Making difficult decisions

Recently I had to make some difficult decisions about my capacity to review grant proposals in advance of a fall 2010 deadline. It was a hard decision to make and a hard decision to communicate to clients.

I have gifts to share with my clients. I genuinely enjoy helping people. And from 2005 to now, helping Canadian academics with grant applications has been the mainstay of my business.

However, that’s not the only thing I’m good at. And I have limited capacity. I needed to make decisions about how much of my time and energy was going into that specific activity and how much was going into other activities (some of which bring in income and some of which don’t).

Some clients were disappointed. They would like me to do much more for them.

But some things — time and energy — are finite and we all understand that.

Do you face similar difficult decisions?

As an academic, you have many demands on your time and energy.

Teaching
Research
Knowledge mobilization
Service to your institution
Service to your scholarly community
Graduate supervision

And that’s just the main job-related demands. You also have friends, family, and outside interests.

Sometimes you have to make difficult decisions about how much capacity you have for each of these activities and cut back on some of them to make space for others.

Whenever you make such a decision, someone will be disappointed.

What is your best contribution?

In making my decision, I was guided by a desire to make my best contribution. If my time is limited do I fill it up with the activities that seem to come most easily? Or do I identify the best contribution I can make with that limited time and energy, and then make space for those activities?

I also reminded myself of my values. I don’t need to set my priorities using other people’s values. My priorities should reflect my own values.

So, in relation to grant support, I value helping academics make a contribution to the advancement of knowledge (whatever knowledge they value) over helping academics get money. Getting money, in my view, is in service to the greater goal of advancing knowledge.

That means that if I have a choice between coming in at the end to provide comments on a draft and intervening sooner to help a researcher frame the project and approach the writing of the grant more effectively as well as commenting on the draft, I’m going to do the latter.

It takes more time but it makes a greater contribution. In addition to a better grant proposal, the researcher will have less anxiety about the whole process, will spend less time writing drafts, and have a clearer sense of how to move the project forward even before the decision on the grant is communicated.

When you make decisions about how much time and energy to put into the various aspects of your work, do you take your values into account? Does your workload allocation reflect your values? Or is it in conflict with your values? How can you get your workload into better alignment with your values?

Taking responsibility for the constraints

All decisions have consequences. I took the consequences of my decision into account when I made it. Those consequences have potential income attached to them, which is part of what made the decisions difficult.

One of the reasons I work for myself is to have more control over the type of work that I do, how much work I do, and the conditions in which I do that work. I only have that control to the extent that clients are willing to pay me to do what I want to do.

Sometimes decisions involve making a commitment to finding new clients or to limiting the amount of income I earn from particular types of clients. I take responsibility for those decisions and for the work involved in either replacing the lost income or living within a lower income.

You may think that you have fewer choices. You are employed by a university, which dictates the terms of your employment.

However, if those terms conflict with your values, you have the option to look for other work. Not all institutions are the same. Indeed the relative value placed on teaching and research is one of the key things that differentiates post-secondary institutions.

It is also often possible to work fewer hours. In my previous academic life, I negotiated reducing my commitment to 80% with a consequent reduction in salary. My partner has recently negotiated a similar reduction. Although he highly values research and teaching, he also values food production and outdoor physical activity.

I know scholars who have decided not to pursue tenure-track positions in order to maintain more control over the allocation of their research, teaching, and other work or to keep this work in proportion to the value it has for them relative to family and other non-economic interests.

Although you have no control over the conditions in which you make choices about the allocation of your time and energy, you do have choices. Are you choosing to devote a lot of time and energy to things you don’t value? Are you frustrated with how little time and energy you have for things you do value? How could you change those things?