Dean Is Arresed on Pornography Charges

Use meeting maker to schedule EVERYTHING.  People will try to schedule any available minutes, so schedule things like 2 hours for working on a grant proposal as an appointment with yourself, going to the gym, or dates with your partner.  Make it clear on your schedule when you are on campus and when you are not.  If someone tries to schedule over one of these things, reject the invitation and suggest an alternate time.  

I strongly advise blocking off chunks of time.  A chunk for student office hours (and make the students stick to them), a chunk for writing/research.  A chunk every monday morning for organizing your thoughts and papers for the week and another chunk every friday afternoon for cleaning out your email and finishing the things you’ve only half done all week.  BLOCK OUT TIME FOR GRADING.  Block out 30 minutes before each class to review the material/your notes.  

I’m guessing part of the problem is a lack of sufficient time in blocks to get things done.  That means making appointments with yourself and keeping them.  Interruptions sap your productivity, making it really hard to finish things.  Until you learn how to batch up the things you need to do and block off the time in which to do them, you will continue to feel stressed.  The work load is manageable IF you take control of your time and manage it like the limited resource it is.

Finally, if someone schedules an appointment that doesn’t work for you, tell them.  Offer another time that would work better, or a few of them.  But outside of your classes there are few things that can’t be moved around.

Hi TR–I think this is my first time commenting in the new digs. I came here to advise what misanthropic789 has already done: schedule blocks of time for writing, class prep and grading, and even (especially!) an hour a day for project management (reviewing to-do lists, clearing out email, filing papers). If someone tries to schedule a meeting over it, agree to the meeting ONLY if you can move whatever block you’ve scheduled there to another time.

As a frequent committee chair, I have to schedule a lot of meetings, and I think there is a time to be flexible. That time is at the beginning of the semester, when the chair of any committee you’re on should poll members and find a time that everyone can meet in a normal week. You might need to juggle your schedule then. But after that, you can say, “Sorry, I scheduled our regular meeting at 9 a.m. on alternate Wednesdays, but I have a conflict Thursday at 3 and can’t make it.”

And if someone with authority–a chair, a dean, whoever–asks you to take on something new, you can say, “OK, but I’m already doing X, Y, Z, and Q. Which of those do you want me to give up so that I can fit in this new responsibility?” That’s not saying no; it’s pointing out that your time is limited and you have to prioritize things.

R. O. P. Lopez has great advice about email. Often you can settle in a 5-minute face-to-face or phone conversation what would take an hour of back-and-forth emailing to accomplish.

Excellent post. The only thing I would add is that if you are at a research-oriented institution where promotion-and-tenure decisions are based mostly on the stature of your research accomplishments, then you need to keep reminding yourself of that every time you get that feeling that someone is going to be “mad” at you if you decline to do some stupid fucken service task–or soft-pedal it–that few of the other research-successful faculty at your institution are willing to engage.

I have to agree with your advice on never signing in extra students over the cap. Never. EVER. I never did and never had to face my class cap increasing to add more students. My colleagues who did feel pity for a few students every semester and signed them in (override, my school called it) lived to regret it. School administration quickly catches on to those instructors or professors who allow more students in every semester, and immediately raise the cap for that class.  It was a pretty obvious cause and effect reaction.  Perhaps I am mercenary about this, but I always figured I would not get paid extra for the additional students, whereas the school would get extra money. If they want more students taking that class, they can open another section, pay me or another colleague to teach it, and we all win.  Similarly, there are meetings and service activities that one has to beg out of. Or even argue out of.  It doesn’t make us better educators to be always hurried and overwhelmed by work. And in the end, we only have one life to live and we should be able to enjoy it as free of stress as humanly possible. 

I will just echo the advice others have given: block off the times you need for writing, gym, whatever. This semester I have just said that I am not available on Fridays. When anyone wants to schedule a Friday meeting, I’m not available.

Also, close your door if you want to be in your office and write. At least on my campus, students often will not knock.

