Day 81 - Finding the time

There is never enough time.
But the point is to make use of the time that you have to do what you want to do rather than becoming time's slave.
I have been leaving writing my blog until late (like tonight) and this has resulted in me not having enough energy to write what I want to write, and therefore I have missed days. And this is annoying because there are things I want to write about - for example, my philosophy of management, reflections on programme teams, and the responsibility of the composer - but I feel that if I can't write them properly, I shouldn't write them at all.

This is obviously all part of my ongoing battle for effective time management, and my suspicion is that this is not a battle that will ever be over but that's ok. I'm probably never going to be intuitively organised in the way that some people seem to be, but I like the idea of working on the art of being alive, and being actively engaged in the process rather than it being something that happens behind my back.

Day 49 - Laying the foundations

After a few days of rising panic, things are beginning to feel a little more settled.
This week is full of tasks I don't want to do but have to do, but as each day passes, I'm actually accomplishing things.
It feels as if it will all fall together and I will have a blueprint for the year.
What I hope this means is that I will be improvising less (at least academically - I hope I get more opportunities to improvise musically!), and that I will be correspondingly less stressed.
I hope that it means that I will have more time for myself, and that I use this time sensibly.
I also hope that it means that my students will have easier access to the information that they need without having to constantly come to me or other members of staff. That requires a bit more thought, but it's a definite goal.

I have no doubt I will make mistakes. I already made a minor one today that I will have to undo tomorrow. I will still suddenly realise that I haven't organised something far too late and be forced to work late just to make it work. But I sincerely hope that it doesn't happen quite so often!

Day 47 - Setting standards

A few years ago, my counsellor gave me some excellent advice.
She told me that I absolutely could not expect other people to live up to my standards.
To do so would make me ill, destroy working relationships and friendships, and generally make any interaction with other human beings untenable.
It was difficult advice to take, but as each year goes past, I see more wisdom in it.

It applies to my relationship with students, as well as with colleagues, and with management.
Most of all, it means I get less stressed at work.
I get angry and frustrated less frequently.

Just because my colleague is not doing a task the way that I would do it, does not make it wrong.
Just because my colleague has elected to perform a task in a less efficient way than the way that I have already demonstrated to them does not make it wrong.
Just because my colleague has elected to perform a task in a way that I regard as being unhelpful does not make it wrong.

I cannot do everything, and I cannot know everything. I cannot oversee everything.
I cannot judge everyone. This is not my place.
I struggle with this on a daily basis, and I guess that other people around me may do as well.
They may want to constantly tell me how to do what I'm doing.
They may want to constantly remind me of things that they feel that I am forgetting, or correct my priorities.

Knowing the right juncture to intervene in someone else's practice in a constructive way is an art form, and not one that just comes to you. I have enough problems judging it with myself, but in that process of developing self-knowledge, it is also helping me read other people and attempting to make that judgement with them.

Day 45 - Chill Out

After one full day back at work, I woke up feeling a bit recycled.
As the day progressed I felt more and more sleepy, and found that my peripheral vision was disappearing fast. A familiar feeling that grew in my stomach confirmed what I already suspected: I was getting a migraine. Not a proper migraine with throwing up and crushing pain in the skull, but a combination of symptoms like tunnel vision, auras, feeling sick, loss of concentration, hypersensitivity, etc. that are often symptoms of migraines.

That this has hit me after only one full day at work annoys me. I should have better tolerance for slings and arrows than this. How can I hope to survive life like a normal person if I'm so useless?

But I reflect - the worst stress is that which is self-inflicted. We do it to ourselves. Over and over again.

Day 43 - Dreadful email

Today is my last day of my annual leave and what bothers me most is catching up on email.
I have never been very good at dealing with email, or at least in keeping up to date with it.
I have literally tens of thousands of emails in my inbox dating back to the start of my employment (2008), and no real sense of how to deal with it all.
I've got a lot better at responding to email (still some room for improvement of course), but no closer to coming up with a sensible and systematic way of organising it.

