Timeboxing

Timeboxing is the technique of allotting tasks to very well-defined and usually short periods of time, or boxes. You might also call it microcheduling. During the winter break I am going to be doing some of that as I work to get a lot done before classes start on January 17. If I can fit in three or four 25-minute sessions almost every day between now and January 17, I could get an amazing amount written.

As the image of Sugar Ray Robinson suggests, I like the pun of "timeboxing." Putting on the gloves and sparring with time itself. A boxing match consists of three minute rounds with one minute breaks.

Preparing in Real Time

I can prepare a class in about the same amount of time it takes to teach that same class. In other words, I can take an hour and 15 minutes to prepare a class of equal length.

This excludes the extra time it takes me to read a lengthy novel, for example. If we are reading 60 pages for a particular day, then I would need an hour to read those pages, and maybe another half an hour to 45 minutes to prepare the actual class.

Sometimes, preparation is quicker because I have materials from previous semesters that I can use. Sometimes, it is much slower because the material is all new. Prep can be broken down into two aspects: knowing the material and planning the actual class.

I can grade x number of papers in an hour. Maybe 1 graduate paper, 2-3 undergraduate papers, 4-6 short compositions, etc...

So finitude ought to be possible with teaching as well as with research. If I teach five hours a week, I can spend five hours preparing and an average of two hours grading. That is twelve hours. Add meetings with students and other extras, like answering emails from them, that is about 15, if I don't have to read novels.

If I were better organized I am sure I could spend less time and be a better teacher than I am now. For example, I often just reprepare a class instead of using perfectly fine material I once prepared, simply because I cannot find it.

I am writing about this because I think that teaching is the missing link in the management of scholarly writing. I hear people say they cannot get other things done because they are teaching, or because the semester is too busy... Even I fall into this trap sometimes. If you treat teaching as a finite activity, requiring a certain number of hours, and you schedule those hours, then you will be able to see what time you might have for research. For example, if you are teaching 3 rather than 2 courses, then my twenty hours might be 30.

Refi

We refinanced our house today, converting a 30 year loan into a shorter term note. While we were at it, we got a better deal on home insurance AND auto insurance, so we came out of the day in much better financial shape, only having to pay a little more a month in our house payment, and quite a bit less in insurance, while cutting years off the loan. Not only that, but I got some writing done.

Money, like time, can play some nasty tricks with your head. For some reason, both are hard to perceive accurately. What I mean is that it is very difficult to estimate costs or time frames accurately. We overestimate the time something will take, making an hour's work seem like twenty, but also let time slip away through inaction. Those two impulses might seem contradictory, but they are really part and parcel of the same dynamic, since we procrastinate when that one hour of work looms larger in the imagination than it should.

If I gave out money management tricks, they would be very similar to my time management ones. In both cases, it is all about how to perceive these quantities accurately. With money, as with time, I like to do things ahead of time, paying bills as quickly as I can, minimizing debts. I have to be quite adept at it, because I am paid only 9 months of the year and have to allocate extra funds for the summer. I spend a lot of time just transferring funds from one account to another in order to maximize my savings through a fairly complex system. As with my work time, I am always tweaking my finances for optimal results.

300 Hours

I'm going to try something different for my next project, Lorca: modelo para armar: devote about 300 hours to getting a good first draft. Approximately 100 days at 3 hours each, to produce 140 words an hour, for 7 chapters of 6,000 words each. I will check off each hour I spend on this project. I'm writing in Spanish so the work will go fast.

Streamlining

I often feel the need to streamline, to do things even more simply than before. Streamlining is reducing clutter, routinizing tasks that should be routine, removing unnecessary obstacles. Summer is a good time for streamlining because you can think back to your routine in the school year and think: "Why do I do things in such a roundabout way?"

I'll have a streamlined semester in the fall, because I am teaching a class on Wed. evening, once a week, and only one class on T/Th. I should be able to come up with a work plan in which everything for my two classes grading and prep, can be done in a few blocks of time on T/W/Th. 3 hours on each day, for example. If I have the discipline to do that then I will be in great shape.

Efficiency

One way of looking at the problem of efficiency is to fit the most work into the least amount of time.

