How do you spend your time in the office?

A couple years back I wrote a long series of posts reflecting on what it’s like to teach a 4/4 load, how to manage one’s time, how to make time for research, and so on. Recently a friend was mentally cataloguing how he spends his hours in the office, both for himself and for higher-ups. So I thought I’d work up a list of ways academics use their time in the office. I came up with twenty-five categories, though I’m sure I’ve overlooked some. The hardest part was thinking about scholars outside of the humanities (you know, people who work with “hard data” in the “lab” and create “spreadsheets” with “numbers”—things I’ve only ever heard of, never encountered in the wild). Here’s the list, with relevant glosses where necessary, followed by a few reflections and a breakdown of my own “office hours”:

• Teaching (in the classroom or online)

• Grading

• Lesson prep

• LMS management (think Blackboard, Canvas, etc.)

• Writing

• Reading

• Supervising (a G.A. or doctoral student, or providing official hours toward licensure)

• Experiments/lab work

• Data collection/collation/analysis

• Meetings with students

• Meetings with colleagues

• Emailing

• Phone calls

• Admin work

• Committee work

• Para-academic work (blind reviewer, organizing a conference panel, being interviewed on a podcast, etc.)

• Vocational work (say, seeing clients as a therapist or making rounds at the hospital)

• Church work (preparing a sermon or curriculum)

• Family duties (paying bills, ordering gifts, taking the car to the shop, leaving early to pick up kids, staying home with a sick child)

• Loafing (hallway chats, office drop-ins, breeze-shooting)

• Eating (whether alone or with others)

• Devotion (prayer, meditation, silence and solitude)

• Social media (call this digital loafing)

• Filler (walking, parking, shuttle, etc.)

• Other (this is here, lol, so you don’t have to think about questions like “how much time per semester do I spend in the restroom?”)

Now suppose you are (a) full-time faculty with responsibilities in (b) teaching, (c) research, and (d) service, and that a typical work week is (e) Monday through Friday, 8:00am to 5:00pm, spent in an office. That comes to 45 hours. How do you spend it in a given semester? That’s a factual question. It’s paired with the aspirational: How do you wish you spent it?

Answers to both are going to vary widely and be dependent on discipline, institution, temperament, desire, will, gifts, talents, interests, and job description. The chair of a physics department with 2/2 teaching loads will spend her time differently than an English prof with a 4/4 load and no administrative duties. So on and so forth.

Here’s how my time breaks down in an average week this semester (numbers after each category are estimated average weekly hours spent on that activity):

• Teaching – 9

• Grading – 1

• Lesson prep – 2-3

• Writing – 3-6

• Reading – 10-15

• Meetings with students – 1

• Meetings with colleagues – 0-1

• Emailing – 3-5

• Committee work – 0-1

• Para-academic work – 0-1

• Church work – 0-1

• Family duties – 6

• Eating – 1-2

• Devotion – 1

• Other – 1

• LMS management, supervising, lab work, data collection, phone calls, social media, loafing, vocational work, admin work, filler – 0

Check my work, but I think the numbers add up: at a minimum, these activities come to 38 out of 45 hours, with an unfixed 7 hours or so in which to apportion the remaining 16 in variable ways, given the week and what’s going on, what’s urgent, etc.

Now for commentary:

• Note well what’s in the “zero hours” category: admin work, social media, supervising students of any kind (including in a lab), and LMS management. Anybody with duties or habits along these lines will have a seriously different allotment of hours than I do.

• Notice what’s low in my weekly hours: email (which I wrote about yesterday), grading, meetings of any kind, and in general duties beyond teaching and research. On a good week, 30 of my 45 hours are spent teaching, reading, and writing. That’s not for everyone—nor is it a viable option for many—but it’s the result, among other things, of how I organize and discipline my time in the office. Teaching, reading, and writing are the priority. Everything else is secondary.

• Well, not quite. Notice what’s (atypically?) high: family duties. I drop off our kids at school every morning, which means I sit down at my desk no earlier than 8:00am, sometimes closer to 8:30am. At least twice (often thrice) per week I leave around 3:00pm to pick them up, too. So if we’re thinking of the standard “eight to five office day,” that’s an average of at least five hours weekly that I’m not in the office. That’s not to mention dentist and doctor appointments, the flu, stomach bugs, Covid, choir performances, second grad programs, and the rest. Not everyone has kids, and kids don’t remain little forever, but this is worth bearing in mind for many faculty!

