I do not think science is anymore a way of living. I used to believe like that and compromise things in my life. But look around you. There are people working in science just following a normal schedule as in any other job. So my advise is to work as long as you are enjoying. If you get your reward at work, repeat the tasks as many times as necessary. If on the other hand, you have curiosity for some other things, just work as many hours as your contract states and then enjoy outside. Science is not the dreamy world, and we should not put people to work their ass off and not to have any other activities for the sake of science and humanity. Everybody has the right to spend time on things they enjoy the most. And we, scientists, are responsible to make science and research the most interesting job. If we fail, a scientist might enjoy doing art! After all we are just normal people like a clerk or a taxi driver!

I feel the same, with the added difficulty that I have other professional activities to achieve the standard of living that desire. Still can not find my personal balance!

I agree with you guys.... however this is not surprising to me. Remember that being a scientist is a full time job, a way of living, a style.... like being an artist or a musician you will have your work all the time with you...

Exactly, a scientist is not a common job, but a way of living...!

I did a lot of research which was intertwined with life in general so I don't feel that pressure. It's very spontaneously that I came to some results because it has to do with intuition and direct action.

Life and research are the same kind of flow.

Synchronicities you can't force they just happen.

There is a lot to think about why such things happen, which direction it is going and who is responding.

Agreed it is a way of life. I don’t want to claim that I have done lot of research but has reasonably contributed. There were times a little extra pressure was there, but never felt that it was overwhelming. I think it depends upon considering your priorities in life and allocating appropriate time based on your requirement and proper time management will go a long way in organizing your research process.

I am fully agreed to Nageswara sir. there should be balance between personal and professional life for this proper time management will be useful. live your life according to the priorities of your's.

It appears someone here does not like research hence down vote.

@Nageswara Posinasetti: its not like someone is not like doing research. It just to know how all researchers manage their life balance. It does not make sense research means 'no other life'.

Research is a process that requires huge time investment, especially at the beginning of ones career. But, in theory things should ease off with time. This is becuase one becomes more faimiliar with the foundational knowledge that underpins one's discipline. The rest is just a matter of keeping updated with current developments in the field. But usually a researcher gets involved in a wide spectrum of activities ranging from teaching to correcting student exam copies, and administration tasks. I guess acquiring excellent organisational skills becomes inevitable!?

Marry with another one scientist and together you could live yours personal life in the lab. It's the only way ;)

switch off computer, switch on life :D

if you feel under pressure, give yourself some limits, and if possible try to do more than one thing at a time, so you will reduce the time you spend in the lab and obtain the same results. in any case the lab will follow you even when you are outside!

Science is life - no other choices, if you want to be a scientist.

As a mother of two (now grown up) children, housewife, partner etc etc... you learn to cope with having to do a lot of things parralell. So handling and managing time for work as a (almost full time) researcher is just one of those many things! But most of all you learn to accept that doing work=science is just not sooooo important! I think male in general (not only researchers) take their job just a bit too serious ;-) .

Because male look deeper?

Deeper into what?

into their job, of course. Not being warior anymore, males perhaps taking their jobs as main thing in the life (it was war). Women, alternatively, do care about family (nowadays about diet, perhaps?).

'Having to do a lot of things parallel' is a big problem for me. If I am doing something I can not concentrate on other things.

The question, if one can live in multitasking environment, is not new. While some experts say, that multitasking reduces your productivity, I successfully manage to cope severe multitasking for many years.

Sleeping 3-4 hour or less for long time is another question of time management. While for some people this is nearly deathfull, others can live year with sauch amount of sleep.

So, many things are very personal, and tyhere is no recipe for everyone.

Scientist are like saints, if you want to be a great scientist like Einstein or Newton you have to be like a saint, to be a scientist is spontaneous process, you can't create it. As you said "I have to compromise a lot with my personal life for doing research" , yes you have to compromise, because you are not working for yourself you are working for humanity, for mankind . It's all about a way of living. be hungry be foolish.

--This is completely my personal view.

