Systems for Academics
As I’ve mentioned, I’m in the process of switching project management systems. Nothing says summer like selecting among calendar layouts, no?
I’ve landed on Asana for the time being, despite the fact that the company’s pronunciation of the word drives me absolutely bonkers.
Anyway.
Switching from one productivity app to another has me thinking about systems more generally, which has become increasingly important as I’ve moved through my career, gained family responsibilities and opened a side business offering faculty coaching and developmental editing. Cute Moleskins ain’t gonna cut it!
In particular, I’m focusing on applying what I’m broadly calling systems to help manage tasks or organizational projects that take place at an awkward cadence. I find things that happen every day or every week relatively easy to track (I’m a religious weekly planner), but the things that should or could happen monthly or quarterly tend to slip off my radar until they’ve become something awful, either their disarray or the tedium required to process them. (Here’s looking at you, Digital Measures!)
If you’d like a peek at my systems, here are a few of the processes and rules I have implemented in the past or am experimenting with this coming academic year. I’ll also suggest a few principles or rubrics for developing systems of your own.
STORAGE AND FILING:
STORAGE: Decide what lives on your university drive vs. GoogleDrive vs. a personal Dropbox. I keep all writing materials as well as personal and side business materials in my own Dropbox and keep teaching and service materials on the university box. This may vary according to discipline, but I see my writing as going with me, no matter the institution I am affiliated with. In contrast, service and teaching materials include items I like being able to easily share with students and colleagues. Additionally, large files such as photos and videos are better kept on Dropbox, whereas documents that need collaboration are a natural fit for GoogleDrive.
FILING: Beyond shared folders with other campus collaborators, I only have three folders visible when I open my campusBox: Service, Tenure and Promotion, and Teaching. I am particularly proud of my new system for managing the “Teaching” materials. Whereas this folder used to contain numerous subfolders titled by class and semester, which I would have to scan in order to find my current classes, I now have only a small handful of folders: one for each of my current classes, one for graduate advising, one for recommendations, and one titled “Older teaching materials.” At the end of a semester, I dump the completed class folders into this last one. Seeing only the current semester’s class folders reduces an enormous amount of stress and helps me stay organized during the busy middle of a term. Ditto for writing projects in my Dropbox.
DOCUMENTING:
Historically, I am not so good at this. Also, because we have largely not had merit raises at my university, it’s bootless to do a meticulous job at annual review time. Because I put off tracking accomplishments until annual review time, this task becomes huge and unpleasant, only accomplished with a box of red wine, the Real Housewives, and too much microwave popcorn.
Monthly reminder: To try to reduce the pain come December, this year I’m adding a monthly reminder to Asana that will prompt me to add any new achievements or information to both my cv and to the program my university uses for annual evaluations. If you maintain a professional website, you might add a monthly reminder for this as well.
This brings me to the broader category of:
CALENDAR REMINDERS:
I love a good calendar reminder! It’s a way of relieving pressure on my poor old brain, who definitely can’t keep up with all the things she’s supposed to remember.
Weekly calendar reminder to check CMS. During the semester, I set a weekly reminder to check Canvas to make sure assignments are published, course readings are present, and that there are no broken links.
Conferences and Grants. Most conference and grants operate with roughly similar deadlines each year. One of the best things I did as an assistant professor was to identify all the possible conferences I might want to attend or grants I might want to apply to someday and putting a repeating yearly reminder in my calendar about a month or two ahead to “start thinking about X.” This way, I’m reminded every year in enough time to make a decision about the opportunity, whether I choose to pursue it or not.
STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURES:
What’s the Prof. F approach to graduate mentoring? This is a new one for me, but I’ve found that I’m constantly reinventing the wheel alongside my graduate students. This is a bit silly. Although taking comps or writing a prospectus is new for them, it’s not new for me as an advisor. This year, I want to work on creating templates and timelines for standard graduate student tasks. I’m hoping this will create greater clarity for them and more ease for me.
CREATE TIME TO REVIEW SYSTEMS:
Quarterly Planning Retreats: For the past two years, I’ve been attending the wonderful Meggin McIntosh’s quarterly planning retreats (https://meggin.com/quarterly-planning-retreat/ ). For a small fee, I join a Zoom room of others and work on my calendar and goals for three hours. These four sessions a year help me see what’s coming up, what I’ve lost track of, and what needs to be tweaked. Pro tip: look for the conferences, family events, and heavy grading periods you have coming up. Adjust accordingly.
Backburner Days: I’ve been marking a day or an afternoon a month to plow through nagging tasks, clean up things that have gotten chaotic, etc. This may mean facing down tasks that have grown large and scary in my mind (how does one plan summer camp for kids?) or doing various kinds of cleanup: What documents have shown up on my computer desktop that need to be sorted or trashed? What documents have shown up on my physical desktop that need to be sorted or trashed? Why are there so many G-D documents?!?! These are tasks that don’t necessarily need to be done well but that need to be done and I plow through as many as possible.
GENERALIZABLE TIPS AND QUESTIONS FOR CREATING YOUR OWN SYSTEMS:
Pick cadences that are meaningful to you and create task groups around them: daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semesterly, yearly. Use these temporal buckets to brainstorm tasks and then set repeating reminders in your calendar or project system.
What are your areas of particular chaos or inertia? Mine is that damned annual review. Could you create a calendar prompt to visit them a chunk at a time so they don’t become a monstrous beastie?
Create dedicated time to work on your plans and systems. The initial time investment is well worth it to keep important tasks and plans in view, but a good system is a lot like a car: if you don’t maintain it, you’ll end up stuck on the side of the road.
As you take on new roles, integrate things you learn into your systems. When I directed a program, I had a painful education in how different the last day of the term is for a chair than a regular faculty member. While everyone else was off drinking eggnog, watching Hallmark movies, or racing snowmobiles (I don’t know...), I spent a late December Friday chasing down laggards who had yet to submit their grades. After that, I knew to plan for the final day of term. Similarly, as a parent of a new elementary schooler, I’ve learned a lot this year about how to build my calendar for next May.
That’s what’s under the hood over here. Now, nerd to nerd: What do you do? Reach out and let me know what systems you use.
