If you’re a faculty member on a standard U.S. academic calendar and anything like me, this week you are thinking at least a little about the new semester. (If you finished all your semester planning and are enjoying the day at the beach, why are you reading my blog right now??) Before the summer and before the fall are the typical times when I have the occasional delusion of getting everything on my fantasy to-do list completed within 3 months. Earlier this year, the head of my dojo, who is a former management consultant, reminded me and several other students that one can think of “return on investment” in a qualitative sense in terms of both the time put into a task and the satisfaction received. ((Mark Russo, who runs the Tampa Quest Center. Nice guy, great martial arts teacher.))
Yesterday and this morning, I mentally ran through a list of things faculty do during a semester and roughly classified it by both my qualitative sense of ROI and how much time it requires. I’ll start with some typical teaching tasks before moving on to other stuff:
- Reviewing the “course policies” section of syllabi and updating them: moderate ROI, less than an hour.
- Skimming some sections of my favorite relevant college-teaching book and using that as motivation to review course objectives/structure: huge ROI, less than two hours.
- Adjusting course objectives/structures afterwards: huge ROI, less than eight hours.
- Putting all assignments and expected grading/response times on a single calendar, and then making sure they all fit in the semester and won’t cause me to weep in late October: huge ROI, less than two hours.
- Creating rubrics or otherwise writing out expectations for major assignments: big ROI, less than four hours.
- Planning a class discussion for a week (3 class hours) so that it leads to important topics by the end: big ROI, less than half an hour.
- Finding media (images, audio/video clips) for an individual class presentation: moderate ROI, less than an hour.
- Writing a moderately-detailed outline of a mix of mini-lectures and discussion: moderate ROI, less than an hour.
- Writing out a detailed outline of a 50-minute lecture for undergraduates: low ROI, ((Given typical inefficiency of student note-taking.)) one or two hours.
And some non-teaching tasks:
- Establishing a weekly schedule and communicating it to everyone who needs to know: big ROI, less than an hour.
- Making some commitment to exercise and have “off” time (part of the previous task): huge ROI, less than an hour. (“Making some commitment” will be individual. For me it’s having a long-term contract with one or more places, as I know that if I have already paid for classes, I will attend them.)
- Extending the “grading/response time” calendar from above to all obligations (meetings and deadlines), and limiting obligations on that basis, including by setting a mental limit for how many additional obligations to accept: huge ROI, less than an hour.
- Setting a priority list for writing tasks: big ROI, 5 minutes. Following Paul Silvia’s suggestions from How To Write a Lot, I now start with any deadlines and move to revisions and then other writing jobs.
- Setting up filters/rules inside my work email system to separate emails sent directly and anything that is cc’d to me but not direct: big ROI, 5 minutes.
- Setting up an online calendar system (last year, using Tungle chosen based on advice of a friend): big ROI, 15 minutes.
- Setting up and learning how to use Nudgemail for auto-reminders inside email (last year): huge ROI, 15 minutes.
- Setting up awayfind.com for vacations and other “away from work” time (several years ago): big ROI, 15 minutes.
- Setting up Google Reader and Instapaper as a workflow to save online stuff I have to or want to read (several years ago): big ROI, 15 minutes initially and about 15 minutes a day.
Some potential tasks are easy to say yes to: anything with a small time commitment and significant payback in terms of time saved, satisfaction, etc. Other things require more consideration. And my judgment of both the time required and what I think I’ll get back change over time.
Outstanding!