I recall, while I was still taking courses in grad school, it was like 2-3 hours in class/day, and maybe 2-3 hours in the coffeeshop or lab working on research, plus teaching/grading work. When I was done with courses, it was a little less intense, but still at least 3-4h/day
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Now, to the extent I can even call myself an independent researcher with a straight face, I spend maybe 4-5 hours a week... like one afternoon. Something like 10-20% of grad school level. And that's on a good week. I see no line of sight to getting up to 20-30 hours.
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I think all the talk of indie research/scholarship etc. are basically impossible if you're also earning a living doing something else. Ie you have to be retired-early and independently wealthy.
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It's nice to see people trying to make various sorts of micro-grant programs happen, but I don't think they're funded at levels high enough to make meaningful indie research possible, in terms of freeing up time for later-life people with higher cost of living.
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Even in my first year as a grad student, I made ~18k/yr, and in my last year as postdoc I think I made ~55k, and that was mostly as a single guy with very low cost of living and expectations...
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I personally don't count my writing as research. If it goes straight from idea to writing, without intermediate steps like field work, coding, math, deep prep notes, or experiments, it's not research in my book. Going straight from reading to writing is more like criticism.
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Structuring time for research is far harder than structuring material resources (equipment, lab bench) or space (properly sized/ventilated/lit area for the type of work). Research is a natural time monopoly. It wants to take over all your waking hours.
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And then as you get older it gets a lot harder to pay back the sleep debt if you do a burst and get focussed for a few days
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But you're a full-time astronomer anyway, right? Not an indie part-time researcher... do you mean having to stay up nights to manage observations?
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😂 I do that remarkably seldom relative to my total job-time. No, this is more creating the deep-dive time to get an entire project/topic loaded up properly into my mind (mostly on the literature side, but also analysis/writing etc).
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I guess your observation is all scheduled on automated instruments?
Got to do a group observing night at Mt. Wilson 60/100” earlier this month and though it was great, staying up that late knocked me out for several days. For my little home scope I rarely stay up past midnight.
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Depends - some is queue, some is remote, some is robotic, our uni observatory is in-person (at the moment). But data collection is a small fraction of what I need to do, most of the time.
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