Time, and the seduction of meetings

Meetings: where productivity goes to die

I love this image. The image of an empty meeting room, with the sign ‘Do Good Things’. This says everything I want to emphasise. Good things happen when meeting rooms are empty, not when they are full. This should not be news. The business world has long since understood that meetings are an absolute - categorical - waste of time. Academia - despite producing research that tells the business world just that - does not want to internalise this knowledge. Nothing productive happens at meetings. In fact, nothing happens at meetings.

Academia is full of what I think of as ceremonial meetings. Meetings where things USED to happen, but have long since stopped having any decisional making power due to restructuring of faculty and university power structures. Let’s take that great ceremonial: exam board meetings. In the old days, exam boards used to have decision making power - now, computer says yes or no and grade. It has all been decided before you step foot in the room, but because some University rule from 1922 - when exam boards last decided things - still says that exam boards must confirm the students’ results, we all sit in a room for 5 days hearing someone read out the equivalent of the football results. All numbers, all anonymised, no voting or decisions to be taken. What a giant waste of a week’s salary. Sitting in that room for one week - I actually did the calculation, combing and dividing the salary of colleagues present came to about £900,000 a day (without overheads) and I could not help but think there were better ways to spend this money. But these are not the only meetings that have become largely ceremonial. Boards of study meetings (all decisions taken elsewhere, these are now ‘informational’ one way stream to communicate things already decided). Ditto, school / faculty meetings. What about standard committee meetings, like ethics or research committee or teaching committee? Often what needs to be decided is minimal and as we learned in a pandemic, can be done both remotely and in about 30 minutes if everyone is concentrating. Not 3 hours.

What about really important meetings such as, say, academic promotion meetings? First, these happen once a year, not once a week, so a little time given over to this important service role is justifiable. They are predictable, you can schedule them at the beginning of the year. You can thus schedule your writing time around that meeting. There will be pre-reading which you allocate time for. Well, you ought to. If everyone has read the applications before hand, and there are clear criteria, this should not be the 5 hour marathon it has become. Ever seen someone start to read the applications in front of you for the first time? Let’s just say: preparation maketh the meeting. It maketh it much shorter than 5 hours.

What about research meetings amongst collaborators? Well, again, how many of these have no, or poorly defined, agendas (‘let’s have a catch up’) that can go all day or turn into some mega whine about all the things? What are the three things you need to decide? If there are any more than that, bump it to the next meeting. Short, focused, and on task. This is not a comment-more-than-a- question type of event, for the love of god, people have actual work to be doing.

No agenda, no meeting. Say it with me. No agenda, no meeting.

Frankly most meetings are not for decision making. They are for already-decided-decision-communication, and that can be done in an email, which people can read in due course, as scheduled.

People who got to a lot of meetings don’t write

Fact. If you have more than one meeting a week, you are not writing, or not writing as much as you should. I don’t mean students here, they have their allotted hours already for personal tutee meetings, and naturally you meet them in the classroom. I mean staff / University / research / stakeholder / funder meetings. All the meetings that do not involve students. People who go to meetings feel busy: they are busy, attending meetings. Any lingering guilt about not writing is assuaged by that ping of the calendar announcing yet another meeting to go to. You can fill your whole week with teaching and meetings. Boy you feel super useful, and perhaps, a little bit important.

How many meetings are too many? This depends on where you are in the pecking order. If you are running the department, this advice does not apply to you. You should probably be in a fair number of meetings - this is literally what you get paid to do, having given over most other parts of the job. Otherwise, it totally applies.

I feel any meetings are too many, naturally, but maybe you can’t get away with that. One per week: too many. Two per month? Acceptable, better for it to be two per term. Perhaps we have service roles and other faculty commitments, but if you have so many of these you ned to attend more than two meetings per month, you have too many roles, or it time to understand you can’t be at all of the meetings, all of the time. Share them out. Decide if you need to go to endless meetings to fulfil your roles or do your part. What are you actually doing there? What about PhDs? Well no-one needs to spend more than 30 minutes a week with their PhD student in general - are you feeding back on their work every week - otherwise, why are you meeting them? Again, this is not an opportunity to whine - this is not what PhD meetings are for. If you want to catch up - get many in a room and do it all at once. For 1-1 deep supervisory meetings, these should happen once a month, once every six weeks, when the student has had an opportunity to do some work and turn it in for comments.

And if you chair meetings, please have an agenda - a short one - with 3 things on it, and move through it like a hot knife through butter. Spare everyone the unnecessary pain. In my previous life I was Chair of the Postgrad Exam Boards and for boring reasons there were four of these suckers per year. FOUR. But I got them done in 30 sweet minutes, and it was glorious for everyone. This required some prep on my part obviously to check for any error in the papers, grades and so I was not faffing in the meeting. Not a problem, happy to do it. As chair is was my responsibility to fully prepare, and not waste other people’s time.

