How do I avoid working overtime due to young people's lack of planning without harming them too badly?

Question

A very bright undergraduate student asked me for a letter of recommendation less than a week ago that is due today. She is one of my favorite students and I want to write her a strong letter, however I really have been quite busy the last week, and I am a bit sleep deprived today. I want to do nothing but teach then go home and sleep but I must write a letter.

I really don't want to ruin her application, and I want her to do well because she really is quite a strong student and was a pleasure to have in my class.

I am just going to suffer through it today but how do I avoid this in the future?

Answer 1

This is an all-too-familiar situation. I have several pending requests for LORs sitting in my inbox right now, and I have mulled over this issue myself quite a bit over the years. My thoughts:

• You can't entirely avoid this, it's simply an aspect of life for any conscientious, well-meaning person working in academia. (The non-conscientious people have it easier; they can simply make it a hard rule to say no to requests that transgress their work-life balance boundaries.)

• The consequences for students of a refusal on your part to write a LOR are probably less severe than you imagine. (This is a special case of a general principle I have come to believe in: all of us are less irreplaceable than we imagine ourselves to be...)

• You can minimize the effects of this issue on your life by adopting certain practices: first, do allow yourself to say no sometimes. E.g., if you've committed to writing N LORs and the (N+1)-th request pushes you into an uncomfortable personal situation, say no.

• Second, when a student writes asking for an LOR and it's not a last-minute request, give them a clear list of your expectations of what they need to do and when they need to do it in order to give you time to perform the task. Keep a template email lying around where you list those expectations and can reuse when LOR requests come in. For example: "please send me a list of programs you're applying to and their application deadlines. Also include your CV, grade transcript [etc], and send me those materials no later than 3 weeks before the earliest application deadline." Students may be disorganized, but having hard constraints and clear expectations can often motivate them to get their acts together.

• Also, recognize that this issue only affects our lives for a short part of the year (October and November usually in North America). So, while it's a fact of life, being sub-optimally busy during certain parts of the year is something that academics generally get used to and accept; when you consider that academia also gives you other parts of the year during which you are relatively un-busy (in some cases also sub-optimally, but in a more fun way), it's not a bad deal overall...

Answer 2

You won't avoid it in the future. You will always get that one extra request, if not by your student, then by your head of department who needs a last-minute input, your colleague that finds that one proposal deadline in two days, etc.

Many people suggest to just say no to taking things on. This is a common oversimplification and it needs to be considered judiciously. Saying no is particularly difficult for a junior academic.

You can deny the student, but you might deprive them of a vital career opportunity. You can may say no the head of department, but that's costing you political capital. You can say no to your colleague and, next time, they will ask someone else to join their project.

As consequence, you need to evaluate if that's a cost you are ready to bear. As you become more senior, this may be easier to do. However, as long as you are in a junior phase of your career, you may be reluctant to do so, since you still need to build up your reputation.

One part of the response is, partly, to keep a few buffers in your schedule, as other answers suggest. But, I'll be frank, that may simply not be possible. No matter how much the mantra of work/life balance is repeated today - the life of an academic, especially a junior one, has extremely busy stretches. Not all the time, and there also is a lot of flexibility; but, let's face it, over phases, you may be drastically oversubscribed. It's just the way it is.

Therefore, you need to look to alternative trade-offs, and the most important one is to learn to work to the available time slot and trade in quality for time.

Note that, with your researcher hat on, you want to ensure the highest degree of quality for your scientific work, especially the carrying out of the research and the write-up of the papers. These require (ideally) the highest degree of clean-up, consolidation and polishedness and can in general not be rushed. Here, you need to take your time and give every detail its due respect.

For non-scientific routine work, however, it is often well possible to accept an effective less-than-perfect approach.

For a LOR, for instance, you can hack one out by writing how you met the student, your experience with them, a general evaluation based on this evidence, and your conclusions about whether they are suitable for the job. A pithy and well-written 3-4 paragraphs LOR is, for a talented undergrad, a perfectly sufficient space to help them into a strong program. It's far easier to write a LOR for a very bright student than for a generally support-worthy, but not quite as strong one.

With a bit of experience, a strong LOR can be written well in 20-30 minutes (without AI!). But you need to accept that it will probably not be as powerful a LOR as you could devise if you had 2 or 3 hours. That's the price that the student needs to pay for coming in the last minute; not because you wish that price to be paid, but simply by force of the circumstances.

But at the same time, knowing you can trade this off gives you the elasticity that you need to add this one more thing into your packed plate.

Answer 3

There is nothing you can do to avoid this situation in the future, because the situation wasn't of your making. You can either refuse a last-minute request (likely harming the student's chances) or agree to it and take on extra work with a quick turnaround time. Either choice would have been understandable here.

Advice for today: don't stay up all night. Take an hour or two before bed and write the best letter you can in that time. It likely won't be as strong a letter as it would be if you had more time, but that's not your fault.

