Some of your work is scheduled. You know that you will be teaching that class every Tuesday at 2 p.m. (or whatever) for the next 10 weeks or so. You’ve probably also scheduled weekly office hours in which you will be available to students for class-related questions or general advising.
You might even have taken my advice in other posts and schedule in some writing time. Perhaps you’ve registered for A Meeting With Your Writing (btw, it’s not to late) or have some other way of making sure writing gets done.
In reality, your weeks are not that regular.
For every hour you spend in a classroom, there are several hours spent in teaching-related activity: preparing for those classroom hours, administrative duties, managing TAs, grading, and so on. Those extra hours are not evenly distributed across the term.
Similarly, committees and other service obligations don’t require the same amount of time weekly.
The uneven nature of these activities can result in frustration that your carefully made plans are going off the rails.
When your plans go off the rails
It is not that you lack willpower, stick-with-it-ness, or are otherwise flawed.
It is not just the way it is. You were not wrong to think it was possible to write during term time, or keep more sensible hours, or whatever.
Your plans just need some tweaking.
Account for the known periodic obligations
You designed that course and set those deadlines. You know how many students are in this course (± a few). You can estimate how long it takes to grade whatever it is you assigned.
Go into your calendar now and block off time for grading. That way when you are making other commitments, you are taking into account the limited time available for other activities (professional or personal) in that week. You can also make reasonable commitments to your students about how quickly you will get things back to them.
You might also look through your syllabus and note the sessions that require more than average preparation for whatever reason. Add extra preparation time to your schedule in those specific weeks.
As you schedule meetings for your service obligations, schedule some time before or after the meeting to do whatever work needs doing in relation to it. This might require adjustments as the term goes on. If you take on a task for a committee, look at your calendar and be honest about the timeline. Don’t commit to a deadline that you know requires magic to meet.
Minimum +
With a better sense of how your workload varies from week to week, determine a minimum amount of weekly time spent on writing. That might be quite small. Remember that Robert Boice’s research indicates that as little as 15 minutes a day is effective.
That is your baseline. If you get that much writing done in a week, you have achieved your goal. The plan worked.
Now look at the weeks with fewer commitments and fill in as much writing as you think is reasonable. The fact that you can’t get a half-day every week doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take that half-day that’s staring you in the face in week 3 (or whenever). Block it off now so you don’t fill that time with something else.
If you start feeling guilty about how selfish you are being in those weeks, remind yourself about all the weeks when you will have to work hard to get your minimum in. Calculate an average for the whole term if it helps.
The extra bonus to this strategy is that you can make more realistic commitments. And plan ahead for deadlines that fall in periods when you have little time for writing.
You are a smart and capable person but you cannot warp time.
If you don’t find regular small amounts to work well for you, stay tuned. These basic principles can be applied to finding blocks of time to immerse yourself in writing, too. That’s the subject for the next post. (That link won’t work until Jan 9, 2014)