How does anyone decide what you need to keep and what you can delete?
I've been so pleased that I've kept correspondence that seemed trivial at the time on a few occasions that I don't just want to start trashing everything.

I think I might start experimenting with adding an automatic rule to incoming emails, to initially filter them into folders for students, colleagues, and leave external mail in the inbox. I can see that this might be a system that gets polished over time, but I think that it has some merit. I'm thinking that I might even filter student email into year group, which would then mean that I could archive it most efficiently.

I think I'll start small and work out from there. No point trying to solve every problem all at once.

Day 34 (revisited) - There must be a better way

I headed back to work today for the first time after two weeks of leave.
Two weeks of moving furniture, building furniture, cleaning the old flat.
Two weeks of my parents' company.
Two weeks of thinking about music without having to do anything about it.
Two blissful weeks of (mostly) ignoring my email.

Halfway through the afternoon, something struck me as I was answering an email query: this feels like hard work. During my normal term-time schedule, I will probably answer quite a few email queries every day. Some of them will be quite mundane. Quite a lot of them will involve me looking up a piece of information that my correspondent could find themselves if they knew where to look. There are also quite a few bits of paperwork to address, and to file where no-one will ever look at them. There will be quite a few emails I send to colleagues that will be skim-read and then forgotten.

I want to come back to email another day, but for now at least, I'm aware of this like a warning alarm.
There must be a better way.

Day 33 - Workload (part 3)

Now we come to the hardest part of the workload, which is also the most controversial.
I think that the allocation of a specific budget of time to a specific research project kind of cuts against the grain, especially in the humanities, and perhaps most so in the creative arts. I've been writing music for almost all my life, but if I was to estimate how long it's going to take me to write this piece I have on my desk right now, I would struggle.

I've been doing some reading about managing the creative arts but haven't come to any conclusions yet. I think that it's worth chipping away at, because it enables us to put our research activities on a more professional basis, and I refuse to entertain the idea that could be a bad thing!

The typical research allocation for an academic at my institution is 130 units per year. That works out as 10% of the workload, and therefore around half a day a week (3 hours 30 minutes), but the actual allocation of this research time is problematic. Line managers don't always allocate this, and it we've been told that it is not a guaranteed allowance. My philosophy is that if we allocate specific projects with specific durations and outputs, rather than just assuming that we have half a day per week to do open ended research, we're more likely to be productive and more likely to get allocated the time.

We get an allocation (negotiated with line manager of course) for roles such as Research Centre Director, and I'm given 130 units for this (so 10% of my time again). I believe this is pretty much normal for my institution.

PhD supervision is allocated as 195 units per student across their entire study time (3 years for full-time students, 5 years for part-time students). This works out as 65 units per year for F/T PhD students, and 39 hours per year for P/T PhD students (around 105 minutes per week for F/T, and around 63 minutes per week for P/T).

On top of this there is funded research as well, and knowledge transfer, and commercial activity.
This is a bit of a hot topic in my institution at the moment, as the difference between these different areas is masked by them being lumped into one category and leads to (quite often) an undignified scuffle over how research budgets are divided. For a time, my institution regarded research as being an area that it didn't want to invest too heavily, focusing instead on industry engagement through KT and on money-making commercial activity.

KT (engagement with industry) is a difficult area for me. My specific research is problematic for any money-making venture, but also I'm not sure how I feel about how the relationship between academia and industry can be negotiated. I've recently been in discussions about establishing a KT partnership with a commercial partnership (a concert hall), but this wouldn't be an area that I'm really engaged with, and I would really only be steering the partnership. I suspect I will have more to say on the subject on the future.

Commercial activity consists, for us, mainly in our summer school activities. We currently run three summer schools, only one of which is run by our institution; the other two are run by other agencies and only use our building. This does mean that we have a steady income every year, and this has been really helpful for our research activities, and much more helpful (financially) than the REG (Research Excellence Grant), which is top-sliced to such an extent that we don't get a large amount of it. After the upcoming REF (Research Excellence Framework) assessment exercise, we will probably have even less (because my institution did not contribute in my field... a story for another day!), so this is a fantastic financial resource.

