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.
