You do not need to work 80 hours a week to succeed in academia

I used to work an 80 hour week but I was 22 and paid by the hour in a slaughterhouse so that made sense. I tend to work 9am-5pm Monday to Friday and nothing more - yes occasionally I breach this but its rare. When I first started people kept telling me that I had to do more hours to get a full-time job but more than that I had to be willing to do lots of stuff for free. That make no sense to me so I decided that if it was really impossible to get an academic job without doing lots of freebies or working every evening and weekend, I'd pack it in and do something else because no job is more interesting than my life. But bad things will happen they said! And 15 years later nothing bad happened. All that happens is that I say no to a lot of stuff and I have to be really focused in the day. I also spend a lot of time eliminating as much make-busy work as possible. For example, if I start a new module, I first look if there are any decent Open Education Resources I can use rather than spend many many hours generating material from scratch.

I work 9:30 - 4 regularly. Occasionally I work on weekends and in late hours if there is an imminent deadline. I do constantly think about the things I am planning to do.

I don't think that general advice along the lines of "You don't need to work 80 hour weeks to succeed" is particularly helpful. It depends so much on the circumstances of the academic/researcher in question. I've had to put in 70-80 hour weeks at times, particularly when I started as a lecturer. I think that it's somewhat unfair on early career researchers/academics to tell them they'll be able to get everything done in a 40 hour week and that they just need to "work smarter, rather than harder". This is certainly not my experience and stating that 40 hrs/week is sufficient just adds to the stress! ("Why can't I do everything in 40 hours? Apparently everyone else can. What's wrong with me?") I agree entirely that the norm/expectation should be a 40 hr week but particularly in the early days when one is establishing a group, trying to get the first grants funded, and combining this with teaching and other admin tasks, 40 hours disappears rather quickly. (Even if we're very focussed). I'd rather not leave a lengthy comment here, as the THE's comment formatting is not ideal. This blog post discusses why I think we need to be careful in sending out a message that 40 hrs/week is sufficient in academia: https://muircheart.wordpress.com/2015/07/19/working-9-to-5-aint-no-way-in-academia/ (It's a shame that hyperlinks no longer work in the THE comments sections)

80 hours a week = 40 hours work + 40 hours aholic

Having done graduate school at a top-10 university in the US, I have made observations that lead to my conclusion that the content of this article is untrue; in fact, 40-hr work week is a myth. Perhaps there are a few that can hack the academia world with 40 hr weeks, but let's not talk about exceptions. One has to remember that succeeding in academia requires one to spend a significant time "selling" your product/research ideas, traveling, and connecting with leading professors, because their tenure-ship requires them to be recognized in their research communities. The sad part is that most (young) professors have to spend a lot on time on this marketing aspect on top of the requirement for them to do significant teaching, writing proposals, etc. Furthermore, what makes matter worse is that tenured professors have less teaching requirements than younger professors. This is ironic, since tenured professors should be at their prime to impart knowledge and excitement about the research. "Winners take all" is the way the academia works. And I left academia after PhD for that reason. Academia environment today GENERALLY won't produce the types of revolutionary breakthroughs like in the old times (for example, Einstein and Higgs won't get tenure today). It's GENERALLY just a contest to see who generates the most hype, and money.

Graduate student here. Maybe this whole debate works around whatever our respective fields are, but not many people that I know in Anthropology or Museum Studies are genuinely pulling 80-hour weeks. I pulled far too many 80 hour weeks myself last year, but I was never able to do it consistently because it was truly awful. I nearly burnt out from my program entirely and began to think that I had a major anxiety problem. Truth was, I needed sleep. I needed a healthy meal. I needed fresh clothes from the laundry. I needed music. I needed exercise. Here's the sad truth that people don't want to admit: Being in academia is really just a job like any other. It is not "special" simply because one has a PhD at the end of their name. We really need to break away from that mentality because it is killing us from the inside out. And while some people gain rewards for apparently "working harder," I guarantee that that will come at a cost somewhere down the line. Eventually, they'd lose their health or something else would happen. I would also say that if a person has kids (and yes, we can be humans and have kids, too) they would never be able to pull more than 50 hour work weeks. That's just the reality. With all of this in mind, I think that working 40-50 hours a week consistently is a good ideal. For me personally, it's worked. I'm no longer a resentful asshole about this process and everything that I want to do seems to get done.

I completely agree with Philip Moriarty. Working no more than 40 hrs/week should be the norm (I would add for everyone not just academics). However, at least in my case, it is not what happened. I am about 20 years into my research/academic career. I have never worked less than 55 hrs/week and there have been extended periods where I have worked nearly 70 hrs/week ( ... and by the way, Meghan, sometimes people do use linguistic hyperbolae ...). For me, the simplistic statement "work smarter, not harder" put forward by Meghan is presumptuous and, most importantly, does a great disservice to Early Career Researchers.