I do not think science is anymore a way of living. I used to believe like that and compromise things in my life. But look around you. There are people working in science just following a normal schedule as in any other job. So my advise is to work as long as you are enjoying. If you get your reward at work, repeat the tasks as many times as necessary. If on the other hand, you have curiosity for some other things, just work as many hours as your contract states and then enjoy outside. Science is not the dreamy world, and we should not put people to work their ass off and not to have any other activities for the sake of science and humanity. Everybody has the right to spend time on things they enjoy the most. And we, scientists, are responsible to make science and research the most interesting job. If we fail, a scientist might enjoy doing art! After all we are just normal people like a clerk or a taxi driver!

It is true that scientists are normal people , maybe more curious and obsessive than others.

This is a very difficult thing. We must rank priorities, in timing and in absolute term.

What is urgent in the schedule and what is urgent in our life, program and try to make it one by one with an alternative manner including research.

Maintaining the work/life balance is indeed often tricky. By the way, there was a RG discussion on time management with a number of helpful tips: https://www.researchgate.net/post/What_is_the_best_time_management_book_blog_document_you_have_ever_read

Time management is always a difficult thing when you are passionate about things, and I do think it is important to be passionate about science if you do research.

However, I deeply disagree with the view that science has to become some kind of sainthood or imply that you need to sacrifice your life for a higher cause. I think this view does a disservice to science and is somewhat outdated. Some scientists may choose to work this way, but it shouldn't be considered mandatory to be a "serious" scientist.

I have worked in research for almost 15 years and I believe I’ve made significant contributions to my field despite having very eclectic interests and passions. I feel that having a rich life outside of science makes me more creative scientifically instead of less. I think we will miss many great ideas if we declare doing scientific research implies sacrificing your life. As lifespans get longer and fields of study become more interconnected, the other aspects of your life can become your inspiration instead of a burden.

I agree with Noureddine Ouerfelli. I keep a list of things to do according to importance and urgency. I practise SMART goal setting and Drucker's feedback analysis. Ask yourself what are the 20% of the work that will give you 80% results and spend more time working on these tasks. I also suggest you experiment with different working/personal lifestyles. For example, I found that my life is well-balanced when I work 40 productive hours a week and take the weekend off (usually cleaning and cooking). I can work 50 productive hours a week, however, it's not sustainable because I have to compromise my health and sleep. My philosophy on work/life balance is health > household > emotion > work. Once I have the first three sorted out, I can work productively.

This is an interesting questions and one that I have certainly obsessed about over the years. Although I think that science may be a "lifestyle" as mentioned above, I do not think it should define your life. I very much feel that scientists are required to establish two additional outlets in their daily routines - physical activity and time to create. If you build time for these, you will be amazed at the results even during the work hours. I work obsessively at my science but I am equally obsessive about capturing physical activity and maintaining a craftsman/artisan approach to other tasks. Although I end up multi-tasking quite often, never underestimate the power of good old fashioned mono tasking. If this is done with the non analytical brain parts, it will transfer over into your lab/office work time. I am guessing there are few scientists that at the end of their life say, "damn it, if I would have only spent more time in the lab."

I agree with huepe

That a scientist should enjoy his life and research both. He/she should learn the rules of nature. Many discoveries have been inspired by nature. If we work continuously we will end up with frustration so please enjoy life and take some time for your family. You will see that your productivity have increased a lot. Because a fresh mind can work efficiently than a fatigue mind. So mange your time by sharing some time with your family and enjoy doing your research work.

I think this is not a problem just for science, but of our present culture that emphasizes "productivity" rather than "quality".

In the case of science, it takes the form of the current "publish-or-perish" culture, which pushes people to work too much and publish publish publish, at the cost of at best incremental contributions, rather than ground-breaking. We find it difficult to slow down, take time to think over things, let problems cook in the back-burner slowly until they "solve themselves" etc. I'm convinced that in the case of science, working harder and longer hours is just counterproductive in terms of the significance of the scientific contributions made. Significant questions are just hard and take time: not only time at the lab, or at the computer, but "idle" time when you do other things, relax, and let ideas slowly combine and recombine, at their own tempo. You might want to look at the "slow science" movement, among others, that has emerged as a reaction to what has been called the "MacDonalization of science".

We would make ourselves and other scientists (editors, reviewers, and readers) a really big favor if we just published less and better work, which would necessarily mean that we devote more time away from the lab or the computer.

In a word, the "publish-or-perish" pressure is turning into "publish-and-perish".

