Many research environments revolve around a not-always-unspoken belief: that the most serious scientists are the ones who are always working. Because research is often viewed as a “passion” career, this translates to an expectation that the passion pursuit should dominate one’s life: the PI who responds to emails at midnight. The postdoc who skips conferences because they can’t afford to be away from the bench. The group member who apologizes for leaving at 6 PM.

This culture is not neutral; it shapes how people evaluate themselves and others, how trainees model their own habits, and what gets passed down to the next generation. Increasingly, we hear from researchers at every stage that they’re burning out, but don’t know that they can do anything differently because it could negatively impact their careers.

One individual can’t change an entrenched culture, but we each have some power to decide what we’re willing to accept or not, and what we impose on others. Based on what we observe in groups that sustain both productivity and people over the long term, making even small shifts can improve researchers’ quality of life without negatively impacting their overall trajectory. In fact, people who feel energized rather than drained are going to be more productive in general. But making these shifts requires a deliberate reorientation of how success is defined.

Where the Culture Comes From

It helps to name the forces at play before trying to change them.

Funding pressure is real. When a grant renewal is coming up or when a postdoc fellowship is on the line, the impulse to work more feels rational. The connection between hours worked and output seems direct, especially early in a research career when productivity is still tied closely to bench time, data generation, and getting as many papers out as possible.

There is also a modeling problem. Many of today’s PIs trained under advisors who worked constantly and were rewarded for it. Seeing these norms in action can make them stick. And often the patterns get replicated unconsciously. Add in the off-hand comments from colleagues about how busy they are, how much sleep they skipped, or how only the hardest workers (meaning the ones who always seem to be working) get rewarded, and it’s a powerful concoction.

These structural pressures accumulate, and most people inside them are doing their best. But understanding where the culture comes from is the first step to not perpetuating it.

What Overwork Actually Costs

The case against overwork is both personal and scientific.

Research is cognitively demanding work. The kind of thinking required to design a strong experiment, interpret unexpected findings, or write clearly under pressure degrades with fatigue. Studies on cognitive performance consistently show diminishing returns after a threshold of sustained hours, and in knowledge-intensive fields, those diminishing returns show up in the quality of the work itself, not just in how tired someone feels. The constant cognitive load also impedes on time for reading, which is essential to stimulate new lines of thought, and leaves no mental space for creativity to emerge. 

There are also pipeline effects. Groups where overwork is the unspoken norm tend to struggle with retention. Talented people leave. Others stay but disengage. The group loses institutional knowledge, mentoring continuity, and the kind of social trust that makes collaboration actually work. These losses are hard to quantify and easy to underestimate, until they compound.

And of course, there are often consequences on personal relationships, feelings of fulfillment, and other aspects of life that cannot have room to flourish when work dominates.

The PIs who seem to get the most out of their groups over time are not usually the ones who worked the hardest in a given week. They’re the ones who sustained focus, made better decisions about what to prioritize, and built groups where people wanted to stay and do their best work.

Redefining What “Productive” Looks Like

One practical shift that matters more than most people expect: separating the idea of productivity from the idea of presence.

In many research groups, being visible—physically or electronically—gets treated as a proxy for working hard. This is partly a holdover from environments where output was easier to observe. In research, though, some of the most important work happens when someone steps away: the long walk that untangles a stuck problem, the weekend that makes a difficult paper finally readable, the evening off that allows a clearer head the next morning.

High-performing groups tend to be clearer about outputs than inputs. What matters is whether the experiment got done well, whether the manuscript is progressing, and whether the student is developing. How many hours it took is a secondary concern.

For PIs building or recalibrating their groups, the question worth asking is: what signals does the group take from how you work? If the answer is “they see me responding to messages late at night and assume that’s what’s expected,” that’s a culture problem worth addressing, regardless of what the group handbook says.

There are individuals and occasionally even groups where long working hours do translate to a lot of great research. Some individuals may prefer working in this way; the problem comes in when it’s a general expectation for everyone to work this way. Not everyone can or wants to invest long hours. Does that mean that they are automatically less successful or less dedicated?

What Sustainable Research Programs Actually Look Like

This isn’t about protecting comfort at the expense of ambition. The most productive research groups tend to be the ones where people can work at a high level consistently over years, not the ones that sprint until someone burns out.

There are some commonalities across groups that achieve something more balanced:

• Clarity about what the non-negotiables actually are. Every research program has true crunch periods, like grant deadlines, conference submissions, and critical experimental windows. These are real, and working intensively through them is part of the job. What unsustainable groups do is treat every week as a crunch period. Groups that work well over time learn to distinguish between the genuine pushes and the ambient pressure that never resolves.
• Explicit norms, not just assumed ones. When expectations around responsiveness, working hours, and time off are left unstated, people fill in the blanks with worst-case assumptions. A PI who never mentions evenings and weekends may intend to signal flexibility; the postdoc who watches the PI’s email timestamps often reads it differently. Making norms explicit, even imperfect norms, reduces anxiety and allows people to work without constant second-guessing.
• Modeling recovery, not just effort. A PI who takes a vacation without sending emails is making a statement. So is one who mentions, in passing, that they went to their kid’s game or took a long run. These small signals accumulate. They tell the group what the PI actually values, not just what the group handbook claims to value.
• Celebrating outcomes rather than praising inputs. A group that celebrates the grant application getting submitted after a big push is putting emphasis where it matters: achieving the shared goal. The PI who only talks about how many hours so-and-so works is saying that the only thing that matters is the apparent input.

For Those Earlier in Their Careers

For postdocs and early-career researchers, this conversation carries a particular tension. The stakes feel higher, the evaluations feel more frequent, and the concern about falling behind is not imaginary. Research careers do have competitive moments, and the pressure to prove productivity is real.

At the same time, the habits formed during postdoctoral training tend to persist. The researcher who learns to work intensely during focused blocks and protect recovery time is building a practice they can sustain across a career. The one who simply works all the time during a postdoc may win the short-term comparison, but carries forward patterns that are harder to correct later. 

On top of that, the people who appear to work the most are not always the ones doing the most important work. Deep, focused attention on needle-moving activities, even in shorter windows, typically produces more than scattered effort across long days.

A Different Conversation Worth Having

Research group culture is not fixed. It shifts when people decide to talk about it differently, and when leaders start behaving in ways that signal different values. The work of building and repairing that culture is ongoing, and addressing overwork is one of the most consequential places to start.

For PIs who want to push back against a culture of overwork, in their own groups, or in their broader departments, the entry point is usually not a policy announcement. It’s the smaller, repeated signals: the one-on-one conversation where someone gets permission to work differently, the meeting where it becomes safe to say “I need to take some time,” the moment when a leader asks “how are you doing?” and actually means it.

That kind of culture doesn’t solve every problem. But it’s the foundation on which sustainable research programs get built. And for the people who spend years inside them, it makes a difference that’s hard to fully quantify, and easy to remember.