One of the joys of teaching in an international setting is how much of this kind of stuff completely disappears from your life — because you are a linguistic and cultural outsider, an outlier. Although I can’t escape from all the bureaucratic record-keeping required by my institution, some of which is onerous and pointless, I do have very great freedom in other ways. No one schedules me into meetings. No one requests me to serve on committees. The school is thick with initiatives which I am tacitly excused from paying any attention to. I am completely outside institutional politics, but because I have high status as a foreign professor and teach a lot of classes, I am very well-paid. I can concentrate on my subjects, my teaching, and my students, and no one bothers me or micro-manages me.

This sort of set-up might not work for everyone. But since I genuinely loathe the sorts of impositions that Missouri Marv describes, it is a terrific solution for me, and might be for others.

I would say a reasonable number of meetings is going to change from person to person.  If you are in a field where you have routinely heavy teaching, four extra hours spent in meetings every week, and preparing for those meetings, is going to feel like a lot.

As for “the gratuitous shot at middle aged, nose-haired male professors [that] detracts from the ethos of an otherwise sensible post,” the point is that it was not a stereotype, but a *caricature* of someone who students are unlikely to flock to — who had practically a zero chance of existing in the meat world.

As one person suggested, schedule time for priorities in your life (gym, partner, sleep) as they were as important as work because THEY ARE.  Never feel that you need to explain this to anyone, and no whining or apologizing (“No, I can’t make it to that meeting because I really wanted to have time to write because I haven’t had the chance to do any writing for….blahblahblah”).  All that person is going to hear anyway is the “No” and then the brain shuts off. 

Use the same technique used for redirecting children: rather than say, “No, you can’t have a bowl of ice cream right before dinner,” say, “Sure, you can have a bowl of ice cream anytime after dinner!”  As in, “Sure, I can meet between 2:00 and 4:00 on Wednesdays!”  And if you’re really overbooked and absolutely can’t, just say, “I’m sorry, I am unable to take on any additional commitments at this time.” Stop there, don’t explain further, because, of course, they’re not listening anymore.

I can’t speak for anyone in this article, but I remember one week when I taught 14 hours and had 16 hours of meetings. That was a lot.

Since then I have discovered that there are actually other ways of doing institutional service than attending meetings! Sometimes it’s as simple as the difference between ‘we should meet about this’ and ‘why don’t I just draft it and email it to you all for comments?’ Also, some service activities allow you to get other work done; for instance, grading during your down time while working open house. etc.

I tried not responding to emails from students that weren’t asking a question, and got dinged for it on student evals. When I thought about it, I realized that I would rather have the students communicating by email rather than face to face anyway – takes less of my time, and I have a record of what was said. So now, I try to encourage email rather than discourage it.

I’m with Bobby on this one — *not* responding to student emails that don’t ask a question is a problem for someone evaluating you? Even if you are in your office answering questions?  Srsly? 

In a recent conversation with my Dean, I was heard to say “You know I attend more meetings here in two years than I did in 20 years in the military.”  He did not get the hint.

Doesn’t your calendar software allow you to decline invites to meetings? From the administrative side people who don’t use calendar software are most uncool. Have you ever tried to schedule something with ten or twenty people attending? Have you ever had to call all of them up because they don’t use the software? Have you ever had to call them all up and tell them all that you had to reschedule because Dr. Such-and-Such doesn’t use the calendar? Have you ever had to do all of that crap when it isn’t even your job to play their assistant? 

Ideally I think people who ignore meeting requests should not get a part in the decision making process. The rest of us have to move on with our lives so we can go to the gym, have a nice lunch, write, see students… 

Much of what has been suggested here is very sensible – but it doesn’t take into account that many of us teach at places that will never make the “Great Colleges to Work For” list.  At the university where I work, individual professors have no say in whether students are overloaded into the classes we teach.  The extra students simply appear, put in by someone, somewhere who has the magic code, and we are expected to find a place for them to hunker down in the back or side of the room.  We are told how many office hours we must keep, and roll is taken at university events that we are told to attend.  Etc. That said, one does learn after a time what can be safely skipped and what cannot, which is helpful in trying to carve out a bit of time for exercise and lunch-making.  But academic working conditions vary considerably; I am always struck by the extent to which bloggers and posters on the Chronicle assume that their freedoms and privileges are universal. 

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