• (Addendum: I am—we are—fortunate to have an employer and a type of job that permit the sort of flexibility that doesn’t require us paying for a babysitter or childcare after the school bell rings. That’s a whole different matter.)

• Because I’m piloting a new class this semester, I’m teaching only three courses for a total of nine hours. Typically it’s four courses totaling twelve hours. In that case, in the absence of a new prep I wouldn’t have two to three hours weekly devoted to lesson planning. Once I’ve taught a class a few times, it’s plug and play. In other words, if this were describing my semester a year ago, teaching would have twelve hours next to it and lesson prep would have zero.

• I should add, while I’m thinking of it: Sometimes my reading goes way down when a writing project is nearing a deadline or in full swing. Neither of those things is true at present, so I’m doing more reading than writing this semester. But sometimes the numbers there flip flop, and I’m writing 15+ hours weekly and reading only 3-5 hours, if that.

• My institution requires generous office hours for students to come by and talk to their professors. I keep those hours but encourage students to set up meetings in advance, whether in person after class or by email. That way I won’t randomly be gone (at home with a sick kid, say, or in a committee meeting), and we can both be efficient with our time. I’ve mentored students in the past, which involved more of a weekly time commitment. At the moment I probably meet with two or three students per week, usually for 15-30 minutes each. But I know that not only here at ACU but elsewhere there are professors who give five, ten, or more hours each week to meeting with students. So, once again, there’s the question of decisions, priorities, institutional expectations, personal giftedness, and tradeoffs.

• I’ve already mentioned two of the three great timesucks for professors: email and social media. Both threaten to rob academics of hours of time they could otherwise be using on what they love or, at least, what’s important. I gave my advice yesterday for how to resist the lure of the inbox. The cure for social media is simple: Just delete it. It can’t steal away your time if it quite literally does not exist for you.

• The third great timesuck is loafing. This isn’t a temptation for academics alone, but for any and all office workers. Who wouldn’t prefer to shoot the breeze with coworkers in lieu of putting one’s nose to the grindstone? To me, this is purely and simply a personal decision. Loafing is not only fun, but life-giving. Many office jobs aren’t endurable without a healthy dose of loafing. You can often tell the relative health of an office by the nature and extent of its occupants’ shared loafing. So don’t hear me knocking loafing. It’s a kind of social nutrient for office work. In its absence, the human beings who make up an office can wither and die. Having said that, when I say it’s a “decision” I mean to say, on one hand, that it’s active, not passive (one has agency in loafing—a sentence I hope I’m the first to have written); and, on the other, that it involves tradeoffs. I’ve loafed less and less over the years for the plain reason that I realized what loafing I did inevitably meant less reading and writing (not, mind you, less busywork or email or grading or meetings: those, like death and taxes, are certain and unavoidable features of the academic life). And if the equation is that direct—less loafing, more research—then given my priorities and the tradeoffs involved, I decided to do my best to cut it out as much as I could.

• Not much else to add, except that, when I can avoid them, I don’t do “work lunches.” I’m sure the portrait painted here is sounding increasingly, even alarmingly, antisocial; the truth, however, is that every hour (every minute!) counts in a job like this one, and you have to be ruthless to find—by which I mean, make—time for what you value. I like my job. I would read and write theology in my spare time if I weren’t a professor. So I don’t want to waste time in the office if I can help it.

Email

Email is the scourge of just about everyone’s time and attention, at least those of us in the “laptop class” and the broader white-collar workforce. Some people’s jobs just are their inbox. But for academics, the inbox is the enemy. It’s a timesuck. It exerts a kind of gravitational pull on one’s mind and attention. It threatens to conquer every last second you might spend doing something else.

Here are some rules and practices I’ve instituted to manage my inbox.

1. No email on my phone. By this I mean not only that I lack the app, I also can’t log in on a browser. I literally do not, because I cannot, access my inbox (personal or professional) on my phone.

