Day 11: Office Space

Before I start on today's post proper, I'd like to thank everyone who has taken the time to say nice things about this blog. I really appreciate it, and it means a lot that people find it useful(!) and interesting. I hope it continues to be so.

I spent most of today in the office, sorting through all the paperwork that I had accrued. Last summer, we moved campus, away from a spacious monstrous former mental hospital with glorious views across the city (but lamentably far from the centre, which meant that getting anyone into the place for concerts was a nightmare), to a 1950s/60s concrete campus with no real views to speak of (but with excellent transport links to the centre). I was moving from my own office, in which I had enough space to teach maybe two people at a time, and which I used to store my books, CDs, LPs, and score collection, to a shared office, in which I wouldn't be able to teach anyone, and had one desk and one bookcase. A difficult adjustment.

I threw away a lot of paperwork when we moved, and kept only that which I thought I would need for future teaching etc. Going through a lot of it, and chucking quite a lot of it, I was struck with how my teaching had changed. I have moved away from handing out photocopied chapters of books towards scanning them in to the computer. The subjects I teach, as well, have moved away from those where looking at entire movements of Classical works in sonata form was the order of the day, to where I focus on ideas about music, and which often assume knowledge not just of Mozart, Beethoven, and Bach, but also of David Bowie and Katy Perry. Another big change that has impacted on what I view as essential to keep in my paperwork has been my increased use of imslp. Now, instead of copying a whole Schumann song for the whole class, I can put a link on Moodle to one (or more) public domain pdfs that they can download. I especially love the inclusion of manuscripts where this is possible.

Most of my books went home (and more of those that I kept at work will be coming back here as well shortly), as did all of my CDs, LPs, and scores. I miss being able to reach over to my shelf mid-supervision and grab a score or book that illustrates a specific point, but it hasn't been too much of an issue so far. I make a note to bring it in to the next session usually. I think in many ways it has encouraged me to work without clutter.

You are probably familiar with working from within clutter. For me, it's a bit like building a nest. If I'm surrounded by those things which feed and support my practice, it's a metaphor for how I work I suppose. But it's not logistically or psychologically necessarily the best place to be starting from. When you can't find room on your desk to work, or you can't balance another thing on your shelves because of all those books, what exactly are you trying to achieve? Working from within clutter is how academic hoarding starts.

Pretty early on in the new office, I relegated my desktop computer to hiding behind my little drawer thing under my desk. I got rid of the monitor and the keyboard, and I only used it as a remote desktop. I take a tiny little laptop into work with me now which is a lot faster, takes up a lot less space, and I can take it home easily with me. My next step, which I took today, was to move my trays from my desk to my cupboard/bookcase. This means that the only things I have on my desk are my printer, and my phone. If I can wire myself up to the network a bit more efficiently, I may even start using the shared office printer and ditch mine altogether. I want to have as clear a desk as possible. Why? I feel like I need space to think and space to work. Also it makes it easier to clear up the mouse poo.

When I was talking about home working, I said that I think it's important to work out which tasks are better achieved at home, and it's important to do the same when working in the office. Have a think about the tasks that you try to achieve in the office. What do you need to get them done? Is that what you have near to hand? If not, what do you have? Why do you have that? I'm working my way down to having a few books (especially those I use a lot, and that aren't in the library here) on the top shelf, my tea/coffee things with my in/pending/out trays (which I promise to myself I will actually use) and my scrap/manuscript paper on the second shelf, folders for documents (like historic external examiners' reports, my copies of signed travel forms, and those photocopies of teaching materials I still want to keep) on the third shelf, and student work to be marked/filed at the bottom. If I use the draws under my desk for stationery, then what can go wrong?

I also have made sure that I've got a few personalised touches. There's nothing that depresses me more than an anonymous desk, as if you're not an academic but you're a hot-desking telephone salesperson. I like to be able to look up from my work on my clear desk and look at a postcard of a painting, or to be able to get a colleague's number quickly, or to connect to another facet of my life.

I have thrown away a lot today, and I expect I will throw away even more on Monday. I've discovered things that I had forgotten about, and recognised connections between what I thought were random ideas that I filed away and some of the things bumbling around my head at the moment. Most of all, it made me think about what the office was for, and what I wanted it to be. So much of university life is a messy compromise, and I feel that making my own existence messier only leads to more logistical compromise. And that's just not necessary.

Day 8: Working from home

The problem with working from home is that, well, you're working from home.
In many ways this is brilliant, because it means that you can organise your own day and your own routine. You don't have to pack your own lunch or rely on canteen filter coffee, or that someone hasn't taken your milk from the fridge. You can have music on, talk to yourself, and generally just get on with things.
But (and this is something I don't think you should forget) you are not at work. This is not your office.

