Resident Theologian
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How do you spend your time in the office?
Counting hours and organizing time in the office as a professor.
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.
My new email plan
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.
My technology habits
Phone
I still have an iPhone, though an older and increasingly outdated model. When I read Crouch I realized I was spending more than 2 hours a day on my phone (adolescents average 3-6 hours—some of my students more than that!), and I followed his lead in downloading the Moment app to monitor my usage. Since then I've cut down my daily screen time on my phone to ~45 minutes: 10 or so minutes checking email, 10-20 or so minutes texting/WhatsApp, another 20-30 minutes reading articles I've saved to Instapaper.
I changed my screen settings to black and white, which diminishes the appeal of the phone's image (the eyes like color). My home screen consists of Gmail, Safari, Messages, WhatsApp, Calendar, Photos, Camera, Settings, Weather, Google Maps, and FaceTime. That's it. I have no social media apps. On the next screen I have, e.g., the OED, BibleGateway, Instapaper, Podcasts, Amazon, Fandango, and Freedom (which helps to manage and block access to certain websites or apps).
When we moved to Abilene in June 2016, we instituted a digital sabbath on Sundays: no TV (for kids or us), and minimal phone usage. Elaborating on the latter: I leave my phone in the car during church, and try to leave my phone plugged into the charger in the bedroom or away from living areas during the day. Not to say that we've been perfectly consistent with either of these practices, but for the most part, they've been life-giving and refreshing.
Oh, and our children do not have their own phones or tablets, and they do not use or play on ours, at home or in public. (Our oldest is just now experimenting with doing an educational app on our iPad instead of TV time. We'll see how that goes.)
Social Media
Currently the only social media that I am on and regularly use is Twitter. I was on Facebook for years, but last month I deactivated my account. I'm giving it a waiting period, but after Easter, or thereabouts, unless something has changed my mind, I am going to delete my account permanently. (Reading Jaron Lanier's most recent book had something to do with this decision.) I don't use, and I cannot imagine ever creating an account for, any other social media.
Why Twitter? Well, on the one hand, it has proved to be an extraordinarily helpful and beneficial means of networking, both personally and professionally. I've done my best to cultivate a level-headed, sane, honest, and friendly presence on it, and the results have so far wildly exceeded my expectations. Thus, on the other hand, I have yet to experience Twitter as the nightmare I know it is and can be for so many. Part of that is my approach to using it, but I know that the clock is ticking on my first truly negative experience—getting rolled or trolled or otherwise abused. What will I do then? My hope is that I will simply not read my mentions and avoid getting sucked into the Darkest Twitter Timeline whose vortex has claimed so many others. But if it starts affecting my actual psyche—if I start anxiously thinking about it throughout the day—if my writing or teaching starts anticipating, reactively, the negative responses Twitter is designed algorithmically to generate: then I will seriously consider deactivating or deleting my account.
How do I manage Twitter usage? First, since it's not on my phone, unless I'm in front of my own laptop, I can't access it, or at least not in a user friendly way. (Besides, I mostly use Twitter as I once did checking blogs: I go to individual accounts' home pages daily or every other day, rather than spend time scrolling or refreshing my timeline.) Second, I use Freedom to block Twitter on both my laptop and my phone for extended periods during the day (e.g., when writing or grading or returning emails), so I simply can't access it. Third, my aim is for two or three 5-10 minute "check-ins": once or twice at work, once in the evening. If I spend more than 20 or 30 minutes a day on Twitter, that day is a failure.
Laptop
I have four children, six and under, at home, so being on my laptop at home isn't exactly a realistic persistent temptation. They've got to be in bed, and unless I need to work, I'm not going to sit there scrolling around online indefinitely. I've got better things to do.
At work, my goal is to avoid being on my laptop as much as possible. Unless I need to be on it—in order to write, email, or prepare for class—I keep it closed. In fact, I have a few tricks for resisting the temptation to open it and get sucked in. I'll use Freedom to start a session blocking the internet for a few hours. Or I begin the day with reading (say, 8:00-11:00), then open the laptop to check stuff while eating an early lunch. Or I will physically put the laptop in an annoying place in my office: high on a shelf, or in a drawer. Human psychology's a fickle thing, but this sort of practice actually decreases the psychic desire to take a break from reading or other work by opening the laptop; and I know if I open it, Twitter or Feedly or Instapaper or the NYT or whatever will draw me in and take more time from me than I had planned or wanted.
