Working in academia always felt chaotic, and that might be because I taught writing classes. Sitting down to do some grading meant pulling up 20, 30, 40 documents, all on different topics but addressing the same general rhetorical task. Tackling email could be a lot of things: answering questions about a writing assignment, writing out the plan for next week’s classes because an athlete had to travel, updating a colleague on assessment information, getting some enrollment and retention data to the chair for a hiring request. It could be all of those things, jumbled up and back to back. If I wanted to work in just one mode (answering assignment questions), then the first thing I needed to do was sort everything.
Basically, there wasn’t a routine except for the fact that I was sitting at a desk if I wasn’t standing in front of a whiteboard.
This week, things started to feel a little more like that.
The Breakdown
Like I’ve mentioned before, not all of the projects I work on can be shared until they’re done, so there’s some redaction above. I’ve tried to retain some of the labeling I use to differentiate project types though: WC for Web Content, SFN for an internal news article, TPE for an email about a new technical paper. I have a lot of writing going on. Not only did I spend nearly 35 of the 40+ (not quite 45) hours in the office this week working on some writing project, I also had a few hours of meetings about writing, writing processes and the stuff that the writing team does.
But, at the same time, most of those days are consistent in the task I’m getting to work on. I mean, a single project (writing some web content) is about 20 of those hours, chunked out in 5-7 hours at a time over three days.
That task isn’t done. It’s going into peer review next week. Maybe let’s talk about that.
All That Time… for an Outline?
Ultimately, the thing I produced out of that dark grey time was a four-page, bullet-point outline about what I’m thinking the web content will be about. It has to get through some subject-matter expert (SME) review. This is a task I used to assign in introductory technical writing tasks, so it’s not really unreasonable.
On Friday, I sent it up to the person in charge of the project for review. In total, my outline was about 3000 words. On Monday, it was about 6000 words. This is something that I was told I might work on during my first week here, seven weeks ago, and I’ve been reading technical papers and product specs, watching webinars, taking classes and otherwise preparing like crazy to write this stuff. Getting down to 3000 words of bullet points was rough.
In the meantime, some of these other, smaller projects have intersected some of that subject matter, so I’ve gotten to use the info I’ve picked up. And, those smaller projects have found their way back into this outline.
I probably can’t keep up that pace, though, since there are new things coming my way that will also need a lot of writing time.
Taking Breaks?
I still can’t quite bring myself to stop and take breaks or even take a whole hour for lunch. That habit is going to be rough to break. I taught a lot of midday classes and attended a lot of midday meetings. My office hours were usually tucked right into the middle of those things (every term, I intended use them for lunch, but always got busy). If I ate lunch, it was in a hurry in whatever gap of time I could find, or it didn’t happen at all.
Stopping to just chill for 15 minutes every few hours is also… weird. I try to force it in by getting coffee frequently enough that I have to make new coffee, scattering a 15 minute break into a lot of short walks over four hours.
But, hey, that’s led to a side benefit…
My Bodyweight in Coffee
A few years ago the university I worked at finally had money in the budget for merit raises. The first time ever since the merit raise policy was put into effect a little over a decade earlier. There was a rubric and a ranking system. Everyone was rated out of 3 points, but you could get 4 if your chair thought you did really great in one of the three categories we were evaluated on (teaching, university service, scholarship).
I got a 5 out of 3. I didn’t work for the merit raise. I just wanted to be a good teacher and a good colleague.
Averaged out over the 36 weeks of my annual contract (9-months), that merit raise equaled one Dutch Bros. basic Americano a week, for three weeks of each month.
That… kind of made the merit raise a little bit of an insult, especially when the money was put into that pool instead of into things that faculty were asking for. To be fair, the chairs of most departments made sure that everyone was highly recommended, so the raise was distributed pretty evenly across the faculty. It made it clear, though, that dumping my life into my job was only going to be rewarding insofar as I enjoyed putting my life into my job. I did, but then that became the baseline expectation for the next evaluation. I mean, if you’re not getting 30% better every year, what are you even doing, amirite?
So, anyway, I tell that story to make this point: I supplied my own coffee when I taught, either by driving through Dutch Bros. on the way to campus or by bringing my own coffee grounds and making a pot in the break room. In the seven weeks I’ve been here, I’ve consumed at least the same annual allotment that my merit raise bought, just in break room coffee.
It’s small, but it’s the little things that are really making the difference.
