Tips Round-Up: Time & Workload Planning
Tips Round-Up: Time & Workload Planning
Wrangle your calendar into a workable rhythm.
This month I have a series of Tips planned with back-to-school topics: last week it was preparing a syllabus, today is about making a time/workload management plan, and next week will focus on planning first-day and first-week activities.
I firmly believe that before you can effectively help students learn to manage their workload, you have to have a plan for your own. Every so often - but at least at the start of each semester - I sit down with my time management plan (instructor time management directions & template) to check in. This fall, with moving to a new role at a new institution, I have had to really re-imagine and re-set my time and workload expectations.
The stickiest points for me have always been letting distractions - whether that’s email, or last-minute meetings, or just trying to hop around from task to task - get in the way of the really important stuff. As a friend and colleague said to me earlier this summer: Don’t let the urgent crowd out the important.
Managing emails (and other communication tasks)
A big part of this is communications from students, and I’ve found it helpful to articulate an order of operations for getting questions answered that I ask students to follow. I also try to stick to set email/communication times. At some points that has been responding to emails for 30 minutes at the start of my day and 30 minutes at the end; at others it’s being consistent about collecting together all of the questions or ideas that I want to share with a specific person and sending just one email, rather than 10, or holding them all for a meeting instead.
Saying “No!”
I let these 3 important questions guide me when I’m considering volunteering for yet another thing. Service is a great way to get to know your colleagues and the inner(ish) workings of your institution, but it also can easily expand to fill in all the nooks and crannies in your schedule.
Avoid multitasking
Multitasking, or serial task-switching, is one of the worst things we can do to our ability to get things done. We may lose as much as 40% of our productivity by trying to multitask and it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to the task. That’s just mind-blowing. To counteract task-switching, I really try to focus on single-tasking. Here is where the weekly schedule really comes in handy, as you can block off times for tasks spread across the week. Then you know that you are reserving time in your calendar for the things you really want to do without letting the necessary but less interesting tasks take over.
Try accordion-tasking
Not letting tasks like grading and class prep take over your entire week can be challenging. One helpful idea I recently encountered, shared by Anne Amienne at Scholars & Writers academic coaching services, is to think about your daily and weekly schedule of work as firm-ish boundaries. She calls them "accordion boxes" because you may need, on a given day, to expand the amount of time you spend on grading and compress the amount of time you spend on something else. Rather than just throwing your schedule out the window and spending the entire day on grading, she advocates for treating the schedule like an accordion - you may get only 15 minutes for a walk outside instead of the 1-hour yoga class you had scheduled, or only skim one article rather than drafting a new lit review outline, but at least you’re still doing the thing that was important enough to make it on your daily schedule. This idea really resonates for me because it’s a way to still make time for something you’re enthusiastic about and provides some necessary balance.
What are your stickiest time & workload problems?
Next week I’ll share some tips for first-day and first-week activities for a strong start to the semester.
For more reading…
Christine Tully has some great suggestions for planning a “writing day” where the focus is on having a large chunk of time to move a project forward. These strategies could work for planning a “course design day” or “grade 150 essay drafts day” as well - particularly her suggestions for planning the work of the day into chunks, and having a wrap-up routine that includes making notes for yourself about where you’ll next pick up when you return to this project.
Faculty time management activity (with template)