Time and Productivity in Wartime: Deadlines, Communication, Trust

The workshop invited us to reflect on our relationship with time and commitments within the academic community. We often take deadlines for granted, yet the cost of missing them, or of chronically postponing work until the last moment, can be significant.

In our conversation, we discussed the costs of missing deadlines, ranging from reputational damage, such as no longer being invited to collaborate when delays become systematic, to financial losses. We also considered our own well-being and sense of solidarity: how fulfilling commitments on time can reduce anxiety, restore a sense of control, and encourage us to treat both our own resources and those of our colleagues with greater care.

You can download the visual notes for printing in English and Ukrainian on this webpage below.

Anastasiya Leukhina is a facilitator and trainer in the area of conflict management, negotiation and facilitation and a Fellow at the Hertie School. Before her war-induced relocation to Berlin, Leukhina taught at the Kyiv School of Economics, led the ‘Horizontal Connections’ NGO, and was engaged in activism to make education and healthcare more human-centred. In previous positions, she conducted security sector reform monitoring with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, supported the process of reforming the Ukrainian police, and managed the democracy and governance portfolio of USAID Belarus. She coordinated the Ukraine Research Network@ZOiS.

Olena Strelnyk completed her habilitation in Sociology in 2018 at Taras Shevchenko Kyiv National University, Ukraine. She has published extensively on the topics of gender inequality in Ukraine, care work, and the impact of war on gender roles. She was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, University of Michigan (2016), at the Prague Civil Society Centre (2019), and the Technical University of Munich (2022–2024). She currently works as a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and is an associate researcher at Indiana University Bloomington. Olena was a fellow in the Ukraine Research Network@ZOiS. Her project was titled Seeing the Invisible: Family Care for the Elderly in a War-Torn Ukraine.