2. No email on the weekends. This rule’s looser, but I don’t reply or feel accountable to my inbox on the weekends. I mostly leave it be.

3. No email until lunchtime. Mornings in my house are harried swirls of chaos getting kids to school; I don’t check my inbox before leaving. When I get to my office, I pour some coffee, pray, then sit down in my recliner and read for 2-4 hours. My laptop remains closed and in my bag, barring an urgent matter or occasional need. I usually open it around 11:30am.

4. Inbox zero twice per day. While I munch on a salad, I take 15-30 minutes to whittle my emails down to zero. Two-thirds of this is deletion. For what remains, it’s a smattering of replies, archives, calendar notes, and snoozes. I do the same thing late afternoon, before I leave the office. Occasionally I’ll do it in the evening, at home, but I don’t plan on it.

5. Little to no email outside of normal working hours. I’m flexible on this one, but the rule is that I don’t make myself accountable to my inbox outside of the 8:00am–5:00pm range. If I receive an email then, it can wait till the next day. And if the inbox piles up outside of office hours, so be it.

6. As few newsletters as possible. I’ve slowly been unsubscribing from newsletters I read and transferring their feed to my RSS reader (I use Feedly). Some still come by email—I’m not sure how to pay for one without getting it via email!—but I either click on them immediately or skim and archive. I don’t want them just sitting there, cluttering up the place.

7. A quick brief reply is better than a delayed reply or non-reply. I still remember an email I sent to a distinguished academic in 2010. I was going to visit his campus to see if it might be a good fit for my doctoral studies. My email must have been a thousand words at least. His reply was a single incomplete sentence. Yes, he would meet with me. But it was so curt I thought he was mad. He wasn’t! He just didn’t have time to match my logorrhea. He had better things to do. And he was right. So when colleagues, students, or readers email me, I’ve trained myself to give them a speedy 1-2 sentence answer, even if it’s not as detailed as they’d like. Sometimes it’s just, “Let’s talk more in person,” or “I’ll have to think about that.” But if the question is concrete, I can typically answer in a single sentence. Brevity is preferable to silence!

8. Every personal email gets a reply. Except by mistake, I never ghost genuine emails from living human beings (unless, I suppose, there are living human beings behind A.I.-generated Ed Tech mass-mailers). Everyone who writes me by email receives a reply, full stop. That includes random readers of my work. Obviously I don’t have a sizable enough readership to make this infeasible; I assume Ken Follett can’t personally respond to every bit of fan mail he gets. But as long as it’s not unduly burdensome, I’m going to keep up this habit. And doubly so for emails from people I know, whether colleagues or friends or family. No email goes unanswered!

9. Every (initial) personal email gets a reply within 24 hours. This one might sound tough, but it’s really not. I’m a fast typist and I’m committed to being brief whenever possible. So once the spam and nonsense are out of the way, I reply until the inbox is clear. Then I do it again later that day (on workdays, that is). That way I stay up on it, and it doesn’t pile up to unmanageable levels. Sometimes, granted, I lack the time to do so, or I’m traveling, or an email is going to take up too much time for the length and thought required. So I email within the 24-hour period to say that I’ll be emailing tomorrow or later that week or once my midterm grading is done or after the holiday or after the semesters wraps up. That way I’m not leaving a correspondent hanging, even if I can’t get to them in a timely manner.

10. Strategic snoozing. The “snooze” button is your friend. It’s a great invention. Right now I have eight emails snoozed (and nothing in my inbox). Only two are emails I need to reply to. One is an ongoing correspondence about a paper I’ve given feedback on; the other will reappear in a couple weeks when I’m supposed to remind a colleague about something. So no one is waiting on me, exactly. Even when I’ve snoozed threads trying to find time to meet up for a meal or drinks, the person isn’t waiting on pins and needles; we both know it’s a busy time and we’ll figure something out in a month or two. Anything pressing has been dealt with; it’s the emails with longer deadline horizons, such as a recommendation letter request, or emails that function as self-reminders that call for strategic snoozing.

All this, I should say, is operative primarily during the academic calendar. I’m looser in the summer, for obvious reasons.

