Time management and scholars

I’ve been on sabbatical this semester, my first in twelve years, and I’ve long argued that we can get our jobs done averaging 40 hours a week. I over-committed myself. I agreed to writing or co-authoring six book chapters/articles, seven campus visits in the US, several days of talks in Czechia, and reviewing one article and two book manuscripts. I was still Director of the University Writing Center. I also kept track of my time (more or less). I thought it would be helpful to tell folks how it turned out, since I know that the first time I got a sabbatical I wished that someone had given me more advice about how to use my time. You don’t completely get away from teaching or service, but you can keep it reined in.

I counted my sabbatical as nineteen weeks, from just after New Year’s till the end of finals.

1) I did pretty well at trying to average 40 hours a week (it was 40.5 average). That’s partially because I took about four weeks of vacation.
2) The largest category was scholarship (which is where visits went), with 65% of my time.
3) If I was at the Writing Center, I just clocked it as UWC–there’s no way I could have kept track of when I was teaching, when it was scholarship, when it was service. That was the second largest category, with around 13% of my time.
4) I spent just over 8% of my time on “misc work” (email, planning, phone calls, organizing).
5) Non-UWC service also took up just over 8%–some professional, some departmental, but mostly one university committee I didn’t realize would be such a time sink.
6) The rest was really random–a few hours for dentist appointments or sick days, a few on things that mixed categories (such as writing undergraduate letters of rec–that always seems to me to be both teaching and service).

The reason I emphasize average is that I keep getting misunderstood on this point. Of course you don’t work 40 hours every week. If you take off the four weeks of vacation, then I was working around 50 hours a week for the weeks I was working.

There are also always things that are hard to figure. I didn’t count the time I spent cleaning up cat barf off my desk so I could work, setting up dog beds so they wouldn’t bug me, chasing down the shoes that Pearl stole, nor the time I spent walking a dog and thinking about my writing, or talking about my work. I did, however, count the time at the gym that I spent reading things for work (so not my Sunday gym visit when I’m usually reading apologetics or sermons or Jane Austen).

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