Sensibly, commercial activity workload allocation is divided into Commercial Support, which I believe would include the administration of these projects (being a Principal Investigator), and Commercial Delivery, which would involve the actual activity itself.
This division into administration and delivery enables (again) line managers to assign appropriate workloads, and should counter the standard approach of assuming that administration time is invisible in projects such as this.

There's a big responsibility on the shoulders of managers to understand and implement these allocations, and the relationship between top-down and bottom-up management of these allocations is a tricky one.
I'll have cause to talk about the difference between top-down and bottom-up management another day, but for the time being, I'll just say that the difference is primarily whether you manage allocations from the perspective of looking at the entire academic team as a potential resource amongst whom you can divide various responsibilities, or looking at individuals and managing them as such. My own perspective is that you have to start off with a top-down approach, but customise it to be bottom-up later in the process. Both perspectives have to be maintained simultaneously, rather like those Magic Eye pictures.

It's not easy, but I think it's worth the effort.

Day 32 - Workload (part 2)

Having started off yesterday talking about teaching workload, I thought that I would finish it today.

The remainder of teaching allocations include things like module leadership, personal development tutorials, and things like programme leadership, and school-wide roles.

Module leadership and personal development tutorials come with a specific allocation – you get 15 units, and 0.1 unit per student on the module for module leadership, and 2 units per student for tutorials.

I try to see all of my tutees twice every term, and I allow half an hour for each meeting, so that works out as fine, and I’m quite happy with how that all matches up.

Module leadership involves weekly tasks like collating registers, monitoring attendance, communicating with teaching teams (where relevant), updating the VLE, and making sure that everything is in place for the next week. I think that 30 minutes a week is probably enough for most modules. There’s quite a lot of admin to put in place to ensure that modules run smoothly during the trimester, and quite a lot afterwards (assessment organisation, mark collation, writing module reports), so that doesn’t leave all that much time… Let’s suggest a class-size of twenty for a hypothetical module. That gives us a total of 17 units. If we spend 0.5 units every week of the teaching term (12 weeks), that leaves us with 11 units. Allocating 1 unit to organising assessment, 2 to collating marks, and 2 for writing the module report leaves us with a total of 6 units for preparation. That’s not bad.

We have a scholarship entitlement, which I suppose charges us to keep up to date with the latest publications in our area. That comes to 65 units for the year. If we treat this as being spread out over our entire working year, that comes to around about one hour and fifteen minutes every week. That’s not a lot, but what would you say if I proposed that you spend one hour a week in the library reading journals? I’m not sure that’s something that many of us really feel that we have enough time to do in the course of our weekly routine, but I think that we really should take this seriously. Work out when the journals you read have a new issue, and plan to spend the time reading it. And if your job involves performance, I think that it’s worth considering concert attendance, if correctly planned, as scholarship. One hour a week during teaching terms comes to around 30 hours for me, so leaves 35 hours during the summer. Not a huge allocation, but one to be sensibly applied.

Much of the rest of the teaching budget appears to be up for negotiation between the line manager and the staff member concerned. There are set allocations for specific roles such as programme leader and director of student experience, but no real transparency with the hoi polloi regarding what those set allocations actually are. The official documentation says that ‘Schools differ in their organisation structures and allowances for roles such as…’ so it’s a shame that the school doesn’t see fit to issue further documentation.

And that’s our teaching allocation covered.

You’ve probably gathered by now that I enjoy this sort of thing, and that I’m planning to apply it to my own weekly workload. This isn’t an approach that will work for everyone, but for me, it’s the beginnings of a manageable implementation of my integrated academic framework.

We’ve been told that the workload allocation model is going to change, and the final tweaks are being made to it, so, to some extent, this is all a waste of time in terms of my actual institutionally supported process, but quite aside of that, this is a useful model for me to look at how I manage my workload on a weekly basis and provides the opportunity in looking at the division into different tasks in some detail.