Answer 4

Probably you can't, completely. You could let your students in general know that you need, say, at least two weeks. You could ask them to give you an idea of what they might think it important to mention.

But, the student might even have valid reasons for a late ask.

Some people ask for a draft written by the student. I only mention, but don't recommend that.

The other way to do this in the future is to start early/immediately on such a request, just by jotting notes somewhere on what to include. It is harder if you start late, especially if you are overworked.

Answer 5

I asked a somewhat similar question on Interpersonal SE five months ago and managed to find a workable solution. Applying it to your case, I would recommend the following:

(1) Inform your students in advance that if any of them wants a LoR from you in the future, they will need to ask you a certain amount of time in advance. This is especially important when you supervise a student working on a research project with you, as such students are very likely to ask for a LoR later on. This measure will reduce the number of last-minute requests and give you a good reason to decline them.

(2) Just say no to last-minute requests if you feel that the student isn’t particularly bright or can obtain a LoR from someone else without significantly affecting their application. Don’t argue or over-explain; simply say something like:

I'm sorry, but I absolutely can't. I'm extremely overburdened this week. I really can't help you with your application this time, but I'm happy to support future applications. Just remember, as I've warned before, LoR requests need to be made at least three weeks in advance so I can fit them into my schedule.

(3) Consider offering a compromise for bright students who make last-minute requests:

Look, I’m happy to support you, but you made your request very late. Аs I've warned before, LoR requests need to be made at least three weeks in advance so I can fit them into my schedule. I'm currently very overburdened, so I can only manage a short LoR this time. If you need a longer, more impressive LoR, you could help by providing a draft. Include any details you think might strengthen your case, and I'll use the draft to write a strong LoR within my time constraints.

Please note that while this last suggestion is common practice in some countries, it might be considered academic misconduct in others, so use it with caution.

Answer 6

I think you are approaching this the wrong way. Getting an unexpected student request isn’t the real problem, this is:

[…] I really have been quite busy the last week, and I am a bit sleep deprived today. I want to do nothing but teach then go home and sleep […]

It’s not this letter that makes your plate spill over because frankly it already has. If you have an entire week and can’t find the time to write one letter then the problem is the week, not the letter.
And taking a wild guess here: probably the week before, and the week before, and the week before, and …

Now there are a lot of self help books out there and I won’t repeat any of them, but realise that a day has only 24h, a week has only 7 days, and your life has only about 4000 weeks. You literally can’t do everything you want to do, let alone what you think you should do. So decide for yourself what you actually want to spend time on.

If that includes supporting good students (and I hope it does) then acknowledge, up front, that this takes time. If there is one thing you can expect from students it’s the unexpected, so block some time for that! This can be a few hours every week, or if you are better at predicting the unpredictable perhaps a few more hours during specific seasons.

And should you ever find that you have blocked more time than you need - well, go get some sleep!

Answer 7

I've had professors ask me to draft my own letter and send it to them. The first time it happened I was scandalized, but I later learned it's a common practice.

Not that you just sign what they wrote, but it gives you an idea of what needs to be covered, and a place to start. Also, it requires them to put forth a comparable level of effort to what they're asking from you--that will help you gauge how important it actually is to them.

Answer 8

Short Term Solution: Cheat... I mean, Use Generative AI

Ask ChatGPT or a similar GAI to write it for you. Instead of writing out a whole letter, just write a short prompt outlining the student's qualities you want highlighted. It should be something like this:

"I am <my-name>, a professor at <my-university>. Write me a formal letter of recommendation for my student <their-name> who is applying to <their-grad-school>. The students best qualities are: <strength-1>, <strength-2>, and <strength-3>."

Then you just need to proofread and send. ALWAYS PROOFREAD This will give you a nice thought out sounding recommendation letter, but only take 2-5 minutes instead of however long you would normally spend having to choose each word carefully. While I'm not the biggest fan of using Generative AI for most things, this is exactly the kind of formality writing that it excels at. Plus, if you're truly back against a deadline and not of sound mind to make it work, I'm sure your student would prefer this to nothing at all, or something riddled with mistakes because you could not give it the focus it deserves.

The Long Term Solution: Still cheat, but make it more personal

GAIs are trainable. If you have more than 5 sleep deprived minutes to dedicate to problem, you can start by uploading sample letters of recommendation that you have written in the past, and tell ChatGPT to use them as style guides. Then when you prompt it to generate new letters of recommendation based on the previous letters. It will then mirror your tone and speech patterns as a guide for what sort of language choices it should be using when it writes future letters on your behalf so that they sound more like you.

While I know some people really hate GAIs on principle and find that they can be very impersonal when used without intention, when you train them on your own writing, you are eliminating all the mental load of doing the same thing over and over you do every time you write one and focus instead on just the things that make this one student exemplarily.