This isn't quite right, though. Let's try this again.

There are 168 hours in the week. What you need to do is find between 6 and 15 very good hours of writing somewhere in these 168 total hours, where three two-hour sessions, (MWF say) and five three-hour sessions, (MTWTF) are the minimum and maximum. Looked at in this way, the problem is finding the best 10 hour out of 168. The problem, then, is having too much time, not too little. It's a problem of finitude. Let's cross off 56 hours for sleeping. That leaves 112. Much better. Now you only have to choose the best 10% of your waking hours.

There is no point in writing during the time of day when you are feeling the worst. If you work well in the morning, take advantage of that. Since there are plenty of hours in the week, the problem is not really time at all, but energy. A morning hour might be four times better than a 4 p.m. hour.

Write in the Morning, Research in the Afternoon, Plan in the Evening

I often plan in the evening. For example, I might make a list of things to do the next day, or rewrite my plan of action for finishing a project. These planning sessions do not produce any actual writing, but I find they are tremendously productive.

I like writing and rewriting my plan of when I will write what chapters. It keeps me on track and motivated, and allows me to see my weekly, monthly, and yearly goals with great clarity. If you have a very mild form of obsessive-compulsive disorder, as I do, it can be very reassuring.

Where Did the Day Go? (2)

The idea here is to chronicle a day and see where the time escapes to. To see how much "dead time" there is in a typical work day.

Monday morning (March 14).

7-8. Got up. Showered and dressed. Check email. Made and drunk coffee. Cleared snow off car (WT?) and drove in to work.

8-9. Graded rewrites of papers. Why do students rewrite papers and not even address what was wrong in the first place? (WTF!). Xeroxed exam to give at 11. Wrote course description for Fall course on idioms and proverbs. (Checked what other course I'm teaching in the Fall. Ah, joy, advanced composition and grammar!) Checked itinerary of speaker coming on Thursday. Started this post.

What I'm learning so far is that the 8-9 a.m. hour can be very productive, despite the snow.

9-10. Saved Zambrano chapter and sent to myself as email attachment. Read a post on Thomas's blog "Research as Second Language." Began to read introduction to Ellas tienen la palabra for my afternoon seminar. Wrote email messages with feedback on two student presentations. No dead time yet though perhaps too much multi-tasking. Tweeted a proverb. Where is that student from Arkansas with the 9:30 appointment with me? (WTF? Maybe it's the snow.)

10-11. Continued to read for Graduate Course. Spoke briefly with my department chair. Read posts on Clarissa's blog. She links to my post on cultural capital! Took break for coffee (10:30-10:50).

11-12:20 Gave exam while continuing to read for Graduate Course and make some notes on revising article in chapter version. Also looked at Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor which will be useful for next Fall's course.

12:20-1. Ate lunch. Talked with Jake.

1-2. Checked in on the Wriing Group. Then some dead time randomly checking blogs. Then wrote some notes to myself on how to revise my Zambrano chapter and a blog post at my other blog on the 1930s. Read some more poems for the 3 p.m. course. A little more dead time to tweet some aphorisms. Another blog post on Lakoff and Turner's More than Cool Reason. Ordered a book from library. What I'm learning is I'm really efficient so I can do this quickly and then waste some more time inefficiently.

2-3. Checked in with the Stupid Motivational Writing Group. Had coffee with my departmental chair. Then some dead time. Then reading for class, with random thoughts about what I should say about gender, sex as identity, sex as desire.

3-4:20. Graduate Class.

4:20-5. Some decompression time after class. Checked in with writing group (good work, fellow writers!). Drove to Massage Envy.

5-6. Massage.

6-8:30 Drinks with friends and dinner.

8:30-9:15. Checked in with writing group, answered misc. emails that had accumulated since 4;30. Looked at little at my Zambrano chapter, deleting some extraneous material from it.

9:15-11. Tinkered around. Watched some netflicks videos without settling down on any. Took a shower. Listened to music.

11 bedtime.

Where Did The Day Go?

You might want to (once in a while) keep track of where the time went on a particular day. Just like with money, if you get $100 out of the ATM, you might wonder two days later why you have no money left in your wallet. You could figure out where you spent that hunnard bucks if you had a small notebook with you at all times and kept track of every cash purchase.