I should add as well that, unlike other techniques for tech management, I don’t feel constrained or stressed by these rules. They aren’t hard to keep. They’re shockingly easy, as a matter of fact. Not everyone is in similar circumstances, but something like these rules would work, I think, for most academics. Of perhaps all “laptop workers,” academics may be the most notorious for simply never returning emails, even important ones. It’s not that hard, folks! And rules like these actually keep you from being on email more. My average daily email time is 30-60 minutes. That’s doable. But I could stretch that out to just about anytime I’m in the office, if I kept my laptop open (or, when I’m writing, my email open). Were I to do that, then I’d see a new email demanding a reply every 10-20 minutes, in which case I’d never get around to anything else. It’s in service of getting around to other things—usually more important and always more interesting—that the rules are worth implementing and maintaining.

Personal tech update

It’s been an unplanned, unofficial Tech Week here at the blog. I’ve been meaning to write a mini-update on my tech use—continuing previous reflections like these—so now seems as good a time as any.

–I deactivated my Twitter account on Ash Wednesday, and I couldn’t be happier about the decision. It was a long time coming, but every time I came close to pulling the trigger I froze. There was always a reason to stay. Even Lent provided an escape hatch: my second book was being published right after Easter! How could I possibly hawk my wares—sorry, “promote my work in the public sphere”—if I wasn’t on Twitter? More to the point, does a writer even exist if he doesn’t have a Twitter profile? Well, it turns out he does, and is much the healthier for it. I got out pre–Elon Musk, too, which means I’ve been spared so much nonsense on the proverbial feed. For now, in any case, I’m keeping the account by reactivating then immediately deactivating it every 30 days; that may just be a sort of digital security blanket, though. Life without Twitter is good for the soul. Kempis and Bonhoeffer are right. Drop it like the bad habit that it is. Know freedom.

–I deleted my Facebook account two or three years ago, and I’ve never looked back. Good riddance.

–I’ve never had Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, or any of the other nasty social media timesucks folks devote themselves to.

–For the last 3-4 years I’ve been part of a Slack for some like-minded/like-hearted Christian writers, and while the experience has been uniformly positive, I realized that it was colonizing my mind and thus my attention during the day, whether at work or at home. So, first, I set up two-factor authentication with my wife’s phone, which means I need her to give me access if I’m signed out; and, second, I began limiting my sign-ins to two or three Saturdays per month. After a few months the itch to be on and participate constantly in conversations has mostly dribbled away. Now I might jump on to answer someone’s question, but only for a few minutes, and not to “stay on” or keep up with all the conversations. I know folks for whom this isn’t an issue, but I’ve learned about myself, especially online, that it’s all or nothing. As with Twitter, I had to turn off the spout, or I would just keep on drinking until it made me sick.

–I don’t play video games, unless it’s a Mario Kart grand prix with my kiddos.

–I only occasionally use YouTube; nine times out of ten it’s to watch a movie trailer. I cannot relate to people, whether friends and students, who spend hours and hours on YouTube. I can barely watch a Zoom conversation for five minutes before needing to do something else with my time.

–I subscribe to Spotify, because it’s quality bang for your buck. I’d love to divest from it—as my friend Chris Krycho constantly abjures me to do—but I’m not sure how, should I want to have affordable, legal access to music (for myself as well as my family).

–I subscribe to Audible (along with Libby), because I gave up podcasts for audiobooks last September, a decision about which I remain ecstatic, and Audible is reasonably priced and well-stocked and convenient. If only it didn’t feed the Beast!

–I happily use Instapaper, which is the greatest app ever created. Hat tip to Alan Jacobs, from whom I learned about it in, I believe, his book Reading for Pleasure in an Age of Distraction. I’ve even paid to use the advanced version, and will do so again in the future if the company needs money to survive.

–I’ve dumbed down my iPhone as much as is in my power to do. I’ve turned off location services, the screen is in grayscale, and I’m unable to access my email (nor do I have my password memorized, so I can’t get to my inbox even if I’m tempted). I can call or text via Messages or WhatsApp. I have Audible, Spotify, and Instapaper downloaded. I use Marco Polo for friends and family who live far away. And that’s it. I aim to keep my daily phone usage to 45 minutes or so, but this year it’s been closer to 55-75 minutes on average.