I agree with Julian. When I jumped in science I stopped writing poetries--science takes all my time and all my mind.

1. The pressure we have requires to prove that we are good, and this depends on quantity of papers we publish; we have not time to elaborate them and make them more valuable. The world reversed. 100 years ago a scientist published the paper and received a good honorarium. Now, we often should pay to journals to publish color figures or additional pages. I understand that scientists should be able to explain their work briefly and clearly, but sometimes it is impossible to explain your two-year work on two pages--the article look like advertising and reader need to navigate to supplement for explanation.

2. The salaries we obtain, which depends on economics, diminish drastically. Sometimes it is not enough to pay your bills. To survive we are looking for more and more new projects, which you should complete with the same resources and which adds additional load to your life.

If you are not obsessed with what you are doing, you should develop certain solid skills, for example, as an experimenter or programmer, and make it an "industry." In this case you will be an artisan, which is not bad; you will become very respectful and high-demanded specialist; many will need you; you will be fast, performing their requests; you will participate in many papers they write. And you will be capable pick up the amount of work that not cut your personal life.

But if you would like to be a top scientist, you should sacrifice. :(

Valentina, I'm not sure I got what you mean. Do you mean that one should give up doing good science just for the sake of publishing a lot, staying in "the system" to pay the bills? I may have misunderstood your message, in that case, could you explain yourself a little better?

Yes. I mean that many scientists are underpaid. To get grants you need many publications. Unfortunately, counts weigh more than quality. For example, after molecular dynamics I have results; I explain them somehow; to make better explanation I need to perform additional experiments, which takes a lot of time, especially for MD, sometimes months, but I don't have this time. So I publish as is. It still is a solid paper, but...

I have 26 projects for a half of 100% salary. How many I could have for 100%? And what quality of my science could be? What time would be left for my personal life?

OK, Valentina, so I got it right. I'm sorry for you, I wouldn't do it. In your place, I'd just quit and do something else: there's no way I could get anything done, let alone enjoy myself doing it, under that sort of pressure.

I agree with Julian. Somehow we should break this circle. If in order to continue in the game we need to lower the quality of our science, we will pay the price in the future. We are trained to make the best science we can, within the limitations of the field where we are working. No way I am going to give up my personal life to play this game of populating databases and adding dots to my CV. Too boring for a scientist!

I totally enjoy being a scietntist after spending 17 years as a nurse whilst my family grew up and so therefore was used to managing and juggling life and attempting to not let social life suffer as you do need thta break in order no to be overwhelmed.

I had always wanted to be a scientist as a child but chose to do it in later life and at 46 have 2 degrees and about to do my masters all done whilst working full time in a hospital research lab .

Work involves alot of projects on different subjects but i still find the time to do home study and writing in the week leaving time at the weekend to do the social thing in life but i will admitt I do tned to read as much as i can even at the weekends when i manage to fit it in to update myself on the new and latest research for development .

In my case i feel the need to do this so i can be the best i can be at what i do and to achieve the best results within the projects i do.

It hard work but satisfying at the end of the day

Gloria put it very nicely. The two main issues are

(1) science is becoming a game of quantity rather than quality,

(2) "somehow we should find a way to break this circle".

There's this idea that a game is a "magic circle" (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Ludens_(book) ) that is the field defined by the rules of a game. When you "play a game" you enter this "magic circle". One of the key elements of "play" is that you must enter the circle voluntarily. Otherwise it is work, not play.

The problem with the "game of science" is that the scoring-system changed.

It used to be a game of seeking knowledge, discovering the basic laws of nature, and you scored a "point" whenever you made what used to be called a "significant contribution" to the advancement of our understanding of nature. Let's called the old-game "the scientific discovery game" (SDG)

Now, you score whenever you publish a paper, whatever its content, and worse, whenever that paper is "cited", however it is cited (impact points, h-factors, etc). To give it a name, I'll call it "the paper-publishing game" (PPG)

One usually enters the game of science thinking it is SDG, to discover too late that it's a PPG. Or, as it is my case, older researchers started when the game was still SDG and saw it turn into PPG during their careers. (as an example of the SDG game aims: after two years of "unproductive" hard work to crack a hard scientific problem, I proposed my supervisor at Cambridge (UK) that we had material for at least 3 papers: his answer was "Julian, we must publish just ONE paper, it will be a classic!")

