The moment you say yes once, you will be asked again.You have landed that new, highly coveted permanent position. You naturally want to show your best side: to be available, collegial, reliable. My warning is simple: don’t. Or if you must, only in moderation.
In academic environments, helpfulness is rarely rewarded explicitly, but it is quietly exploited. Women, in particular, tend to say yes more readily to tasks that “just need to be done”. Men, in my experience, often do so far less.
What I have noticed over the years is this: if a male academic does end up with an undesirable task, he often ensures that he is never asked again. By doing it badly, by delaying endlessly, or by “forgetting” it altogether. The outcome is predictable. The task disappears, and so does the request. The system, in other words, rewards exactly the behaviour it officially discourages.
My advice, then, is straightforward but not easy: learn to say no.
That is harder than it sounds, especially if you are used to doing things well and stepping in where needed. One surprisingly effective strategy is banal but useful: make “I’m very busy” your default response. Not as an excuse, but as a pause. If pressure follows, say that you need to check whether you can fit it in and that you will get back to them in a few days. And then say no. Unless it is something you genuinely want to do.
It helps to make the pattern visible. Make a list: who marks, who organises, who adjusts? Such lists are uncomfortable, but clarifying. They reveal what otherwise remains implicit: that tasks are rarely distributed evenly. I made that mistake myself, early on. I proudly announced that I had finished all my marking. Foolish – very foolish. That same afternoon, a new stack landed on my desk. It was the work people had been waiting weeks for, work of a colleague-professor who always took his time, and apparently could do so without consequence.
The same mechanism applies to agreements. As a team, you discuss how to arrange things. Sabbaticals, for instance. You shift your plans to accommodate everyone. Until Professor Y schedules his sabbatical in the very semester you had already moved to. He had forgotten. And now, well, he had plans. Your earlier arrangements suddenly become an awkward detail. The implicit message is clear: you can surely shift just one more time.
This “forgetting” is not an innocent oversight, but a proven tactic. It works particularly well when the original agreement was informal or made behind closed doors. Those with greater institutional power can afford to deny such agreements the moment they become inconvenient. A single sentence – “What agreement? That was never decided” – suffices. What follows is rarely open conflict, but something subtler: isolation. You are cast as difficult, inflexible, hard to work with. Thus, the problem is silently shifted from behaviour to person.
The lesson is neither uplifting nor elegant, but necessary. Put agreements in writing. Confirm them by email. Not because you are distrustful, but because informal systems favour power. Those who shift once will be asked to keep shifting. Those who set boundaries protect their time, their work – and ultimately their place in academia.
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