I’ve been thinking about time management for some time. It
doesn’t come naturally to me, and I really never needed to learn it through graduate school. My standard method of
doing things—reading for classes, writing papers, studying, grading—at the last
minute in a hurricane of panic and crisis got me the results I wanted in terms
of grades and rewards often enough. And, besides, it made fairly tedious tasks
much more interesting, fed the beast of the imposter syndrome, and kept me from
feeling like a drudge (which, for reasons to complicated to explain, was always
present to me as a terrible thing to be).
At some point, however, my crisis-driven time management
methods ceased to work, and I had to learn new ones. Since then, I’ve played
around with different methods, using different ones at different times and for
different purposes. More recently, I’ve had a mild sort of mid-life crisis (I’m
not buying a convertible or getting a toupee): I don’t want to be in a constant
state of feelings like I’m drowning in undone or badly-done tasks. When I
thought about what changes I’d like to make in my life—I’m quite likely at
precisely middle age, after all—I realized it’s pretty clear to me what I’d
like to do differently.
I’d like to spend less time on work; I’d like to have more
time for gardening, exercising, and hanging with my family. I’d like to protect
my health (and sleep) more than I do. I’d like to spend more time with women
friends, and maybe do some volunteer work (I’d love to take one of the dogs to
a nursing home). I’d like to do more pleasure-reading. I’d like to be a better
teacher, to spend as much time as I currently do on teaching, and yet do more.
I’d like to spend more time on my scholarship; I’d like to read more outside of
my immediate area of research, and read much more broadly in my field. I’d like
to publish more articles. I’d like to finish three book projects within the
next three years or so. I’d like to repay some of my debts in terms of service
to the profession and do more mentoring, book reviewing, manuscript reading, article
reviewing.
You can do that math—I’d like to have about thirty hours a
day.
And I’d like to give good advice to grad students and
colleagues about how to use one’s time. The research that is out there about women
who get hung at Associate Professor is that they work just as much as people
who get promoted, but they work differently, with more time on teaching and
service. So, I wanted to try to figure out how to use my time both for my own
purposes (to use my time more efficiently and, basically, reduce the drama) and
to give advice grounded in honest self-assessment to others.
I’m a binge scholar, which isn’t a great model. I don’t get
a lot of scholarship done during the semester, especially from mid-October till
the end of semester in the fall and from mid-March till the end of the semester
in spring. Instead, I work entirely on scholarship during summer and Christmas
break. I’d like to change that, but I’m still not entirely clear how. I don’t
think of myself as doing much class prep during the semester, as I generally
have the semester planned out in considerable detail, so most of my teaching
time with undergraduates is conferring with students and grading.
So, at various weeks during the semester, I kept track of my
time obsessively, just to see where it was going. I was trying it by hand, with
half-hour time blocks, and that just told me what I knew: I spend a lot of time
on teaching. I tried a much more specific program (toggl) which enabled me to
note when I was doing something if only for a couple of minutes. And I was
really surprised by what I found.
1) I spend more time in semi-work than I think I do.
“Semi-work” is how I think of that kind of stuff you do that
isn’t fun, and so it’s work, but it isn’t easily identifiable as any kind of
work. There is stuff like email that might have a couple of emails from
students (so teaching), and email regarding a scholarly association (and so
some service to the profession), and email from the Admin that it turns out I
didn’t really need to read. It would be impossible for me to figure out how
many seconds I spent on the needless email v. the email exchange with a student
that was clearly about teaching, so it’s all just misc work.
And then there is proto-work—getting my printer to work so
that I can print up an article so that I can read it for a scholarly project,
finding the book I need to read, collecting together student portfolios to see
if students turned in everything they should have, trying to figure out what I
need to take home so that I get done at home what I’ll need to do. I spend
about six hours a week on “misc work.”
I spend about two hours a week on scheduling/organizing—that
is, just figuring out what I’m doing and whether it’s what I should be doing
and whether I have what I need in order to do it.
And then there is almost work—such as getting ready for
work, or commuting. That’s about seven hours a week. Over two hours of that is
just walking to and from my car.
2) I take more breaks and longer breaks than I think I do. That
was invisible with my other method of time-keeping, because I take a lot of 60
seconds breaks. I don’t know if that’s bad or good; maybe it’s even a very good
thing. But I take a lot of 60 second breaks to check email or pop onto facebook
or read Dan Savage or look at lolcatz. I don’t take enough breaks at which I
get up from my chair and walk around, but when I do they’re really long.
But I was really surprised to find that I might pop down the
hall to chat with a colleague or go into the office and get coffee and burn up
twenty minutes. I need more breaks that are slightly active.
3) I don’t know how to count “chatting with students or
colleagues.” I spend a lot of time doing that, and they’re wide-ranging
conversations about the department, our teaching, their projects, my projects.
I learn a lot during these conversations, and I think they’re good for students
(especially undergrads) and so count conversations with students as teaching,
but I think they’re a sort of hard-to-measure entity, like a doctor taking
extra time with a patient.
There’s a similar issue with scholarly mailing lists and
facebook. I end up in a lot of discussions that are related to work, and use
them to think through issues. An email thread on the WPA mailing list, for
instance, was really helpful for understanding how other compositionists think
about argumentation; friends post links to demagogues all the time. But I was
surprised to discover that I spent twenty minutes composing my email on that
WPA thread—that wasn’t a good use of my time.
4) I had no clue I spent so much time on class prep. I know
that was partially because I was teaching a new class, but still it amazed me
how much time I spent looking for materials for class, writing up exams, and
generating course material. I don’t regret that time, but I never budget for
it, and therefore panic because I’m behind.
5) I am a slow
writer. I’m spending about eight hours per conference presentation (each of
which is about 15 minutes). That’s just a fact about me. I’m not overpreparing—the
papers aren’t even all that good. As with the class prep, I think I just need
to budget for a lot of time per presentation and not beat myself up about it.
6) Technology takes time. I spent a lot of time one week
(because I got a new macbook), but even on the other weeks I spent about half
an hour on technology—uploading or downloading or troubleshooting or upgrading.
And I try to spend as little time on technology as possible—I’ve procrastinated
lots of upgrades and reorganization and other tasks because I don’t want to
spend that time right now.
I think all this stuff is pretty common for people. I know that
friends in other professions have complained how much time gets pissed away in
semi- and proto-productive work, (spending an hour at a meeting when one’s
presence was only necessary for ten minutes, coming up with a great idea after
a half hour conversation that seemed rambling). And I know that it isn’t
possible to spend all one’s time at full-speed—I can’t write or read for more
than four hours. If I’ve written for four hours, and try to shift to reading, I
can only read for about two hours. I can grade papers for about seven hours in
a day, and exams for only slightly longer.
I don’t have any brilliant observations about this. Except
there is one other strking thing about my time-tracking. I’ll get up at four in
the morning in order to grade, but I never get up at four in the morning in
order to do my scholarship. I’ll work on teaching till it’s done, but I fit
scholarship into the corners of my days.