I’ve also been thinking about the ‘missing’ 205 hours per annum unaccounted for by the WAM, and concluded that we should see them as contingency time. I don’t think that we’re really all that familiar with the idea of contingency in HE. We allocate time and resources like bus timetables are written. You work out how long the process optimally takes, and then fill your schedule to match this. If something goes wrong, we find time from our own schedule to make this up.

What if we were all going to plan our weeks but allow around 1 hour a day for which we have no plan? How much of a luxury would that be?

Day 31 - Workload (part 1)

A while ago, I said I was going to talk about how my institution calculates workloads, what that means for me, and reflections on the whole business of managing workloads.
The disappearance of my internet, and the generation of a buffer of posts to cover me until Monday seemed like a good time to actually get to grips with it, so here goes.

I am contracted to work 35 hours a week, so approximately 7 hours a day, 5 days a week.
I have 46 days of holiday every year, the timing of 14 of which are non-negotiable (public holidays, Christmas vacation, etc.).
Looking at September 1st 2014 to August 31st 2015, there are 52 full working weeks and an extra Monday. In total, that comes to 261 working days.
Less my 46 days holiday, that comes to 215 working days.
Given a 7 hour working day, that comes to 1505 working hours.

We are each assigned 1300 work units for each academic year. I have no idea where this number comes from, but it is quite clear that a unit does not equal an hour. Except it's sort of assumed that it is.
In fact it's around 69 minutes and 28 seconds.

The workload allocation model is divided into four areas: Teaching, Research, Commercial or Other, and Support.
I'll talk about teaching tonight and tomorrow, research and commercial on Sunday, and support on Monday.
On Tuesday I'll try to draw everything together and shout at it.

So. As mentioned above, each unit counts for around 69 minutes and 28 seconds of my working life.

I'm going to deal with different types of teaching first of all, and go through what they actually entail:

• Lectures: 1 unit per taught hour, with another unit for each taught hour to cover preparation/support
• Seminars/tutorials: 1 unit per taught hour, but the preparation time per taught hour decreases depending on how many of these seminars or tutorials you actually take
• Honours year projects (such as dissertations):  Here the allocation is calculated as including teaching, preparation and assessment, and falls into one of four bands. There is not very clear criteria of how to interpret these bands (and that which is given is irritatingly science-based), leaving it worryingly open to abuse. Our dissertation module includes 12 hours of supervision across the year (half-an-hour a week if distributed evenly), while another similar module on a different programme might involve only 3 hours of supervision across the year. Looking at the guidelines, they are regarded as being equivalent.

Then we look at assessment. Basically, for each student taking 20 credits, there is one unit. This means that if you are marking essays for 30 students, which is 50% of the mark weighting, you're probably going to get 15 units for your trouble (around 35 minutes per script). That doesn't seem too bad, but remember how much time you spend messing around with a marking grid, refamiliarising yourself with the topic and the specific question. Having worked that out, if you have any moderation involved, you should really be allowing some for the moderator, so you have to take that out of the allowance for each student.
Again, reflect that some modules may involve multiple forms of assessment, and may involve blind double-marking. You won't necessarily get an allocation for the time it takes you to mark.

Let's assume for a minute that we are going to be cynical about this.
Let's look at what the allocations actually mean for us as lecturers.
Importantly, for me, I can see that fewer assessments in a module will give me less work for my time. Although the calculation is apparently fair, it takes time to change gear between assessment types. One can get 'into the flow' of marking essays (as well as hitting a wall!) that will be interrupted if we also have to mark harmony exercises.
Any module that involves double-blind marking is inefficient since you are basically doing twice as much for no more time allowance.
Also, taking seminars and tutorials will not get you as much time allowance as teaching lectures. Now, I believe that the equation for working out preparation time for seminars/tutorials is generally a sensible one, but the consequence of this is that I get more allocation from teaching lectures.
The final observation to make is that if I don't change my teaching, I still get the allocation for preparation without having to actually do it.

