Post-doc priorities: "Laundry list" vs. "Research trumps all" I am a post-doc in the physical sciences and I am finding that people have very different expectations of what a post-doc's priorities should be. Typically people are somewhere between two camps. I call these two extreme views "Laundry list" vs. "Research trumps all".

The "Laundry list" view is that everything matters, and that next to research skills developing soft skills is also very important. Examples of such advice philosophy are the Times Higher Education guide (see here) and the The New Scientist guide (here). Apart from research, there is great emphasis on teaching and mentoring students, practising talks, going to many seminars and networking.

The "Research trumps all" view is that at the post-doc stage, the importance of papers far outweighs everything else. For example,  this interesting guest post on The Professor Is In advises to be very cautious about getting involved in mid-author papers and optional teaching commitments. In the Scientific American blog post "The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc " (here), the author directly attacks laundry list advice of the above kind and emphasises selectivity in activities, putting research and teaching first. Cal Newport's canon of advice (e.g. this and this post) is generally all about selective focus on research projects and minimizing dissipation (e.g. little email communication, drop bad projects).

I am most interested in career advice for post-docs in the physics, mathematics, computer science, life sciences on a path towards a research oriented academic career. I think it would be very interesting to see what you think and where you place your post-doc priorities on the continuum between "Laundry list" and "Research trumps all".
I think this is an interesting and multi-faceted question. As a postdoc, I was very much on the laundry list side of things. I did a lot of teaching, organized events, went to plenty of conferences, helped with department service, collaborated in projects that I probably should have gotten out of months ago, started a lot of long-reaching initiatives which would not lead to any papers in the short term, wrote grant proposals, and so forth. My publication track record was good, but not nearly as good as the track record of some of my colleagues who tried harder to fend off non-publishing activities.

I think ultimately this made job searching harder, as hiring committees in virtually all research-oriented institutions put an overwhelming emphasis on published papers. However, I also feel very strongly that I am a better and more well-rounded academic now than what I would be if I had locked myself in and wrote one paper after the other. I especially feel like I am pretty well set-up to achieve my tenure requirements (which, at least in my institution, are much more well-rounded than just looking at papers alone), and the change from a postdoc to a faculty position has been rather smooth - I did not get the "shock" that some others seem to have when they suddenly need to do teaching, department service, etc.

All in all, I think a good way to see it is that the "publications-over-everything" strategy maximizes your chance to get as good a tenure-track position as possible, while the laundry list strategy trains you better for a long, well-rounded career.