You might be surprised where that time went. You might have had an hour where you got a whole lot done, or another hour spent waiting around and not getting anything at all done. The 12 hour day might have been 9 hours, with some "dead time." There's nothing wrong with that, except that you might want to know. Once you know, you can figure out if you need to change anything in how you manage the flow of time during a particular day.

Tiredness

Have you ever been really tired when all you've done is attend pointless meetings where you did not have to do very much, or wait for a plane, or wait around for other people to do things so you can complete the next step of a process? You can expend energy in those activities; you might even call them work, if they are part of your day at work and more or less mandatory. You are tired afterwords, yet you did not even try to get anything done. You are not tired from working, but from not working, which is extremely wearisome. You could say: "I did not work very hard today, and as a consequence I am very tired."

In contrast, you might write for two hours first thing in the morning and not feel tired at all. If you are doing it right, you might have even more energy for the rest of the day to go out guiltlessly and do other things unrelated to your writing. It might sound like heresy, but you do not need to be mentally fatigued and emotionally spent after writing for a few hours.

If you sleep well, then you will be well-rested and be ready to write the next day. There is no point in bragging about how over-worked you are, so much that you are losing sleep. That's like boasting about not being able to work, since chances are that your work after an unrestful night will not go as well. When I am sleep-deprived I barely get through the day, through the classes I have to teach, and nothing more. Nothing to brag about.

***

A related point:: if you exercise for an hour, you will more energy, rather than less, the rest of the day. The exercise will not tire you out physically the way waiting in an airport will. Fatigue comes more from not exercising or from overdoing it. After exercising, rest is more restful.

Feast or Famine

"Feast or famine" is a colloquial expression in English referring to events irregularly distributed in time. Feast or famine writers get very little done most weeks and months, but have periods of two or three days when they try to make up for what they haven't done. They realize they are up for tenure and try to write three or four extra articles all at once. This does not work.

Their scholarly base might be very strong; they might spend a lot of time reading and very little time writing. The problem is that a feast or two does not make up for the lean times when nothing gets done. These are the writers with huge gaps in their cvs.

Busy-ness or Accomplishments?

How do you want to be judged, by how busy you appear to be or by how much you get done?

One way of judging how hard you are working is by how much of your time is occupied. The other way of judging is by looking at how much you accomplished in a given week / month / year / career.

So do you say "I worked 70 hours last week!" or do you say "Last week I finished an article!" Note the difference.

Now maybe you worked 70 hours and finished something too; that's great, but only the accomplishment really counts, in a way. The rest is what you had to do to get it done. You wouldn't judge how much you wrote by how many bottles of fountain pen ink you went through either, or your success in sales by how much gas or shoe-leather you consumed.

Create Ideal Conditions / Work in Real Conditions

Set up your work conditions to be ideal, in terms of space and time. Develop your scholarly base; have all your work materials that you need on hand when you work. Sharpen your pencils.

***

But don't wait until everything is ideal to start working. Work anyway, because there will always be conditions that are less than ideal in some significant respect. For me, for example, I often don't have the book I need on hand. I could be more organized, but I am not. Somehow I out-publish people who are much better organized because I don't let things like that bother me and I don't make excuses for myself.

Plan for the Best, Plan for the Worst

What I mean by this maxim is that you should make an optimistic plan for completing work on your current project. For example, I could probably finish by December of 2011 if everything works out. That optimistic plan is highly motivating.

But if I have unforeseen difficulties and don't meet that deadline, I have still planned for the worst case scenario, which is that is will take me longer. Working steadily but inefficiently, I will still get something done; I will still meet external deadlines (just not my own). Planning for the worst outcome in the first place is counterproductive, however. If my best case date for finishing were 2012, then I might not finish until 2013. My goal now is to see how much gets done by December of 11, but if I don't meet that I will still be in good shape.

***

You can string together enough "bad" weeks, where you are less productive than you might have been, and still make substantial progress. A bad week, maybe you only had 1-3 days where you made substantial progress, as opposed to 4-7. It doesn't matter. A totally uninspired day of writing still makes its contribution. In fact, I think those bad days are even more significant than the very few days where the muse or duende actually descends upon you.