I don't want to really lay down the law here because everyone works in a slightly different way, but unless you're going to treat your workspace like it's a sacrosanct workspace, there are going to be distractions, whether that's flatmates, spouses, children, parents, animals, etc. How do you let people with whom you share your living space know, without being tetchy, that this is basically your workspace? How do you let the dogs know that you can't walk them right now because you're in the middle of reading an article by Habermas? Being rigid about these things isn't going to end well. And after all, aren't you working at home to avoid the rigidity of the office? Chill out.

I aim to work from home for two half-days a week now during teaching term. During the third trimester (June-August), I generally now work three days at home and only two days at the office. Since we moved to a communal office, I have had far less space to store my books, scores, and audio so had to invest in a lot of shelving for my flat. Now, if I want to look things up, I have to either be in a library or at home, and home is easiest. I want to talk about the pros and cons of a shared office another day, so I won't get into that now, but there are few things to say about home working.

1. Determine some tasks that you want to accomplish during your day. Don't just let things drift along. It will be harder to motivate yourself unless you have clear goals and targets.
2. Some tasks are better suited than others to home working. Make sure that you're doing them when you're working at home. Exactly which tasks these are will depend upon you, so think back to the last time you felt really productive at home. What were you doing? Now do the same for the office. This is a good indicator.
3. Make space to work at home. As I write this, I am sat at my kitchen table which is covered with pieces of paper, a spare keyboard, a very large pad of graph paper, and a couple of books. There is not very much table space. This is bad. Don't be like me and work in clutter. Aim to work in clear space. This ties into point 1 and will help stop you getting distracted by other tasks.
4. Try to keep a handle on how long you're working. There's nothing worse than feeling guilty about time spent away from your desk, and you will often punish yourself and spend more time at your desk to compensate. You wouldn't act like that at work, would you? Just keep track of how long your breaks are and aim to work for your scheduled hours every day (mine, excluding lunch of course, is a seven-hour day). At the end of this time, stop.
5. Don't let work take over home. This addresses almost every one of those points above. I pursued this job because I love it, and I enjoy it, but I do aim to have a life sometime. I'm not saying that you shouldn't compose 'after hours' or read or whatever, but don't flog yourself. Try to make some time and space for life.
6. Final point: your institution will probably have paperwork to cover them should an accident happen. Fill them in. It saves hassle in the long run, and forces you to address point 3 a bit more directly. I suspect that hardly anyone fills these forms in or knows what to do with them when someone else hands them one, but that's not the point.

There are plenty of other things to talk about today, including a new Universities minister (who has a PhD I note, as well as a lot of other things on his plate), and my own institution in the news regarding advertisements for zero-hours lecturers. I will probably return to these at a later date, but for today, I've mainly been thinking about what I think I can accomplish while working in a mess.

Day 5: Looking ahead

Today, I've been thinking about proposals for conferences and working out how they might fit into my teaching and researching schedule for the next year. I want to talk more about conferences another day, but for the time being I'd like to go on the record as saying that they are a Good Thing.

Conferences get you out of where you are now and into the company of people who are thinking about the same subject areas that you are. Different people (normally). You may have wonderful supportive colleagues, but it does you good to see different people and talk about different things. I often think about how little time there is to reflect on what I teach, and on how I teach, let alone on what I research and how I research, and conferences give you the opportunity, divorced from the usual distractions of office banter and student cries for help, to look at what you're doing and think outside the box.

Right now, I've got a few examples of opportunities for reflection that are related if not similar. At the moment, the windows of our office are being replaced, so for at least some of next week, I won't be allowed in my office and I have cleared my desk (literally) in preparation for this. I would usually be working from home for most of the week during the summer anyway, but I had planned to be in on Monday and Friday. If the office is accessible on Monday, I'm planning to file away a lot of student work so that I have some spare shelf space. I also want to clear my desk. Again, office space is something I want to talk about, particularly the perils of sharing a communal office, but for today, I just want to say that space is valuable, and I have allowed myself to get too cluttered. It's time to change that.

I also have been asked to take all my holiday before September. This is a bit of a new experience for me, as, previously in the summer, I tend to do a little bit less work and don't officially take my holiday (so that I can come in as and when I'm required). This year I have taken as much holiday as I think I can take without causing problems for meetings and marking. I still have nearly two weeks left over. I think I'm going to spend my time writing music and writing a book proposal, and I'm rationing my email checking. Strictly speaking, that's still work, not holiday at all, but it's a holiday from the requirements and necessities of work and focusing on my own work priorities which take second place during term time.

I've been looking over a list of proposed topics for these blogs as well (in no particular order):

1. Powerpoint slides (good/bad practice)
2. The National Student Survey (NSS)
3. Hearts & Minds
4. University politics
5. Research (what is)
6. Disposable practice
7. Methodology
8. Essay structure
9. Discipline/self-discipline
10. Programmes
11. University as a Business
12. Teaching synthesis & induction
13. How to recognise good teaching in HE
14. Holidays
15. Email
16. Office space
17. Conferences
18. Strikes/unions

If anyone has other suggestions, please let me know. I'm not going to methodically work through this, and the subject of my posts will normally depend upon what I've been talking about or thinking about or doing during the day.