–I use a MacBook Pro for work, writing, and other purposes; I don’t have an iPad or tablet of any kind. My laptop needs are minimal. I use the frumpy, clunky Office standbys: Word, Excel, PowerPoint. I’ve occasionally sampled or listened to pitches regarding the glories of alternatives to Word for writing, but honestly, for my needs, my habits, and my convenience, Word is adequate. As for internet browsing, I use Firefox and have only a few plug-ins: Feedly for an RSS reader, Instapaper, and Freedom (the second greatest app ever)—though I’ve found that I use Freedom less and less. Only when (a) I’m writing for 2-4 or more hours straight and (b) I’m finding myself distracted by the internet (but don’t need access to it); I pay to use it but may end up quitting if I find eventually that I’ve developed the ability to write without distraction for sustained periods of time.

–I’ve had a Gmail account since 2007; I daydream about deleting my Google account and signing up for some super-encrypted unsurveiled actually-private email service (again, Krycho has the recs), but so far I can’t find it within me to start from scratch and leave Gmail. We’ll see.

–I have the same dream about Amazon, which I use almost every day, order all my books from, have a Prime account with, and generally resent with secret pleasure (or enjoy with secret resentment). Divesting from Amazon seems more realistic than doing so from either Apple or Google, but then, how does anyone with a modest budget who needs oodles of books (or whatever) for their daily work purchase said books (or whatever) from any source but Amazon? That’s not a nut I’ve managed to crack just yet.

–I don’t have an Alexa or an Echo or an Apple Watch or, so far as I know, any species of the horrid genus “the internet of things.”

–In terms of TV and streaming services, currently my wife and I pay for subscriptions with … no platforms, unless I’m mistaken. At least, we are the sole proprietors of none. On our Roku we have available Netflix, Prime, Hulu, Disney+, Apple+, HBO Max, and YouTubeTV. But one of these is free with our cellular service (Hulu), two of them are someone else’s account (Apple+ and YouTubeTV), and another is a byproduct of free shipping (Prime). We pay a nominal fee as part of extended family/friend groups for Netflix and HBO, and honestly we could stop tomorrow and we’d barely notice. We paid a tiny fee up front for three years of Disney+, and if we could have only one streaming service going forward, that’s what we’d keep: it has the best combination of kids, family, classic, and grown-up selections, and you can always borrow a friend’s password or pay one month’s cost to watch a favorite/new series/season before canceling once it’s over. As for time spent, across a semester I probably average 3-7 hours of TV per week. I’ve stopped watching sports altogether, and I limit shows to either (a) hands-down excellence (Better Call Saul, Atlanta, Mare of Easttown), (b) family entertainment (basically, Marvel and Star Wars), or (c) undemanding spouse-friendly fare (Superstore, Brooklyn 99, Top Chef). With less time during the school year, I actually end up watching more TV, because I’m usually wiped by the daily grind; whereas during the summer, with much more leisure time, I end up reading or doing other more meaningful things. I will watch the NBA playoffs once grades are submitted, but then, that’s nice to put on in the background, and the kids enjoy having it on, too.

–Per Andy C.’s tech-wise advice, we turn screens off on Sundays as a general rule. We keep an eye on screen time for the kids Monday through Thursday, and don’t worry about it as much on Friday and Saturday, especially since outdoor and family and friend activities should be happening on those days anyway.

–Oddly enough, I made it a goal in January of this year to watch more movies in 2022. Not only am I persuaded that, my comparison to television, film is the superior art form, and that the so-called golden age of peak TV is mostly a misnomer, I regret having lost the time—what with bustling kids and being gainfully employed—to keep up with quality movies. What time I do have to watch stuff I usually give to TV, being the less demanding medium: it’s bite size, it always resolves (or ends on a cliffhanger), and it doesn’t require committing to 2-3 hours up front. I’ve mostly not been successful this year, but I’m hoping the summer can kickstart my hopes in that area.