What this means is that, according to this system:

• traditional lecture-based modules are more cost-effective than any other more interactive formats;
• it is not cost-effective to change your lectures from year to year;
• traditional essay-based assessment is more cost-effective than any other more interactive formats.

That's pretty depressing.

Let's just go back to dissertations for a second. Let's say you convince your line manager to regard the dissertation as a 'Band 2' project, which carries with it an exciting 10 unit per student weight.
You spend 12 hours across the year supervising their project, for which you will probably do some independent research on the topic yourself in order to help them on their way. You will probably mark drafts of the work, giving feedback as the year goes on. Then you will mark the thing (ours are 11,000 words and are blind double-marked). If this was a lecture-based course, you'd already be on around 25 units per student.
It's likely that we should revisit the amount of supervision our dissertation students receive, obviously!

What is clear to me, is that these things are never discussed when it comes to discussing module design. Actually, nothing is really ever discussed when it comes to module design, but that's a rant for another day. It also isn't discussed when it comes to the PGCert for teaching in HE, but it's a reality of managing staff, managing a programme, and managing one's own workload. Why is this?

I have a depressingly easy answer to that one. Nobody really understands these numbers. Academic managers (and I mean heads of department or similar here) are in the position that they are in because they published a couple of books, or have been around the block a few times, or made the mistake of catching someone's eye in a meeting when they should have been looking at their feet, not because they're skilled at admin. Some are (thankfully) but (in my experience at least) most aren't. Calculations like I have been discussing today scare many academics because they aren't (except when they are) accountants. They are musicologists and pianists and experts in literature.

The other problem is that induction programmes and PGCert programmes are not designed to train you for the realities of teaching. They are idealistic in their outlook. Which is all very well, but it's a bit like teaching a child that the world is a wonderful place full of welcoming and innocent people and then dropping them in the centre of town.

I've talked about cost-effectiveness, but how much does an hour of an academic's time cost? For anyone on my salary point (so basically anyone who is a non-probationary lecturer), the price including estates and indirect costs, is £56 per hour. That is the Full Economic Cost of my time - how much I cost the university to work for an hour.

Finally, I want to come back to this idea that we have 1300 units, but work 1505 hours per year. If we regard the difference as being spread out across the year, it comes to around four hours and a quarter per week. How much time do you spend in staff meetings, or in other similar meetings? As we will see, there is little allocation for this sort of activity, so it's probably fair enough to start viewing a unit as equaling an hour.

Isn't it? This is probably one of those questions it's not wise to ask.

Day 30 - Admirable and adorable hobbies

Today, I was sent a link to this article written by Patience Schell from THE entitled 'World less, do more, live better'. It makes a lot of good points, variants of which I have been making gestures at in my posts.

An element that immediately jumped out at me though was to think about how, in music and in other fields where performance plays a part, the time we spend organising and performing in concerts, productions, and other events becomes almost invisible.
I don't just mean the time that we spend going to concerts (although there's an argument for including at least some of that in your workload - it's not an argument I agree with 100% but I can see the logic), even when those concerts are given by your students, but I mean the time when  you are conducting the university orchestra, or stage managing the production of Orfeo, or even examining a final year performance.

The reason it becomes invisible is, I think, two-fold:

1. We do it because we love it
2. Music is still frequently viewed as an admirable and adorable hobby - a free-time pursuit

The time we spend at our desk earnestly whittling away at our latest magnum opus regarding the use of double-sharps in Peter Maxwell Davies' earlier Orcadian period (not something I'm planning to do, but it sounds like it could be fun), or even noodling away at a composition, or a teaching plan seems real, tangible, and like 'proper work'; working up a sweat directing a bunch of students making ephemeral music seems less worthy somehow.

And that's not something that is easy to change. It isn't just to do with how we think about our own work, but has a lot to do with how the society around us views work in general. The identity and role of work is determined through use, and so it's something that is in flux, and not something that can be changed by any one person. So we have to stop complaining about it, accept that it's going to happen, and get on with things.

