Flexi Hours: The Right Culture In Academia & Research

If you're interested in understanding how academic/scientific/professorial minds work and how to actually get the best out of them, this is probably an important post to mull over:

Ask yourself: When you go to see a musician in concert, say Ustad Zakir Hussain or Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia or your favorite rock, blues or jazz band, all you are focused on and concerned about is the excellence on display on stage for the 2-3 hours you are there. That's it. You are not in the least interested in questions like: "Well, do the artists sit in office for eight hours every day at a stretch from 9-5? Is someone marking their attendance?". Why? Because you are well aware that for the artists to arrive at the level of excellence they are displaying, they must have certainly put in hours and hours of practice! And they put in these hours of practice at times that work best for them - some early morning, some late night, some in the afternoon, some in the evenings. An artist's entire focus is on attaining perfection in his or her art and he or she knows the best time to practice through self knowledge and experience! There is no need to police them as long as they perform excellently when on stage! In fact, if we start making artists "come to office" from 9-5 every day, five days a week, and insist that they practice as per schedules we are setting in place, their art will immediately suffer - you can sense the truth of this statement because you can intuitively feel how ridiculous the scene being depicted is!

The thing is: All creative and intellectual pursuits work on the same principle. Scientists are at their best when they work on problems engaging their attention at times that work best for them, academics and professors are at their best when they engage in research or preparing for class at times that work the best for them, and as long as the lectures being delivered, papers being published, and books being written are of the highest quality, it doesn't matter at all whether these folks busy themselves early mornings, or late nights, or during afternoons, or during evenings, or whenever works for them!

Each and every university and laboratory that insists on a 9-5 schedule for academics, professors and scientists, is actually working in a direction that *reduces* quality. Creative and intellectual pursuits thrive on open minds that are left free to work independently. And if the result is excellence, then it is only in our best interests to create these conditions instead of insisting on clamming down unnecessarily.

This post will likely take some thinking, but what I'm saying is absolutely on the money :), I assure you of that!

We have to create an atmosphere wherein we select excellent people, place our trust in them, and then, by all means, expect excellence. Right now all our systems are based on mistrust and policing. This road does not lead to excellence.