The Difference between Workload and Expectations Management

It’s a new semester, so I briefly want to revisit a perennial topic among academics: the increasing demands on our time from e-mail, social media, and the internet more generally.  I often hear this spoken about as a question of workload, but that’s not right.

Let’s take it as read that academic workloads have changed dramatically over the past two or three decades.  At many schools, advising and assessment demands have risen.  The decades-long systemic collapse of the tenure-track job “market” in the humanities has meant, in addition to the devaluation of the Ph.D. and the morally shocking reliance on contingent labor, that those people lucky enough to land a full-time position face heightened research and other requirements for tenure (since, after all, there’s an army of under- and unemployed academics who could be plugged into one’s job).

But these sentences aren’t the same:

• Our class sizes have increased by 10 students!
• We’ve been forced to do departmental and university-wide assessments, on top of our graded activity!
• I advise 50 students during the two week preregistration period!
• My school stopped hiring administrative assistants 2 years ago, so my department of 20 faculty and 500 students has had no secretary for 3 semesters!
• Our state legislature mandated that all upper-division courses add 20 pages of writing assignments to the syllabus!
• My gen-ed courses have all been shifted online, and so I’m spending an incredible amount of time on course design.
• I can’t get my grading done because my e-mail always interrupts me!
• Students in my online class engage the course material at all different times during the week.

The latter two are not, I don’t think, problems in “workload.”  They’re problems of managing expectations.  The best overview of this distinction is the podcast we did last semester with Merlin Mann about the “first person transitive.”

The difference is important, in part because it’s a lot easier to change expectations than it is workload.  You can change your own expectations–”I won’t go online after 9pm” or something–and you can negotiate appropriate expectations with the various people in your life.  “Thanks for this message–I won’t be able to respond properly until I’m out from under these papers, ok?”  Often, the problem isn’t other people’s expectations, it’s your own.  “Why didn’t I get that course in my very first semester?”

At the start of this semester, it’s worth thinking about the areas over which you feel most out of control, and figure out the extent to which you’re facing a workload problem, or an expectations problem.  Improving the latter can go a surprising way toward ameliorating stress and anxiety.

Image is by Flickr user adamjackson1984 / CC licensed