What does this mean for the music academic? I think it means that we have to be sensible. Take care not to take too much invisible time as part of your workload. You can allow some to slip in, but if you take on a considerable amount, it will be assumed that you can do this (no sweat) on top of everything else because you're driven by our admirable adorable dedication to your art.

And it's not enough to blame management for this. Blame management for many things, but having a Machiavellian grasp of your workload is probably not one of them (and indeed, you may wish to blame management for not having more of an idea what is going on with your workload). This is something that you're doing to yourself. It's up to you to stand up and count your hours and be sensible about what you're going to expect yourself to do.

Day 23 - Predictable incident of the dog in the night-time

Following on from yesterday's post, I wanted to focus a bit on what my workload actually entails in real terms.
But I ran out of time to actually prepare this properly.

But as I started to type this, fireworks went off outside and woke the dogs up, and one of them started whining because she prefers to sleep on my bed rather than her own.
Why mention this at all?

I suppose it's a more general reflection rather than a specifically higher-education related one, but we find ourselves continually at the mercy of other people's timetables and schedules. These other people may not be able to access our schedules, or may not care about our schedules. This will never change.

You will be called into a meeting next week, only to have it cancelled the day before.
Important matters will be discussed without an agenda being issued to give you a heads up.
Your carefully managed schedule with adequate time for every task will be disrupted because someone else forgot to plan anything a day in advance, let alone as far ahead as you do.

A student will get seriously ill, or will suffer a bereavement that means you want to give them an extension that will mess up your plans (or perhaps even your holiday).
A student will not take advantage of any of the support opportunities provided during the term, but call on you at the last minute.
A student will just drop off the map, stop communicating, and basically freak out.

And, yes, a firework will wake your dog up when you really want to sleep the whole night without them pushing you to the side of the bed.

What can we do about this?
Really, nothing.
It will always happen.

So what?
I suppose it's important to factor in workload contingencies.
Some breathing space in the week which can be rescheduled.
I've never actually tried this, but I think it's worth thinking about.

In response to the other observation, about dealing with last minute cancellations,my strategy is to get into the position where you are the one arranging the meeting, assisting the drawing up of the agenda, and working out who is going to be there. Does it work? Let's see.

Day 23 - Towards a manifesto

Tonight, I just wanted to establish the beginnings of a manifesto - what I think I'm aiming for in my job.
I've hinted at it in previous posts, and it's become a theme of my interactions with colleagues recently.

I want to become an integrated academic.

• This means beginning to smooth over the crises and hiatuses of the academic year and approach something like a consistent even keel;
• This means carrying on research projects throughout the year concurrently with teaching, to the detriment of neither;
• This means establishing the groundwork for a sensible work-life balance;
• This means not being a slave to email;
• This means fire-proofing my life from the disorganisation of others and from a culture of last-minuteness;
• This means being in control of my workload.

At the moment, I have no firm idea of how I am going to accomplish these goals, and many of them are going to be trial and error. It may turn out that it isn't possible, but I won't believe that until I fail.

My biggest concern with the amount of pressure that academics are put under is where this pressure really originates. I know colleagues who have been put under intolerable pressure to fulfill bad interpretations of university policy, or just bad university policy, but for the majority of it, we do it to ourselves. And on a larger scale, as academics, we do it to each other.

I have to believe that we have the power to change this, even if it is in small ways.
And when we do, we will be on the road to professionalising a career that is in danger of becoming industralised.

Day 22 - With sinking heart, I read...

It's another short post today, around guilt and fear of failure.

Today, I had a flip through Ruth Herbert's Everyday Music Listening, and although I was quite enjoying what I was reading, and it obviously slots into my Music Psychology module, but, as I was reading, I felt a familiar knot in my stomach.

This is all so useful, but there is so much of it to read.
When am I going to do all of this?