What about those meetings that ‘just pop up’? Well they don’t, not for you, because you already scheduled writing in that slot. If you had a class scheduled in that slot, there would be zero qualms about saying you could not make it. Same goes for research. It is not disposable at the whim of others. People who hold meetings that just ‘pop up’ (a) don’t write (b) are trying to dump some unexpected work on someone, and it can’t be you if you don’t go to the meeting (c) have badly thought through their time and you should not pay the price for that.

Remember, there are other ways to communicate with colleagues. Whilst meetings are seductive, they are also the number one indicator of someone who does not write. Shorter is better. Time is precious. And always, always write first.

The tyranny of email

Email: It sucks (time)

There are many things I can become quite righteous about in relation to time. Things I have little sympathy for because I feel like these are self inflicted wounds: the tyranny of email is decidedly not one of them. Email: it sucks, and it sucks your time away and it is very difficult to discipline yourself about it for a multitude of reasons. I feel this pain, although I suspect for slightly different reasons than many of you.

Email is a replacement of the letter, not snapchat. It is not a text. It is not an instant medium, yet we seem to have forgotten this very basic starting point. You SHOULD NOT be replying to emails immediately. It is not that kind of medium. Email is a very big waste of time, most of the time. And yet, and yet, oh, so addictive. I want you to visualise a dam that has burst - that is email. It is a wide open gate for the world to access your labour, unconstrained by contractual arrangements and pay. And that water never ever stops flowing in. Ever. Academics get asked to do a lot of work that is not even from their employer!!!! Can you even imagine that in any other industry? I don’t think so somehow. Yet you see every possible approach via email as something YOU MUST DO, even stuff you are not paid for and is not from your employer. You don’t have to, really.

Why is it this way?

Why do you spend so much time on email? Lots and lots of devilish reasons. You have all your notifications turned on like some Pavlovian dream. Respond on demand. The system is set up to have you perform like one of those rats trained to hit the lever to get a treat. Yet this rat is never satisfied, it keeps on hitting the lever manically to get its treat fix. Email is a treat because it is easy. It makes us feel useful (I am solving other people’s problems all day long! Hooray!), it makes us feel like we are contributing, and it provides that dopamine hit of quick wins. But crucially: it is EASY. Much, much easier than writing and research. The problem with this is those emails were not on your to-do list today or any other day. 10 other things were, and you did none, because you were on email, like the rat, tap tap tapping away.

I sympathise I really do. Although I was not an email addict, I was a compulsive solver of other peoples’ problems (that were presented, by email, as my problem - it is a wonderful sleight of hand no?). I was also someone likely to be emotionally derailed for the day as a result of a departmental circular of some kind, usually related to teaching or some new fiendish way of wasting my time invented by finance. That stuff BURNED. I was unable to discipline myself into not reacting this way, so evasive action was required. Divert, divert, divert. Do your work. Your actual work, which is on your actual list of things to do.

Controlling Email

Unlike time, you can control your email.

Most of the emails you get can go straight to trash and you should set up rules to make sure that happens. Unsubscribe rarely works, so just trash that stuff. Same with departmental and University circulars - set up folders, divert away from your inbox. Students - whilst in my opinion not the primary generator of email overload - should be directed by your signature (or in extreme circumstance, your out of office automatic reply) to the various avenues they can get the answer to their question - usually, the syllabus, or support staff, or the online learning portal, or course site, or discussion board. Wherever you collate your FAQs. You should have repeatedly made clear your email policy (don’t email me about …..) at the beginning of term. Come see me, ask me in class, post on the discussion board. I will not respond by email: that is OK - there are 700 of them (on this one course) and only one of you.

Most emails though can go straight to trash. If there are actually things you - and only you - have to action, you can mark these as to do, and make a slot in your diary to tackle them. Don’t do it NOW regardless of any stated deadline. If it was really that important (note, I don’t say urgent) they would have given you more than two days to respond. That is not your problem. Schedule and tackle accordingly. Remember: agency.

So once again, the secret is to schedule email, and crucially, schedule it after you have written. This will seem impossible for those with an email addiction so I suggest you work your way up to scheduling your email at 4.00pm, and start gently by scheduling email at 11.00am. Whatever you do, do not open email first. You should have scheduled slots to actually do the emails tasks if they are weighty. For the love of God, please do not reply all to anything, thus creating yet more emails for everyone. Keep your responses tight and short. Try not to encourage endless back and forth of never ending politeness that no-one knows how to stop except with the thumb up emoticon.

