You Need to Stop: The Cost of Saying Yes to Everything as a Postdoc
"You've taken on too much and you need to stop".
I had just submitted my very first NIH grant application, which ended up being down to the wire and submitted hours before it was due. I had lost a lot of sleep, and yet rather than rest and take a few days to enjoy the summer weather, I felt compelled to catch up on all the projects I wasn't working on when writing the grant. I immediately started sending updates to collaborators, apologizing for falling behind while the grant was consuming my time. To one of these emails, a senior colleague replied telling me I needed to take a break.
I am grateful to this colleague for even noticing how much I was working and for her deciding to tell me this. Many postdocs don't have anyone watching out for them in this way. But I do want to name the academic culture that made this feel necessary. I felt such pressure to produce, and felt like any time off would have a domino effect on everything that came after. That same year, even the five work days I took off to get MARRIED took a lot of willpower to quiet these voices in my head long enough to allow myself to disconnect from postdoc and be present in the moment.
I wonder whether a throughline would have helped me. At the time, I had no framework for evaluating opportunities. I was just trying to accumulate more papers, more collaborations, and more grants. What I didn't see was that the thread of my work was slowly disappearing under the pile. This grant, the one I had lost so much sleep over, wasn't even something I was excited about, but rather something I felt that I should write because it would allow a connection between two institutions to form, and I thought that was a good political move for me to make. It wasn't funded, but if it were, it would have taken my work in yet another direction unrelated to my scientific curiosity, and compounded the drift I was experiencing even more.
If I were to come up with it now, my throughline might have been something like understanding how the organization of the brain supports language learning. Considered in this light, this grant would have been a clear mismatch. What I might have worked on instead is a project that would have allowed me to further my interests, such as working with bilingual speakers. Instead, I tried to fit in cross-linguistic work in an unfunded capacity during both my postdocs, and because of that, it ultimately made up a small fraction of my CV.
What I Would Ask Now
Looking back, here are the questions I wish I'd been asking, questions that a clear throughline would have helped me answer:
If this grant were funded, would I be excited? If it weren't, would I be relieved?
Am I genuinely interested in where this work leads, or am I just trying to get a publication out of it?
If I were to get a position doing this type of work, would that interest me? Would I want to build a research program around this?
Am I saying yes to this because I want to, or because I'm afraid of what happens if I say no?
If saying yes to this means dropping something I'm already doing, what would I drop? If I can't answer that (or if nothing seems worth dropping), that's a clear sign.
If you want to work through these questions for your own research, I'm hosting a small group workshop on May 8 where we'll do exactly that.
Find out moreThere are real structural forces at play in academic careers, and a throughline won't solve everything. But having one gives you a filter, and a filter gives you permission to say no. If you say yes to everything, you risk burning out before you can do the work that actually matters to you. Or you end up drifting so far from your curiosity that you end up building a research program that doesn't feel like yours.
Why Your Postdoc Feels Scattered: Fragmentation, Burnout, and Finding Your Throughline
If your postdoc or research role feels scattered, like you’re constantly juggling projects and reacting to whatever funding comes through, it makes sense. It’s genuinely hard to build something coherent in that environment.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been talking with a number of researchers about this feeling of fragmentation. What I’ve noticed is that this isn’t about individual focus or discipline. It’s structural. Soft money, short-term funding, and constant pivots make it hard to shape your work with intention.
On top of that, people simply work differently: some thrive going deep on one narrow question, while others do better with a small portfolio of projects.
The challenge isn’t forcing yourself into one model. It’s learning how to design your work deliberately and find the throughline that makes it all feel connected.
I started with a clear “why”
My PhD began with a love of languages. I fell into psycholinguistics because it let me combine biology with questions about the structure of language. It felt aligned and curiosity-driven, and I had a strong sense of purpose.
Then I started my first postdoc. I moved to a new city (and a new country) where I didn’t know anyone. While struggling with the change in environment, I was also adapting to a new research culture.
The institute where I landed was run entirely on soft money, so my work followed whatever projects had just been funded. Like many postdocs, the projects were adjacent to my interests rather than fully aligned, and they didn’t always connect to each other. My second postdoc was similar, even though the environment and topics were different.
The drift I didn’t notice
Over time, my CV filled up with projects that were adjacent to my original interests rather than truly aligned with them. When I went on the job market, that patchwork of projects naturally shaped the research program I could propose.
Somewhere along the way, my research had drifted, and my sense of why drifted with it.
I didn’t fully see it at the time, but I think that loss of clarity contributed to the burnout I later felt as a faculty member. It’s hard to stay energized when you’re no longer sure what thread connects your work, or when the program you’re running doesn’t fully align with your deeper motivations.
When I moved to industry, the same sense of being scattered showed up again. I had changed fields from educational neuroscience into healthcare data science and AI, and for a long stretch I couldn’t see how my past work connected to my current work. That uncertainty brought a lot of doubt with it.
What finally helped
What helped wasn’t finding the perfect title or perfectly aligned job. The shift came when I started paying attention to the questions that kept following me from one setting to another.
Instead of asking whether a position matched my background, I began asking what problems I kept caring about no matter where I was working.
I noticed that I was always drawn back to the same themes: how data can guide more personalized decisions, and how we communicate science in ways that genuinely help people. Even as the fields and job titles changed, those questions stayed consistent. They became the throughline that connected everything.
Holding onto the thread
Having gone through this myself, I now help researchers step back and see the thread that’s already there: the questions, skills, and motivations that connect their work across projects and roles.
Careers don’t have to look linear to be meaningful. But it helps enormously to understand what ties the pieces together, especially when everything around you keeps shifting.
That sense of coherence can be the difference between feeling scattered and feeling like you’re moving forward with intention.
A small reflection, if you’re in this phase
If any of this feels familiar, it might help to pause and ask yourself:
What kinds of problems do I keep returning to, even when the projects change?
What skills or ways of thinking show up again and again?
When have I felt most engaged?
If titles and funding constraints disappeared, what questions would I still want to pursue?
Often there’s a thread already there. It just takes a bit of distance to see how the pieces connect.