce decision fatigue, I fix daily activities to the same time. That includes meal times and cleanup, personal activities like ablutions and spiritual practices, and homeschooling.
I am militant about maintaining the same nap and bedtimes for the kids. Once babies can be sleep-trained (usually by the time my mat leave is over), I put them down for naps at 9:30 and 3:30, with bedtime at 6:30. As they age, I consolidate their naps into one starting at 12:00 and push their bedtime to 7.
Each weekday is dedicated to a different responsibility:
Monday: grocery orders
Tuesday: grocery arrival; clean cloth diapers
Wednesday: cook all of our food for the week (with the exception of managing our daily dairy intake)
Thursday: laundry
Friday: clean cloth diapers
This order is not random. Cloth diapers need to be laundered every 3-4 days, so I time their washing during the middle of the week, in case we are traveling for holidays (most of which fall on or about a weekend). If we are on the road, the diapers are either done or have time to sit without accumulating too much bacteria. I cook in the middle of the week for the same reason. Since I cook everything in one fell swoop, I stagger freezable meals toward the end of the week so that non-freezable ones will be consumed first. I have groceries delivered the day before I cook so that they don’t spoil before I need them. I do laundry on Thursdays because all the other days are already spoke for by some other major task, which I’ve found it best to space out as much as possible. I fit minor tasks, such as mowing the lawn, into random open windows or on Saturdays, which I reserve as a spill-over for miscellany.
So much for my personal responsibilities. What about my academic ones? Here, too, I have found it best to keep things as regular as possible:
Four out of five weeknights, I work for three hours after dinner while my husband puts the kids down. That might not seem like a lot, but these hours are intensely productive, in no small part because there are so few of them. Other researchers (at least in my field) have also found the neighborhood of three to four hours to be a reasonable limit, while cutting the remaining hours that only deliver diminishing marginal returns. I work in the evenings because my children naturally wake up so early that to work before they rise, I would have to get up in the middle of the night—something I have tried, and failed, to do.
My husband and I reserve one weeknight for a date. After all, you have to feed the fire! On that day, I have a sitter come around the beginning of naptime and stay for five hours. Slotting these hours in the middle of the day works best for everyone. With my littlest guys asleep, they don’t experience as much separation anxiety, while I am able to use the hours to schedule meetings whose timing I can control. After all, no one wants to Zoom at 7:30 or 9:00 p.m. (unless they are in a later time zone than me, in which case weeknight work hours are preferable). I also enjoy having one big day a week to accomplish what I’ve been marinating on during the other days. I overlap this big day with my easier personal responsibilities, which I complete before beginning my work.
In addition to my weekly plan, I try to maximize my use of time by mapping out each of my activities beforehand, as far as the nature of the thing in question allows. To give you a personal example: I have an eight-week meal plan, with each week’s recipes printed out in a separate binder. That way on Monday I can order my groceries instantly from a pre-populated list in my grocer’s app, and get right to cooking on Wednesday without having to leaf through multiple cookbooks. An analogous academic example would be my daily, weekly, semester, and academic-year plans. Expect to hear more of this ‘micro-planning’ in future posts.
Phew! That is my Monday through Saturday. On Sundays, our whole family rests together. We are ferociously territorial about this. Religious commitments drive our choice of day, but the principle of committing one day to complete rest is seriously cathartic, whether you are religious or not. Were it not for this day of rest, I doubt I would have been able to sustain my current academic role this past year and a half.
Deviations
I sometimes need to deviate from my schedule, usually for meetings or appointments over whose timing I have limited control. Fortunately, interruptions of this kind are foreseen with enough advance to plan accordingly. There is always my ‘spill-over Saturday’ in reserve as well, should I need to finish up any projects or meet a pressing deadline.
I do not deviate, however, for the sake of squeezing in extra academic work. I have learned to regard that as a temptation it pays dividends to avoid. In my experience, it leads to overwork, then procrastination during designated work hours, and finally schedule abandonment altogether. Under those conditions, I tend to become unmoored, or at least unhappy.
Concluding Thoughts on Tempo
For now, let me close with a brief word about how my schedule feels day-in and day-out. The work week is definitely densely packed, although as time goes on I am finding it more and more manageable. As with all things parenting related, you grow into it. Still, come Friday night the fast clip has exhausted me. One big reason for this is that our family spends very little time relaxing together during the week. We do what we can to mitigate against this—prioritizing shared dinners, for example—but it is tiring nonetheless. To make up for it, we reserve the entire weekend for family activities, with neither I nor my husband working so far as we are able. We have found this replenishes us well enough to face the next week. All in all, the balance is certainly a difficult and delicate one, but it beats having none at all.