Layla Parast has had a tough lesson recently about what is important, and what constitutes that elusive “enough”:

As the year comes to a close, I’ve been reflecting on my goals for 2025. I had thirteen, yes thirteen, goals: SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound), carefully constructed, color-coded, and tracked goals. I will miss the mark on three of them. And instead of feeling proud of the ten that I did accomplish, I find myself spiraling about the ones I didn’t. It’s a familiar pattern: my internal voice says you just didn’t do enough.

My calendar is a mosaic of blocks that I protect fiercely, especially the ones labeled “deep work” and “kids.” In my previous job, this protection was somewhat easier. We had to track our hours and charge them to projects, literally, down to the quarter hour. While some might not like this, for me, it was freeing. After years in graduate school where I constantly felt simultaneously overworked and underworked, suddenly there was a clear metric. And I was determined: I was not going to work more than 40 hours per week. If I did, I was essentially giving away my time. No, thank you. And I did indeed successfully work about 40 hours per week, often less.

However, after 10 years of necessary time tracking, moving to academia in 2022 felt glorious. No timesheets! No electronic reminders to allocate 0.75 hours to Project A! I was free… until I wasn’t. Within six months I was right back in the old grad-school feeling: Am I working enough? Too much? I had no idea. So I started tracking my time again. I literally write, to this day, on an (electronic) sticky note when I start and stop. I separate “deep work” from everything else, including teaching, meetings, email, applied collaborations, and service. And, unsurprisingly, I learned I was working more than 40 hours per week—not dramatically more, but more than I intended. I made a goal to pull it back. I even tracked the running median for the year, aiming for 35 hours a week (my ideal). It’s still a struggle.

Because the truth is: I love this work. I enjoy it. I wake up in the morning excited and joyful to work—to finally figure out that optimal bandwidth, to check on my simulations, to cook up the perfect homework assignment for my freshmen. But if I’m working too much, something else has to give: sleep, exercise, time with my family, cooking (okay, heating up food). And every time I tell myself, “Once this paper is done… once the grant is submitted… once the semester ends… then I can slow down.” But that moment never comes. We are never done. There is always one more thing to do.

Every Sunday I make a plan for the week: tasks, blocks of time, alignment with monthly and semester goals. It’s all a delicate balancing act. And it only takes one unexpected event to send the whole thing crashing down: a kid vomiting in the night, a tree falling on my car (yes), a school lockdown because a shooter was loose in the neighborhood (also yes). Recently, that unexpected event was a text from my mom.

I was on a flight home when she texted that my dad had collapsed at the gym. His heart had stopped. Bystanders did CPR and shocked him with an AED (Automated External Defibrillator), saving his life. He was in the ICU, intubated, sedated, and no one knew whether he would wake up, nor what he would be like if he did. I know intellectually that my parents will die someday, but I live my daily life in complete denial of this fact. On the plane, I froze. Tears just rolled down my face. The minute we landed, I went home, dumped out my suitcase, repacked it, and drove five hours to the hospital, arriving at midnight, grateful we moved to Texas four years ago for scenarios like this.

For seven days, I slept in a hospital recliner next to my dad’s bed. In that moment, weekly goals, color-coded calendars, and meticulously-planned time blocks meant absolutely nothing. I somehow recorded a lecture for my students (disheveled and apologetic), but that was the most I could manage. After two days, my dad woke up. After seven, he was discharged with an implanted defibrillator. It was horrible. There are many details I won’t share. Mercifully, he remembers none of it.

(Side note: in a previous column in the April/May 2024 issue, I wrote about the heart attack that he had eight years ago, which he refers to as a “discomfort”. He refers to this most recent incident as “fainting”. I have to correct him: “You did not ‘faint’. You died, and someone brought you back to life.”)

When I got home, I did what I always do: I got right back to work. I rescheduled meetings. I prepared lectures. I submitted my grant. I met with my students. I put up Halloween decorations. I brought Halloween candy in for my students. I CrossFitted [Editor’s note: you may recall from Layla’s October/November 2023 column, she is a CrossFit enthusiast!]. I made follow-up appointments for my dad. I tried to convince him to take all the medications that he was prescribed. I ordered personalized medical bracelets for both of my parents. I worked on middle-school applications for my son. I researched assisted-living facilities for my parents for some day in the not-so-distant future. And then, my body finally told me that it was too much. I ended up in urgent care with chest pain and was told that I was having a panic attack.

And here’s the thing: no one is asking me to do all of this. In twenty years of graduate school, industry, and academia, no supervisor has ever told me that I’m not doing enough. If anything, performance reviews tell me the opposite. Even when I get rejected from awards or grants (often!) the message is certainly not “you aren’t working hard enough.” The only person who tells me that is me.

So, it seems, it’s up to me to say: I do enough. I can always do more, but that doesn’t mean I should. And it definitely doesn’t mean that I must.

Academia is a world where we have no finish line. Publish a paper, and there’s the next one. Get a grant, and the renewal looms. Become a fellow of a professional society, and there’s always another rung. But at some point, we have to just stop for a moment on the way up the mountain, before we trip and fall face-first down the other side, and say, “I did good.”

So maybe 2026 will be the year I get better at this, at easing up on my self-expectations, at making a little more space around the edges, at not assuming productivity is the measure of a life. Maybe I’ll only make twelve goals instead of thirteen. I’ll try. But I also know myself well enough not to promise anything.

What I can say is that I’m working on recognizing that even in years with unfinished goals, there is plenty that is good and meaningful. And that is enough.