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Balancing the various demands on your time as an pre-tenure faculty member can be overwhelming. In addition to the things you must do if you want to remain employed and eventually earn tenure, such as teaching and producing high-impact research, there are a wide range of academic activities that are discretionary in the following sense: you are expected to do some of them, but are not required to do any of them.

As a pre-tenure faculty member, I was invited to do all of the following activities (and then some): join a hiring committee, serve as an external member of a dissertation committee, be a union representative, attend an alumni event, advise a student group, supervise an honors thesis, organize a workshop, develop a new course, write an encyclopedia entry, contribute a chapter to an edited volume, give comments on a conference paper, speak on an interdisciplinary panel, review a book manuscript, referee a journal article.

Performing any of the activities on this list, though sometimes worthwhile, reduces the time and energy you have for doing high-quality, original research (the kind of research that matters for tenure and promotion). Doing too many of them dramatically reduces the time and energy you have for doing research, and usually leads to overwork and eventually burnout. That’s why it is important to be selective and strategic about which (and how many) professional opportunities (i.e., requests to perform discretionary academic activities) you accept.

Unfortunately, I see too many pre-tenure faculty members (myself included!) accept professional opportunities in a way that is neither selective nor strategic. Instead, they use the “any-benefit approach” to professional opportunities:

The Any-Benefit Approach to Professional Opportunities
You’re justified in accepting a professional opportunity if you can identify any possible benefit to doing so, or anything you might miss out on if you don’t.*

I see this approach employed both IRL and on Twitter with some frequency. On Twitter, it usually goes like this: an pre-tenure faculty member or postdoc asks #academictwitter “should I do X?” What follows is a thread of reasons why the faculty member should do X:

“That would be great experience!”

“You could make some valuable professional connections!”

“It will give your scholarship greater visibility!”

And so on.

All of this advice is well meaning. Here’s the problem: there are reasons to accept pretty much any professional opportunity, but you do not have time to accept every professional opportunity. Moreover, many professional opportunities involve activities that are extremely time consuming, but low impact. For example, serving on a hiring committee involves hours and hours of work reviewing applications, meeting to discuss said applications, interviewing candidates, and then meeting to discuss said candidates. But at most colleges and universities (even at those like my own, where faculty are unionized and research expectations are reasonable), participating in this activity doesn’t move the tenure and promotion needle.

Pre-tenure faculty need to conserve their limited time and energy for high impact activities that matter most for tenure and promotion; employing the any-benefit approach to professional opportunities directs precious resources away from these endeavors, and is likely to destroy work/life balance.

Instead, tenure-track faculty should employ the “selective approach” to professional opportunities:

The Selective Approach to Professional Opportunities
Identify the core factors that determine professional success on the tenure track. Accept a professional opportunity only if doing so (i) has a positive impact on these factors, and (ii) the positive impact substantially outweighs any negative impacts.*

The selective approach differs from the any-benefit approach in two important ways. First, it invites you to think about the benefits of a professional opportunity relative to your goals. Second, it enjoins you to think about the benefits and the disadvantages of accepting a professional opportunity.

For most faculty on the tenure track, a core factor that determines success and happiness in their professional life is having adequate time to produce high-quality, original research for publication in reputable peer-reviewed journals. The core factors that determine success and happiness in your personal life are more diverse, but for many people it is having time for rest and relaxation, and to pursue hobbies, and spend time with friends and family.

Notice that professional opportunities often have benefits that are orthogonal to your professional and personal goals. For example, serving on a hiring committee, though it has benefits (e.g., you have a say in selecting your new colleague), does not have a positive impact on the core factors that determine professional and personal success and happiness. To the contrary, this activity is very likely to have a detrimental impact on these factors because the time commitment involved leaves little time for research, not to mention rest, relaxation, etc.

What about something like contributing a chapter to an edited volume? This is more complicated. At many institutions, such an activity counts very little towards tenure and promotion (much less than an article in a prestigious peer-reviewed journal). Thus, contributing a chapter to an edited volume, though it has benefits (e.g., it provides greater visibility for your scholarship), has little positive impact on the core factors that determines success in your professional life, which doesn’t outweigh the negative impact (the time it takes away from writing a higher-impact journal article). The time it would take you to write the chapter is probably better spent doing research for publication in other venues, or getting a solid eight hours of sleep at night. If contributing a chapter to an edited volume “counts” toward promotion and tenure at your institution, the cost/benefit analysis may differ.

Employing the selective approach to professional opportunities is even trickier when it comes to activities like giving comments on a conference paper, or reviewing a journal article. Participating in both activities is an important part of belonging to a vibrant intellectual community. Moreover, receiving quality feedback is essential to producing high-quality, original research (a core dimension of professional success). By providing our feedback, we help to maintain a system of knowledge production from which we benefit.

But done too often, these activities (and others like them) produce negative impacts that outweigh their benefits. To ensure that she struck the right balance, Radhika Nagpal imposed a cap on the number of articles she would review each year while she was an assistant professor (hers was 10). She also decided she would travel professionally no more than five times per year (I like to limit travel to one trip per semester).

Whatever balance you decide to strike, the take-home point is this: professional opportunities are abundant. Your time and energy is not. Be selective.

Identifying a reason to accept a professional opportunity is an insufficiently discriminating way to decide which professional opportunities to accept. Instead, you should consider both the positive and negative impacts of the activity relative to your professional and personal goals.

*This title and formula are adapted from Deep Work by Cal Newport, who applies it to network tools like Facebook or Twitter.