So, regarding Gloria's problem (2): "how to break the circle", I'd say, one possibility is rephrasing it to "how to change the circle", i.e. how to "change the game we play".

There are people worried about this around the world that are, timidly, trying to do something about it.

For example, it has been proposed that when researchers apply for a job or a grant, they should not list all of their papers, but just the 3 or 5 that consider their most significant contributions. This is more in line with the SDG scoring system than the PPG scoring system, and it could help to "break the (PPG) circle".

Here follow some links you might find relevant:

http://slow-science.org/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Science

http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/news/publish-or-perish-culture-distorting-research-results/411323.article

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/sep/05/publish-perish-peer-review-science

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/05/07/publish-or-perish-culture-promotes-scientific-narcissism/

http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong

I agree with what was said by Julian and Gloria. But something is wrong in the general discussion. The need to publish much is always at the expense of quality. Some researchers publish a huge number of articles, chapters, etc.. How do they find the time to write them? Any good researcher should personally contribute to the writing of any work on which put his name. But there is one question that I often do myself, it is: will an author be remembered for the enormous number of his articles? Typically, what happens is just the opposite. Watson and Crick (and many others) took the nobel for a very short article in Nature (less than one column). So, for the purposes of those who do research, it is the quality that is remembered. However, all these things do not fall into the lifestyle of a researcher. The lifestyle of a person, although intelligent and culturally prepared, it is always characterized by the human characteristics that he possesses. I think that a great deal of curiosity and patience should be important components of humanity that should characterize those who do science. The frenzies are all anomalies introduced by the system. I understand their importance, but they are just a tool, which should not change our humanity.

I think if one externalizes her/his scientific work as just a technical work per se, one will eventually fall into the trap of facing the challenges of teasing out 'personal' from 'professional' life. Research is not a job, it's a career. It should be fun, effortless, not a burden. Your name is on it. There's no block time for it, it's a continuum. Some of the brightest ideas and interpretations can happen at a completely different setting, such as a coffee chat. It needs continued nourishment, momentum, then comes the pedigree. I don't think it's hard to catch up with one's 'personal' life events so long as one finds the right environment and support system around her/his alma mater. 

Increased productivity is happening with increased quality. All the peer-reviewing and related scholarly feedbacks are meant to guarantee improved quality. This has become the order of the day. 

My two cents..

Yohannes, "Increased productivity is happening with increased quality" is a statement of fact. Could you please give evidence to support that statement? I'd very much like to read the papers that lead to that conclusion!

I think the lifestyle of a researcher depends on himself, as well as time management.

Giovanni, times are changed since Watson and Crick. I knew Dr. Crick personally and he told that there was a honorarium received for a published paper. But now times changed: you never received honoraria and often should pay for pages and figures. Reviewers also received payments; now it is an additional voluntary load. Quality of papers that times was very high: researchers did not want to lose their reputation and reviewers wanted to stay reviewers.

Professors at Ph.D.-granting institutions work no less harder than interns. Probably harder. They develop their own courses (lecture notes, homework, quizzes, exams, office hours, help sessions, coordinate with lab, TAs). They also run a research program, which includes proposal writing (which they do constantly, and usually several at the same time), grant administration, review other people's manuscripts and proposals, organize and chair symposia and conferences, prepare poster and oral presentations, conduct research, direct undergraduate students, graduate students and postdocs in his/her research group, group meetings, evaluate progress reports, countless meetings with their students, write progress reports to grant agencies, write manuscripts (journal articles, book chapters), attend divisional and departmental meetings, organize, host and attend seminars and meet with the speakers, come up with new research ideas and develop them, give lectures at other universities and companies, attend graduate student seminars, qualifying or cumulative examinations (and make up and grade the latter), attend thesis defenses, advise undergraduate students, attend divisional, departmental, and university meetings, compliance meetings (e.g. OSHA, budget, technology transfer, etc.), develop new courses and laboratory exercises, review textbooks, participate in university committees, and...well, I'm sure you get the point by now.

Joshua got it quite right! That's why very few people have time to think of fundamental interesting scientific questions anymore.

Determined to achieve your goal and self-discipline. Avoid distractions

Well explained by Prof. Julian Echave