The first chapter is largely a literature review, and I could feel an anxiety building about reading lists and budgets.
This is all so useful, but how can I persuade the library to get any of these books?
Even if I do, are the students going to read it?

I have recently been making a concerted effort to think about the first point (there is so much of it to read) as a positive aspect. I love learning, and I love reading. I love getting excited about new knowledge and new perspectives. From this standpoint, I am never going to run out of stuff to get excited about, and my entire life will be filled with these experiences of never having to stop.

I suppose it's all about goals. If you're aiming at some kind of point where you know everything that you need in order to definitively teach a subject, you're always going to be living in apprehension of the impossible climb. If, instead, you view it as a journey where the journeying is itself the point, there are only short-term goals, and the only long term goal is to keep going, to set new goals, and to spend one's life as an academic wanderer.

Day 21 - The past is a terrible place to live

Today, I have been ritualistically murdering my past.
That's a bit melodramatic.
I've been sorting through and disposing of the final batch of stuff from my loft in my last house (with the help of my parents).
Apart from a few files I've brought back to securely shred because they include student names, addresses, and phone numbers, I've got rid of a lot.
I've got rid of my undergraduate notes, and a lot of my teaching material because I have realised that my undergraduate notes are terrible, and I've got a lot better at teaching since I made those notes. There were a few things that I needed from both those collections, but I extracted them a couple of years ago.

The main thing that it made me think was about how we let the past consume us.
We worry about what we were supposed to have done but didn't.
We worry about the battles that we attempted but failed.
We are eaten up by guilt about people that we have let down, and tasks unachieved.
And, when you think about it, it's all totally pointless.

The past cannot be rewritten.

A few weeks ago, I found myself sat on some steps with a student who was talking about his regrets during that year, and I gave him precisely that advice. You can't change what has happened, and you are where you are now because of where you have been. Yes, you can learn from your mistakes, but you have to stop worrying about what you should have done, and start deciding what you're going to do.
Regret and guilt are only positive if they spur you on to do things differently now. You have to be able to shut the door on them and move on.

Having said that, you can't live too much in the future either. You can't be constantly planning for what is around the corner. That's no way to live (and as Charles Bernstein says in the libretto to Ferneyhough's opera Shadowtime, 'Just around the corner / Is the coroner' [If someone wants to check that for accuracy before I get to my copy of the score tomorrow morning, please be my guest!]).

It's good advice for students, and I think that it's good advice for an academic too. I don't believe in struggling through the teaching term so that I can enjoy the work that I do in the summer. I believe that it should be possible to do my teaching, marking, and support in a more efficient manner that allows me to continue working on research throughout the year.

We have to live in the now.
The past is a terrible place to live.
The future hasn't had toilets installed yet.

Day 20 - And sometimes you have to let yourself fall

I had wanted to post about this really interesting blog-post by judgmental observer that Lauren had posted on Facebook today, but I find that I have no energy.
I am in the middle of moving flat at the moment, and tonight find myself with little energy, so I shall put off a more serious post until I am back to 'normal'!
In the meantime, I thought I would say something very quickly about the importance of allowing yourself to chill out from time to time. Obviously, it connects to what judgemental observer has to say in terms of stopping from time to time.

If you don't stop when your body and/or mind tell you to stop, you're going to make yourself ill.
If you're ill, you won't be able to do your job anyway.
As a friend told me, when I was agonising about what might happen if I didn't sort out a problem that had arisen at work (at 9pm at night), 'you're not exactly the President of the United States' (and I'm pretty sure he takes a sick day here and there).

So sometimes you have to let yourself fall.
It's better to fall when you choose, rather than leaving it until you have no choice.

Day 19 - Pick your battles

A useful life lesson, is that you should always pick your battles.
Pick the battles that you stand a chance of winning.
Save your energy for those.

You could apply this lesson to teaching, and to how you expend energy on the students that you can 'turn around' (if it's possible to detect such potential). Perhaps that's the wrong way of looking at it. It's a matter of creating situations where those students who can see the point, will be given the tools to improve themselves, and of creating the tools by which they can do this.

