Tracking Your Time
We’re well into the second half of the quarter and now find ourselves looking ahead to the start of portfolio units in 131 and other culminating assignment sequences in other EWP courses. Next week we’ll have more to say about ordering your student evaluations and some general evaluations FAQ, but for this week in keeping with the spirit of care and community-building in previous newsletters, this week we want to touch on ways that you can streamline some of your teaching and recognize the limits of your time, energy, and resources (particularly this quarter).
Before we share some practical strategies for keeping boundaries around our teaching work, we also want to acknowledge that many of you are teaching 131 for the first time, or teaching in person for the first time. Both of these experiences amplify the energy and labor that go into teaching. This means it is more–not less–important for those of you in these situations to have boundaries around your teaching and to identify ways that connection and community with others–including those of us in A-011–can help support you.
Stephanie loves the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity and all graduate students and faculty here at UW have access to their resources. She likes this short essay that specifically focuses on listening to your body and how to ask for help / get what you need. (To access the link you’ll need to activate your free institutional membership with NCFDD)
In addition to listening to what you need and learning ways of asking for those things, we also want to recommend time-tracking as a way to get a clearer understanding of how much time you’re putting into your teaching and how you’re allocating / spending that time.
If you’re not already tracking your hours, we suggest that you do this in a low-key way for one week, perhaps on a post-it note that you keep near your desk or in your planner/favorite notebook. Every time you do some teaching-related work, just write on that post-it note the day and how much time (e.g., Mon, 15 min–email students; Mon–120 min–teaching class). At the end of a week, you’ll have a sense of where most of your teaching energy is going and whether you are holding yourself to the 20 hours you are contracted for.
If you are an ASE, your QJDA includes the following clause as part of your contract to teach in our program: “It is important to monitor your time management regularly. While your workload may vary week by week, it is your responsibility to notify the EWP Director immediately if you feel your workload is exceeding the average weekly hours defined by the contract so that adjustments can be made.” Even in difficult teaching conditions, it is important that we put boundaries around our time and labor based on how we are being compensated and resourced for that work. We are here to help you with this.
From Stephanie: when I have previously done this time-tracking activity (usually tracking multiple spheres of activity, not just teaching), I always learn something about how I am actually spending my time vs. how I think I am spending my time. Too, if you do this activity and discover you are spending more than 20h a week on your teaching, that is data you need to bring to a conversation with any of us in A-011 / on the EWP team so that we can support you in working within your contracted boundaries.
From Francesca: Your union, UAW 4121, offers a time-tracking worksheet broken out by activity. This worksheet is designed to help you think about your workload and anticipate if you will be going over your contracted 220 hours per quarter. Caitlin Postal has also developed a time-in/time-out tracking sheet that might be friendlier for writing down your work time interval. Caitlin and Missy González-Garduño are your two union stewards if you have questions about how this tracking relates to your workload rights.
From Missy: I’ve never been great at tracking my hours. I’m really bad at working a little, checking my phone a lot, working a little, grabbing something to eat, etc. in an endless cycle that makes it really annoying and tedious to track what is actually work. In the past I’ve strongly suspected that I was going over hours, but never worried about it much because I felt that time/energy was necessary to building a great class for my students.
Through my work with the union, I decided that I should keep a tally for at least one quarter. Full disclosure: I only ended up tracking my hours for two weeks, but even then, I was shocked by how much I was actually going over. And I knew that those numbers weren’t totally accurate, because like I said: I’m not great at tracking, so there was definitely more time that I wasn’t accounting for. Those numbers were totally eye opening for me, so I decided to do something about it.
As I suspected (and feared) managing my time entailed a lot more than just tracking my hours. I had to think critically about how I was going to spend my time every day and I had to commit myself to actually doing work during the time that I said I was. That’s not to say that I am now amazing at sitting down and doing one task without looking at my phone, or walking my dog, or any other thing that my procrastination-brain can think of, but it does help me try to eliminate those distractions and have the motivation to be protective of my time in a way that I wasn’t before.
–Francesca Colonnese, Missy González-Garduño, Stephanie Kerschbaum