Days in the Life of a Senior Postdoc

23.10.2024

Fig. 1. Total hours worked. (A) Total hours worked per full work week for three postdoctoral researchers. Weeks that included one or more (bank) holidays (asterisks in Fig. 1B-D) were excluded. n = 37 (EG); n = 25 (CZ), n = 8 (SVM). (B-D) Total hours worked per full work day for three postdoctoral researchers (at-work breaks included). Asterisks denote weeks that included one or more holidays. Weekend work is highlighted in purple. Dotted horizontal lines indicate 8 h as a reference point. Total number of weeks tracked: n = 42 (EG); n = 30 (CZ), n = 12 (SVM).
Fig. 2. Individual work day structure. Full time-tracking datasets for researchers (A) EG, (B) CZ, and (C) SVM. Colors denote time spent on 12 different task categories, including at-work breaks (see legend). Y-axis represents time in 24-hour notation. Number of days tracked = 256 (EG); 171 (CZ); 51 (SVM).
Fig. 3. Relative time investment for different task categories. (A) Relative time investment of total hours worked for each task category, shown separately for researchers EG, CZ and SVM. (B) Same dataset as in (A) displayed as bar charts.
Fig. 4. Time investment in different task categories over time. Time spent working on different tasks per calendar week for researchers EG, CZ and SVM. (A) Relative investment (% of work hours per task). (B) Absolute investment (work hours per task). Asterisks denote weeks with at least one holiday.
Fig. 5. Work day fragmentation. Time investment in different task categories at high temporal resolution for three representative days per researcher. Y-axis represents time in 24-hour notation.
Fig. 6. Session lengths per task category. For each task category, individual session lengths (dots) and medians (bold box plot lines) are shown for three researchers. A ‘session’ is defined as uninterrupted time spent focussing on one task category. Task categories are ordered top-to-bottom in descending order of relative time invested by EG (see Fig. 3A).
Fig. 7. Changes in relative time investment per task category. For each task category, fold-change in relative time investment (% of work hours invested as senior postdocs divided by average % of work hours invested as junior postdocs) are shown for researchers EG and CZ. Each dot represents one week tracked as senior postdocs. Bold box plot lines denote median values. For researcher SVM, no reference values (junior postdoc time tracking) were available, and analysis was therefore omitted. Similarly, the task category “Preparing & giving talks” had to be excluded from this analysis due to its absence in the junior postdoc dataset. The task category “Outreach” from the junior postdoc dataset was folded into “Admin & other” for the purpose of this analysis.