I’m doing a PhD and currently spending around 3-7 h/week on EA-related stuff (reading forum/blog posts, attending local meetings, moderating in the Virtual Programs…). Since what I learn while doing this may have an impact on my career, it could be regarded as “informal” training time rather than as entertainment/leisure time. However, it does come at the expense of my time spent in “formal” training/work (i.e., PhD) and it’s a dilemma.
Even though my supervisor gives me complete freedom in that regard and doesn’t really check how much I work or how much progress I’ve made, it still feels for me as if I hadn’t worked enough. It may partly come from the fact that I cannot add anything related to that in my CV, as it’s mostly consuming content passively. So, on a career level, it’ll make it hard to justify to future potential employers why I took longer for my PhD (which might be especially tricky if I want to stay in academia), but also personally, because not being able to track more formally this investment of time and the learning progress I make, feels as if I weren’t really doing it.
I don’t see much room for change (besides keeping my PhD hours fixed full-time and engaging in EA in my free time, which may be too many hours of intellectual work and I may feel too tired/not have enough time, or reducing my time spent on EA-related stuff, which, of course, I don’t want), so I’m interested in how you approach a similar situation in your life (practically or mentally) (edit: or to read your advice if you have some) :)
I'm doing a PhD (economics) and feel totally comfortable with my relationship with EA. EA grounds my research and gives me ideas, and on a few occasions I have written things for the EA forum that were just totally helpful things for me to do.
You can judge your output on its own without imagining your counterfactual output if you spent no time on EA. I am deeply skeptical that there's a lot of fungibility between them. EA engagement feels closer to leisure than to work.