For me, one of the hardest lessons to learn, has been how to work alongside colleagues and learning how to pick my battles. As the son of a teacher, I've been intensely aware of the humanity and human failings of educators for my whole life, but I wasn't prepared for colleagues to have such different (and entrenched) ideas about how to educate, how to research, priorities within HE, how to conduct meetings, what team work actually means, etc. I have left meetings where I've felt like bursting into tears, had shouting matches with colleagues, been icy and short, and (on one memorable occasion) had a former line manager threaten to send an entire confidential email chain on to a colleague that it concerned, so that they could submit a complaint to HR using the emails as evidence...

I've found the personal (and where the personal becomes the professional) interactions of collegial life to be one of the biggest challenges of the job in many ways. A counsellor I was seeing to help with depression, a few years ago, told me that I couldn't set the terms by which my colleagues lived their lives or taught, and that I couldn't expect them to live according to my standards. This was a hard lesson to learn. I had to accept that my standards weren't necessarily universal and correct. I still have a bit of an issue with that and, to be perfectly honest, I'd have to say that even now I only accept that other people have to be allowed to be wrong, but that's the stubborn emotional side of me; the intellectual side of me understands (at least I think so) and analyses the scenario more objectively.

I have learned that there are battles that can be won, and battles that are never ever going to be won, at least in the current circumstances. There is no point in tilting at the same windmills over and over again, and then being surprised when the result is the same. That raises stress levels, and only ingrains the problem with both parties. With every person you have to deal with, and with every category of topic that must be discussed, there will be the right time and the right environment to raise the subject, if it is a subject about which a meaningful discussion can be had. It is part of your job as a successful colleague and team player to learn to appreciate and anticipate this.

At the end of the day, you will have colleagues that rub you up the wrong way, but remember that you are rubbing them up the wrong way as well. Learn to pick your battles - the ones that are worth winning, and the ones that can be won - as well as learning to pick the battlefield and your allies for that battle.

Day three: Do as I say, not as I do

In my work as a lecturer, I am always telling students things that I think will improve their working lives: work out the routine that suits you, book practice rooms in advance, work in the library, try to read as much as possible, practice/compose every day, redraft redraft redraft, write ahead of schedule, and try to write a little bit every day.

If only I took my own advice.

For me, this is one of the challenges of life as a lecturer. You have the detachment to see what you, and what your students, need to do to improve your/their academic performance, but you're so busy with everything that you need to fit in, that actually doing it is quite a different matter.

I was exactly the same as an undergraduate, and as a postgraduate. I have always left writing essays, articles, papers until the last minute, and now I leave marking to the last minute as well. I have never 'written a little bit every day' even though I believe 100% in it as a way to improve writing technique. In a way, writing this blog everyday is a way of making sure that I do start following that bit of instruction, even when (like today) I forget and leave it to the last minute before I go to bed.

At the moment (and I think that this has been the case since I started the job), I have worked my own priorities around what I needed to do for the students, and I haven't stopped to reflect (and act upon that reflection) about how to organise myself so that what I do provides a better standard of teaching and support for the students. To adopt such an approach will be healthier for me, and (I believe) make me a better academic - more productive and more flexible.

So why don't I? Why is there this resistance to doing it?

Because it's terrifying.

It's so much easier to know that you can do it, than to jump off the cliff and do it. You might fail. What if this is as good as it gets? Maybe you won't be able to do as good a job if you're not doing it like you've always done it, running around like a headless chicken after deadlines that you've just seen approaching like an oncoming train.

A theme I'll come back to again and again (at least I think I will) throughout this blog is the idea of the integrated academic: where administration, teaching, and research are all part of what you do, and support and reinforce each other rather than competing. It's where I want to be, and it's where I believe I can get to. I'm tired of saying 'do as I say, not as I do'. If my advice is good enough for my students, it's good enough for me.

I'll get back to study skills tomorrow (unless I get sidetracked again). It's time to get a good night's sleep.