[Insert: I neglected to mention that one way I try to read at least some of the innumerable excellent articles and essays published online is, first, to save them to Instapaper then, second, to print out the longest or most interesting ones (usually all together, once or twice a month). I print them front and back, two sides to a page, and put them in a folder to read in the evening or throughout the week. This can't work for everyone, but since I work in an office with a mega-printer that doesn't cost me anything, it's a nice way to "read online" without actually being online.]
One of my goals for the new year has been to get back into blogging—or as I've termed it, mezzo-blogging—which is really just an excuse to force myself to write for 15-30 minutes each day. That's proved to require even more hacks to keep me from going down rabbit holes online, since the laptop obviously has to be open to write a blog post. So I'll use Freedom to block "Distractions," i.e., websites I've designated as ones that distract me from productive work, like Twitter or Google.
I've yet to figure out a good approach with email, since I don't like replying to emails throughout the day, though sometimes my students do need a swifter answer than I'd prefer to give. Friday afternoons usually end up my catch-up day.
I should add that I am a binge writer (and editor): so if I have the time, and I have something to write, I'll go for three or six or even nine or more hours hammering away. But when I'm in the groove like that, the distractions are easy to avoid.
Oh, and as for work on the weekends: I typically limit myself to (at most) Saturday afternoon, while the younger kids nap and the older kids rest, and Sunday evening, after the kids go to bed. That way I take most or all of the weekend off, and even if I have work to do, I take 24+ hours off from work (Sat 5pm–Sun 7pm).
TV
In many ways my worst technology habits have to do with TV. Over many years my mind and body have been trained to think of work (teaching and reading and writing) as the sort of thing I do during the day, and rest from work after dinner (or the kids go to bed) means watching television. That can be nice, either as a respite from mentally challenging labor, or as a way to spend time with my wife. But it also implies a profoundly attenuated imagination: relaxation = vegging out. Most of the last three years have been a sustained, ongoing attempt at retraining my brain to resist its vegging-out desires once the last child falls asleep. Instead, to read a novel, to catch up with my wife, to clean up, to grab drinks with friends, to get to bed early—whatever.
If my goal is less than 1 hour per day on my phone, and only as much time on my laptop as is necessary (which could be as little as 30 minutes or as much as 4+ hours), my goal is six (or fewer) hours per week of TV time. That includes sports, which as a result has gone way down, and movies (whether with the kids or my wife). Reasonable exceptions allowed: our 5-month-old often has trouble getting down early or easily, and my wife and I will put on some mindless episode of comedy—current favorite: Brooklyn 99—while taking turns holding and bouncing her to sleep. But otherwise, my current #1 goal is as little TV as possible; and if it's on, something well worth watching.
Video games
I don't have video games, and haven't played them since high school. We'll see if this re-enters our life when our kids get older.
Pedagogy
I've written elsewhere about the principles that inform my so-called Luddite pedagogy. But truly, my goal in my classes is to banish technology from the classroom, and from in front of my students' faces, as much as is within my power. The only real uses I have for it is PowerPoint presentations (for larger lecture courses to freshmen) and YouTube clips (for a certain section of my January intensive course on Christianity and Culture). Otherwise, it's faces looking at faces, ears listening to spoken words, me at the table with the students or up scribbling on the white board. For 80 minutes at a time, I want my students to know what it's like not to constantly be scratching that itch.
Spiritual disciplines
All of this is useless without spiritual disciplines encompassing, governing, and replacing the time I'd otherwise be devoting to technology. I note that here as a placeholder, since that's not what this post is about; perhaps in another post I'll discuss my devotional regimen (which makes it sound far more rigorous than my floundering attempts in fact amount to).
I have been helped so much by learning what others do in order to curb and control their relationship to technology. I hope this might be helpful to others in a similar way.