2 hours / 400 words

If I work about two hours on a document, the word count will increase by 400 words. That means that I can write 50 words, or about two sentences, in about 15 minutes, while at the same time fixing other, previously written sentences. Sometimes I throw away whole sentences, so this 400 words takes that into account also. (Rough notes might be faster--but rougher.)

An article is about 6,000 words, so it could be written in 15 writing sessions @2 hours. Let's say that's three weeks of work, at a pretty hard pace. Two hours of writing is a lot; it is mentally taxing. To do that 5 days a week is hard work.

Since I like to take into account the fact that I might be faster than average, let's double that to six weeks. You want to be realistic about how long something is going to take. At the same time, being realistic means not just giving yourself enough time, but also avoiding the trap of giving yourself infinite time. I like giving myself 2 months for something that might take 3-4 weeks. Then I feel great about how much I get done. Or I get it done in two months and still meet my internal deadline.

You can be an extremely slow writer and still get enough written, since steadiness and regularity are much more important than speed. Endurance itself creates speed, in the sense that the manuscript will grow faster with more regular work.

Planning to Complete the Paper

Suppose you want to get a chapter or article written in the next two or three months--that's the situation I'm in. You can think about that in terms of hours at the computer it will take you to write it, or in terms of months. It might only take your 30 hours to complete it, so two months seems like an absurdly long time. 30 hours in 60 days! What could be easier? That's an average of half an hour per day. Yet most scholars take much longer to produce their work. Part of the problem is that there is too much time. In other words, it is hard to figure out where those 30 hours are going to come from, simply because they might come anywhere. 12 a.m. to 1 a.m. on Wed. Sat. and Sun., every other week, and 1-5 p.m. every Sat? That might get it done, as long as you realize the weekend you lose to house guests... The key is finitude.

That's why I've been keeping track of my work during each week. Months are too long for this kind of planning, but if every week you make significant progress, then there shouldn't be a chapter that takes more than a month or two.

Who Cares How Many Hours I Work?

According to the general public, a college professor works about 15 hours a week. Maybe 6 hours in the classroom and another nine preparing class and grading. Summers off, ample time between semesters...

According to the academic, the work-load is 50-60 hours a week. Research, committee work and other departmental obligations, peer review of articles...

I think both of those are wrong ways of looking at the problem.

Who cares how many hours an academic works?

40% of my effort is supposed to go to research. (Time, or effort? I'd say effort.) A good research year for someone in my field would be 2 articles and some measurable progress toward a larger project (book.) Or one article and even more progress. So a few Sundays ago, Oct. 3, I spent about an hour finishing the conclusion and introduction to a chapter. It shouldn't really matter whether I spend 1 or 6 hours on research on a given day. What matters is the task, not the time. If I am more efficient, so be it.

Teaching (teaching, preparing, grading), takes the time that it does. Service tasks take the time they do and I get them done very efficiently. What if I worked a ten hour week on a particular occasion (in the middle of the summer) and made a major breakthrough in my scholarship? Was I lazy that week? If someone asked you what you accomplished in a particular day, would you respond with a number of hours or with a list of things accomplished? Are you more impressed with someone with a long list of accomplishments or with a time-sheet showing a lot of hours put in at the office? If someone had an impressive list, you could pretty much ignore her time-sheet, right?

Academic life is increasingly cluttered. Academics take on huge commitments that aren't either teaching or research. Some of these activities are extremely valuable, so I'm not knocking those, especially if they contribute directly to these primary missions.

***

Of course, some people think scholarship in the Humanities is not worthwhile in the first place, but my contract says I am to do it and I intend to keep on with it.

***

Maintaining the scholarly base is itself a full-time job.

Work Done: Oct 1-7

I liked how it worked to keep track of tasks accomplished during the final part of Sept. Remember my theory that you could get a lot done by doing just one thing a day, if you actually have enough days of doing that?

Remember: "Writing is hard, but the hardest part of writing is the easiest part, which is sitting down to do it." Since most of my work is writing some way or the other, if I sit down to do something often enough then tasks will get done.

If you write every day, then you will write every year too. See how that works?