–If I’m honest, I find that I’ve mostly found a tolerable equilibrium with big-picture technology decisions, at least on an individual level. If you told me that, in two years, I no longer used Amazon, watched even less TV, and traded in my iPhone for a flip phone, I’d be elated. Otherwise, my goals are modest. Mainly it has to do with time allocation and distraction at work. If I begin my day with a devotional and 2-4 hours of sustained reading all prior to opening my laptop to check email, then it’s a good day. If the laptop is opened and unread mail awaits in the inbox, it’s usually a waste of a day. The screen sucks me in and the “deep work” I’d hoped to accomplish goes down the drain. That may not be how it goes for others, but that’s how it is with me.

–The only other tech-related facet of my life I’m pondering is purchasing a Kobo Elipsa (again, on the recommendation of Krycho and some other tech-wise readerly types). I’m not an especially good reader of PDFs; usually I print them out and physically annotate them. But it would be nice to have a reliable workflow with digital files, digital annotations, and searchable digital organization thereof. It would also help with e-reading—I own a 10-year old Kindle but basically never use it—not only PDFs for work but writings in the public domain, ePub versions of new books I don’t need a physical copy of (or perhaps can only get a digital version of, for example, via the library), and Instapaper-saved articles from online sources. I’ve never wanted a normal tablet for this purpose because I know I’d just be duped into browsing the web or checking Twitter or my inbox. But if Kobo is an ideal balance between a Kindle and an iPad, designed for the sole purpose for which I need it, then I may end up investing in it here in the next year or two.

My new email plan

I've written recently about my technology habits, and now I write with an update. Last week I took email off my phone, moving ever closer to the reduction of my iPhone to the basic features of a dumb phone, plus pictures/video, maps, weather, WhatsApp, and podcasts. That was why I purchased an iPhone in the first place, in the fall of 2015: to send and receive pictures and video of my children and nephews, and to get around easier when traveling. But Facebook and Twitter and Gmail and the rest colonized my phone and, in turn, my mind and, eventually, my daily habits; and this is part of my ongoing purgation of that colonization. Get thee behind me, Satan!

My iPhone's weekly Sunday morning report of usage told me my screen time declined by 30%, to an average of 49 minutes/day. I bet the next report will be even smaller. As I've said, my goal is an average of 45 minutes/day. But honestly, if I'm not texting much, and instead of reading Instapaper articles I'm reading physical books, magazines, and printed-out essays, I don't see why that number couldn't come down to 30 minutes (or fewer!). Which, for me, would be a glorious victory over Silicon Valley and all its pomp.

Decreasing phone usage would be to no avail, however, if it meant I was on my laptop that much more, precisely in order to compulsively check my inbox. So here's my new plan on that front.

I check email at four different times in the day, two brief checks bracketing two longer checks. The first brief check is in my house, early in the morning, before work (say ~6:30am): just in case there's a pressing matter or even an emergency (e.g., from a student). But my aim is a quick glance, not replying or cleaning out the inbox. The two longer checks come at ~11:30am and ~4:30pm: lunch and end-of-day. Ideally I spend 5-15 minutes at those times, responding as necessary, deleting trash, the usual mundane tasks. Then sometime in the evening before bed, say ~9:30pm, I'll do a similar check as the morning one, to make sure all is well and there aren't any fires needing to be put out before bed.

So that's four checks across 15 hours, adding up to half an hour of email time, preferably less. And in between those times, I use Freedom to block my laptop's access to Gmail—so I can't log in even if I wanted to. Finally, since sometimes replying might take longer than this daily allotment, Friday afternoons are my "catch up" day, where I'll spend whatever time is necessary taking care of unavoidable email business.

So far this plan has been extraordinarily freeing. I'm already reading and writing more, and my mind is less distracted internally. No email or laptop "breaks," since I can't get on Gmail or Twitter anyway. (I block Twitter along with Gmail during those five-hour stretches.) If I'm in my office, then I have a finite set of tasks in front of me: reading, writing, grading, or lesson prep. That's pretty much it. And the usual "filler" interstices of 5, 10, 20 minutes (or more) wasted on email are gone.

I'll report more as the weeks go by. But so far, life—professional and personal alike—with only the absolute minimum required email is just what you'd expect: wonderful.