Productivity: Scheduling the Week
posted by William Birdthistle
For junior professors acutely aware of their chosen vocation’s professional expectations, the academic routine presents an awkward dilemma: tasks that thrust themselves to the front of the daily queue with regular urgency are – in the grand tenure plan – less critical than the momentous obligations smoldering in the background. So while being called upon to teach scores of expectant students in an hour or two is sure to capture the immediate attention of a new professor, the responsibility for producing scholarship lurks silently nearby, patiently lying in wait, never far away.
Perhaps the most important logistical project for new professors, then, is devising a schedule that ensures time will be devoted to the writing enterprise, while realistically accommodating the inevitable slew of daily alarums.
The experienced professors with whom I discussed this topic offered a bountiful if somewhat contradictory crop of suggestions about the ideal way in which to structure one’s teaching schedule:
Clumpers: This school of thought advocates grouping one’s teaching load into as compact a bolus as possible, to be digested in a few rapid bites, thereby leaving a broad expanse of uninterrupted writing time. So, for example, three days of teaching should be scheduled on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, to leave Thursday and Friday entirely clear.
Spreaders: Taking the contrary view, this school suggests instead that the three days should be evenly dispersed across the week as Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays.
Clumpers emphasize that writing requires sustained and uninterrupted time and that clumping, when appended to weekends, will create large blocks of time. Spreaders counter that teaching three days in a row for a new professor can be brutal; so much so, in fact, that the open days will be spent (a) recuperating from the teaching clump and (b) taking care of administrative tasks otherwise ignored during the teaching maelstrom.
A related axis is when, intraday, all this teaching should be done:
Farmers: This school believes in rising early, tackling the teaching in the morning so as to leave the rest of the day free. The emphasis here is that teaching for new professors is a source of worry that will expand to occupy any amount of time open to it – so teaching later in the day will only fill junior professors with greater amounts of nerves while still preempting writing time with class preparation.
Afternooners: Since writing is the task that requires the most discipline, argue the contrarians, juniors should begin the day with that project. Once class prep, emails, phone calls, and colleagues begin trickling in, it’s never easy to regain the concentration necessary to write. Far better to try writing before the machinery of distraction fires up. As for preparing for class, the panic that process inspires ensures that professors will still find reserves of concentration for an afternoon-heavy teaching load.
So, are there other approaches that can bridge these binaries and offer the ideal schedule for junior professors?
May 27, 2008 at 6:30 pm
Posted in: Law School (Scholarship)
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