I’ve been asked to speak to the orientation for new faculty on a few occasions, to offer advice to new hires most of whom are making the move to full faculty members for the first time. The last time or two, my first bit of advice has been “Treat all advice with caution, including this advice.”

The example I give to illustrate this is in the context of teaching. I didn’t have a lot of prior experience when I showed up at Union, so I went around and asked each of the senior faculty for tips. One guy, whose approach I generally like, said that he made an effort to “break the fourth wall” and move out away from the chalkboard into the center of the classroom, to create more of a feeling of discussion than a formal lecture.

I gave this a shot, but realized after a few classes that this was not a technique that would ever work for me. The guy who offered that advice is short, well under six feet tall, while I’m 6’6″ (just under 2m for those using SI units) and usually around 280 pounds (127kg). When he walked out into the middle of the room to get closer to students, it seemed friendly and approachable but when I did the same thing, it was terrifying. I loom over the classroom tables in a way that he doesn’t, and students were cowering when I’d come too close.

So I backed off, literally, and make a point to stay near the board, or the open space in the middle of the room. As a matter of philosophy, I like the idea of that approach, but it’s just never going to work for me.

I was thinking of this because of this advice to graduate students that came across my social-media feeds yesterday. For the most part, this is good, but it runs into the usual pitfall of advice posts, namely that the phrasing is a little too absolute for my tastes– as I said up above, I think all advice needs to be treated with caution, because different things will work for different people.

I particularly noticed this on the point “There is no need for all-nighters, now or ever,” which immediately made me say “Well…” I agree that all-nighters shouldn’t be a regular or expected feature of graduate school (or a post-doc, or a faculty position), but I wouldn’t categorically rule them out. There may be times when there are good reasons why an experiment needs to run long and late, and if that happens, well, you do what you have to do.

Rather than any specific rule about time management or personal organization, or any of that, I’d suggest keeping one general principle in mind: in grad school or otherwise, you should always know why you’re doing the thing that you’re doing, and try to make sure that the reason is a good one. If you’re pulling an all-nighter because the data collection takes six hours and there’s less noise in the middle of the night, well, then you pull an all-nighter (and get some sleep during those noisy daylight hours). If you’re pulling an all-nighter because your boss demands that you work long hours (or you think that your boss demands unreasonable hours), then that may well be a toxic situation that you should get out of.

Grad school is by its very nature a learning process, so there’s going to be an element of figuring out what works for you and what you need to do to be most effective. By all means ask your co-workers for tips and advice, and give their suggestions an honest effort. But if you try what they suggest and it doesn’t work– if you’re miserable, or less productive than you know you could be– stop, and do something else instead. And know why you’re stopping, in the form of a coherent argument why this works better than that for you.

In the research world, people sometimes seem to be demanding a particular schedule of long work hours or whatever, but what matters is usually not clock-punching but results. Any advisor worth working for should be willing to compromise on your exact schedule, work style, etc., provided you’re making tangible progress. You might need to compromise a bit– unless you’re Julian Schwinger, they’re probably not going to let you work a night shift where you sleep all day and work all night, never overlapping with the rest of the people in the lab– but as long as you’ve got a coherent reason for doing things the way you do, and you’re moving forward, you should be able to find a set of practices that keeps you sane and your advisor happy.

If you can’t find that happy medium, find a different research group, because that’s not a place you want to be.

But again, treat this advice with caution. If it doesn’t work for you, well, find something else that does. It’s all part of the process of becoming a professional, and for that matter part of becoming an adult.