Email is tyrannical. It is time to revolt.

I can't find time to write

The next couple of blogs will be a series on ‘Time’, and the stories we tell ourselves about time. We wrap ourselves in these stories so we don’t have to face doing the difficult intellectual work of writing, but the key here is to recognise they are just that. Just stories. Not fact, not true, just things we tell ourselves (and for some, have heavily internalised as a defence mechanism to criticism).

Today I am going to start with the greatest lament of struggling writers everywhere - I can’t find time to write. Wrong. The whole premise is wrong. We don’t find time. We don’t create time. We don’t make time. We don’t lose time (it is not behind the sofa) and we don’t manage time. It is not an unruly toddler that has to be corralled.

Your whole attitude to time has gone astray right from the get-go here. We must see time instead as something we schedule. That is all we can do. Time unspools before us - we don’t create it, or find it. We can choose what we do with our time though, because we have agency - still, in these difficult times - we still have agency to schedule our time. Most working professionals do in fact possess this same agency. Of course, we have fixed slots for teaching, determined by the gods of timetabling, but after that, we decide what we do with our time and when we do it. Your synchronous teaching slots might account for 2-14 hours a week depending on you contract, position and location. That’s still a pretty small amount of a 40 hour working week.

We don’t find time. If you are working from a position of finding time, you have already lost. This is not hide and seek. Time requires us to schedule our behaviour into slots where we match task to be completed to a fixed time slot. We all know many academic tasks - especially teaching related ones - will take as long as you give them, so decide ahead of time, how long you are prepared to give to X task. Let your time allocation model be your guide. Be honest. And here is the rub - so often we are NOT honest. We don’t know how long something has taken us to do because we never set out with a particular goal in mind, and we have never timed ourselves doing it.

Let’s start with a benign example. You have to grade 100 1500 word essays. You are allowed in your time allocation model 10 minutes per essay. You set yourself a target of 30 essays this week, which requires 5 hours of marking on this calculation. That is what you must give it. Use a timer, move on, get quicker at this skill. Use rubrics, autofill comments on Turnitin, whatever strategy you need. You can give excellent feedback in that time, but it takes practice and some investment in working out how to create efficiencies that will pay you back forever. Schedule the time you require and stop when that time runs out. You should not sit for 5 hours grading - no-one should. This task should be spread out, hour to hour amongst your working week(s), to be fitted in around other tasks.

Then, move onto your next task.

That is where people go astray. They ignore the clock, the calendar, and simply continue until they run out of steam. They won’t assess how long that task took them - in fact it took them 5 hours to mark 5 essays instead of 30. That is clearly wrong. You are not paid to spend 1 hour per 1500 word student essay, and no amount of hiding inside some justification about quality will save you here. This was not a good use of your time, because you are paid to do many other things. This is exactly why agency scares people. You choose to spend your time this way. It is not that you could not find time to write. You chose to spend 5 hours grading 5 essays. You chose it.

The key to scheduling your time is to obey the schedule, and of course, put writing in the schedule to begin with. If you show me your schedule, I can find you 5 writing slots a week, guaranteed. I’ve worked with hundreds of clients and I can absolutely guarantee you that. I don’t know how long they will last, but I do know, after a couple of weeks of coaching, your schedule will look radically different than it does right now, if you let me help you populate it. The first thing I ask clients to do is show me their schedule. Some are reluctant, some are a little sheepish, some don’t even have what I consider to be a proper schedule (classes written down on a bit of paper diary is not a schedule, it is a list of your classes). A few are wildly overcommitted, in life and in work, and their obligations have to be trimmed to match what they are paid to do; some clients have only a loose understanding of what is reasonable at any given career stage. Some have massive inefficiencies in their practice that can be streamlined to enable more writing slots to be scheduled.

I don’t think this is revolutionary but experience tells me this should be said explicitly. It is no good having a schedule if you ignore it at the first opportunity - the first time someone asks you for something, interrupts you, or an email pops in, or indeed, if you delight in writing a complementary essay of feedback on the student’s essay.

People resist scheduling for all kinds of reasons, but mainly, they resist it because then - when they scheduled 5 hours to write that week (a mere 1 hour per day) and they did not do it - they can have plausible deniability as the movies say. I just didn’t have the time: oh but you did, and it is RIGHT THERE IN YOUR SCHEDULE. You chose not to. And that recognition is the first step to unwiring these writing myths - the greatest of all being ‘I can’t find time to write’, facilitated by the second greatest myth which is ‘I have no control over my schedule’.