Time Management (again)

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.