Since the start of my PhD, I have been a “field biologist”. Which meant that I studied animals in the wild. And since I chose to study alpine butterflies, my approach for the last 6 years has been to collect as much data as humanly possible 3 months of the year and to figure out what it means the other 9 months.

Remember Oregon Trail? That wonderful, “educational” video game from the late 1980s. When you set out at the start of the game, you got to select the pace you wanted to go. It was a range of slow, moderate, or grueling. Slow meant that everyone arrived healthy but it took like five years to get to Oregon. Grueling meant that you experienced some causalities but if you made it to Oregon, you did it fast! Needless to say, when I collected data in the field I ran my field crews at “grueling”. After my first couple years in the field, my advisers noticed that my all-work-no-play mentality may have been a bit “too rigorous” for my field assistants. They suggested periodic “breaks” for “fun”. To be fair, I headed this advice… eventually. But “fun” was typically confined to a morning of sleeping in or an afternoon at the movies.

Fun fact- the “collect as much data as humanly possible” is not a sustainable model for lab work . It turns out, there is always more than can be done and it can be redone as many times as you like! After my first three months, I have come to the conclusion that “grueling” is not the way to run my post-doc life else someone is going to “die of dysentery” and that someone is probably me.

There are just so many things I want to test but so little time to do them in. I think the solution is to work smarter and not harder and ask for help. I am not saying that I am going to go “slow” just that I might ratchet back to “moderate” for a few months and see how it goes.