Fri. Oct. 1. Worked on "Verse Paragraph," Chapter 8 of my book. Wrote a solid first paragraph of the conclusion, and half of a second.

Oct. 2. Continued to work on this; conclusion and introduction done except for final paragraphs of each. Jiménez section done except for some missing references. I'm "smelling" the end of this chapter in a few weeks.

Oct. 3. Finished intro and conclusion to aforementioned chapter. That's the bread of the sandwich.

Oct. 4. Nothing much. Teaching and blogging, but I can't say I got one significant thing done.

Oct. 5. Wrote a confidential document of 250 words; did substantial work on "Verse Paragraph": finished footnotes, bibliography. I can really smell the end now.

Oct. 6. Finished "Verse Paragraph"! On a teaching day at that.

Oct. 7. Nothing! I did get some comments on my chapter finished the day before, though. That was wonderful. Thanks, Carlos! I gave a short talk in my dept. on Stupid Motivation and attended a dept. meeting.

So in seven days, I had 4 days with 1 thing accomplished, 1 day when I listed 2 tasks, and 2 days with nothing much done. In the bigger picture, I finished a chapter and wrote a short confidential personnel document.

See also this post.

Happiness Base*

You don't have to be happy to produce scholarly writing, and producing scholarly writing doesn't produce happiness either. I'm living proof of that. Feelings of dissatisfaction often come at times of professional success. I noticed some disturbing symptoms in myself recently so I made a list of things to work on immediately:

caffeine / alcohol
exercise
meditation
internet
socializing
diet

Regulating time spent on internet (randomly) and coffee use; having one beer or glass of wine with dinner (or none) instead of two; exercising daily and beginning short sessions of meditation; making sure I meet with friends more often and eat better food. All of these things are mostly within my control. I have that list on a piece of paper at my desk to remind myself.

These factors alone won't make me happy, but they might bolster the happiness base, which in turn contributes to the management of everyday life and the scholarly base. Severe unhappiness can make me unable to work or to enjoy the fruits of my work.

***

*The concept of the happiness base is from the poet Kenneth Koch, who attributes it to a friend of his whose name escapes me at the moment.

Work Done: Sept. 19-30

To attempt to put myself on the line and keep myself in line, I kept track of the work I completed during the last days of Sept. My theory was that if I got one significant thing done each day, I would be in good shape. I'm not including the teaching or preparation of classes, grading of short quizzes, answering emails, attending meetings, or blogging. Only definable tasks of some significance.

Sun. Sept 19. Completed reader's report for [name of journal redacted]
Mon. Sept. 20. Completed 500 word statement about [redacted for confidentiality]
Tues. Sept. 21. Graded complete set of papers for Spanish 453. (17 5-page papers.)
Wed. Sept. 22. Made serious progress on "receptivity" article. / Wrote course description for Spring Grad course (340 words). / applied for job at [redacted]
Thur. Sept. 23. Nothing!
Friday. Sept. 24. Course description for undergraduate course. / Completed bibliography for "receptivity" article. / Made progress on this article.
Sat. Sept. 25. More substantial progress. The thing is done except for a few bibliographical references that I have to go back to Kansas to get.
Sun. Sept. 26. Nothing!
Mon., Sept. 27. Turned in article!
Tues. Sept. 28. Nothing! Hangover from having turned in article.
Wed. Sept. 29. Wrote the text of a 'brown bag" presentation for Oct. 7.
Thurs. Sept. 30. Had a productive planning session, deciding what to do in coming months. Figured out how to finish the entire book by Aug. '11 if I really want to.

On a day I put done "nothing!" all that means that I didn't have a quantifiable and definable task of enough significance accomplished or completed, or, in the case of some weekend days, that I did absolutely nothing work-related. It's fine to have days like that. Knowing my own worst tendencies, though, I don't want to have too many days like that. A few days with 2 or 3 things done balanced out the 3 days of nothingness.

It's interesting that I conceive of work mostly as things that get written, whether it's comments on student papers (grading) or writing course descriptions. Meeting with a guy about a thing is also work, sometimes time-eating work, but I don't tend to put those things down. Interesting, too, that I don't list blogging as part of my work, even though it is writing and has a productive value.