Let’s do away with pretence that researchers work eight-hour days

30 September 1985: Microsoft released the first version of Excel – and the world changed forever.

Excel is not to blame for what has happened. A hammer is just a hammer, but as soon as someone has a hammer, they start looking for nails everywhere. It’s the same with Excel. People using it try to measure everything: motivation, job satisfaction, results, workplace culture – and how employees use their time.

I remember when I first came across time sheets at university. Excel seemed to symbolise that I was now part of something great, a junior member of the scientific world. I had just joined a prestigious research project and was asked to fill in a time sheet. So, as a diligent doctoral student, I put down the hours I spent working on my thesis as accurately as I could, including evenings and weekends.

But then the time sheets were returned to me. The secretary explained that the rules laid down that researchers do not work more than eight hours a day – and certainly do not work on weekends.

I still do not understand why such measures are considered a rational way of overseeing the process of reaching novel scientific discoveries, which cannot sensibly be measured in units of eight-hour, nine-to-five days. We all end up playing a game that is amusing even in its absurdity. But the fact remains that the Excel spreadsheets used by officials in scientific bureaucracies always treat researchers as nine-to-five employees.

My curiosity piqued, I asked researchers in different fields, both in my country of origin and abroad, how they fill in their Excel time sheets. Broadly speaking, there are three ways. Some researchers look at the hours agreed in the contract and simply spread them out in a standardised way, so everything seems to fit neatly into eight-hour working days. Others, particularly those working on several projects at the same time, get a secretary in their unit to do this for them. They are not supposed to work more than the total allotted hours or more than eight hours a day – God forbid a researcher might dare to spend a few hours working on a public holiday! So the secretary simply takes the agreed number of hours and allocates them to the schedule. The researcher’s only obligation is to sign them off: “Yes, that’s exactly how I did the work!” The third group of researchers are those who work eight hours a day and so can fill their time sheets with complete accuracy. I’d be delighted to meet such scientists, who must be about as common as unicorns!

The original purpose of such time sheets was apparently to ensure that researchers take on a reasonable workload while respecting rest periods. That may sound admirable and even heart-warming, but does Excel really have the power to make it happen? If the work is not done, then it is not done. If a deadline is close, an Excel box saying: “You have reached the maximum number of work hours” is only likely to cause resentment.

It would be much more useful, I believe, for funders to count actual working hours as they occur and are spread over the week. That would allow them to draw up much more realistic calls for grant proposals, based on the real time spent on similar projects. At the moment, a large part of science appears to operate with strict budgets and working hours, while still expecting researchers to use innovative methods to produce innovative solutions. Isn’t there a fundamental logical error in hoping for groundbreaking discoveries, while standardising researchers’ journey to get there?

Time sheets have now spread like a disease and are widely accepted as normal by researchers in both national and EU-funded scientific projects. Yet they are inherently absurd and become even more ridiculous when people are working on several projects and have to ensure that hours don’t overlap. Although I have never come across anyone else using the term “excelogratia” – managing people through Excel – I decided to introduce it into my personal lexicon as soon as I discovered that my actual working hours did not fit into the Excel worksheet. It seemed essential to find a way of labelling this illogical way of doing things, which urgently needs to change.

Eneli Kindsiko is associate professor in qualitative research at the University of Tartu in Estonia.