#5: Staying Organized and Managing Time Effectively
The work of teaching expands to fill whatever available time you give it - here are some strategies to reclaim some of that time.
Welcome to the summer 2024 “Top 10 Essential Practices” series for new faculty! Catch up with the series introduction here and #10: Understand Your Learners, #9: Clear Learning Objectives, #8: Using Active Learning, #7: Providing Timely and Constructive Feedback, and #6: Promoting Belonging.
Effective organization and time management don’t sound like particularly fascinating topics for a newsletter focused on teaching in higher ed, but bear with me - I think that time management strategies can be both simple to implement and make a really significant difference in how we work. Anyone who has taught a course has probably experienced how the work of teaching expands to fill whatever available time you give it: there are always small tweaks to established courses, extra readings students might benefit from, or a change to how you ran the last class simulation or project. All of these possibilities are part of what makes teaching exciting and fulfilling, a constant challenge to improve. Too, responding to student work is a task that could always take just a little more time than we have available. Our desire to continually make our teaching and our feedback to students just a little better is also what makes teaching so hard.
Put time management in practice…
When we include the challenge of juggling all our responsibilities - teaching, scholarship, advising, and service - it becomes even more important that we develop and maintain strategies to stay organized and manage our time efficiently. What strategies work for you might be different to what works for your colleague down the hall - so with that caveat, here are some strategies to try out.
Understand your sticky points
I've shared this before, but it bears repeating - sitting down with your (average) weekly schedule is the best way to have a clear grasp of how you spend your time. Seeing plotted out, even just approximately, how many hours you spend advising students, sitting in committee meetings, writing grant proposals, completing administrative tasks, prepping for class, etc., is incredibly eye-opening - not just for what it tells us about how we spend our time, but about how we value the time we spend.
Figure out what helps you focus
For me, the killer is trying to multi-task. I figured this out about myself a long time ago - I am just not as effective when I’m hopping around tasks, or trying to keep details about two different projects active in my head at the same time. It can be helpful to use While I have colleagues who really love the Pomodoro technique, I find that the chunks of time are too short for the way I work. One strategy that has worked well in the past - when I have been disciplined enough to do it - is setting specific email hours when I check, respond, flag for later, etc. and then ignore my email outside those set hours. Now that I am in an office that uses instant messaging as our main communication, I find it a little harder to limit my “available to respond” times to just one hour in the morning and one in the late afternoon, but adding a quick check-in at lunch tends to be sufficient. Another strategy I adopted several years ago that I have stuck with is the Mindful Browsing Chrome add-on. When you navigate to one of the websites on the watch list you create, it suggests an alternative activity instead. It’s just a soft suggestion; you can always dismiss the page and continue to the site you wanted, but it’s a nice reminder to pause and actively choose to spend 10 minutes on social media, for example. After 10 minutes the reminder pops up again, so it’s a great way to be realistic about how much time you just spent.
Plan how you can say no
Sometimes we have to say no - both to students and to opportunities. Although we are no longer in the thick of pandemic teaching, in so many ways the lingering burnout and feeling like we are constantly on a foundation that is shifting beneath us continue to make the work of higher ed a challenge. Setting boundaries around what we can - and cannot - do for our students is not just important for our own working lives, but for their development. It’s harder, in some ways, to say no to opportunities. There are always more interesting and helpful (or, frustrating and time-sucking) activities and committees than any one person can commit to in a semester. I find it helpful to have a heuristic to guide decision-making about all these extra opportunities.
Wrangle teaching tasks into manageable chunks
Whether you’re teaching one course or five, a common issue is that class prep and grading seem to expand to fill whatever time you have available in a given week. I have learned that there are some things current-me can do early in the semester to set structure and expectations that future-me really benefits from - things like having a set structure for each class session, helping students understand where to find answers so that emailing you isn’t the default choice when they have a question, and prioritizing giving feedback that is helpful to students versus feedback that is largely to justify the grade given.
What time management hacks work for you? Please share in the comments!
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