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Time Management Tips

The following items are suggestions gathered over the course of a panel discussion on time management during a faculty development lunch at Calvin in the fall or 2003. If you have questions about these items, or if you have additional suggestions to offer, please contact our office: 616.526.6869 | scholars@calvin.edu

  • Figure out when during the day you work best on scholarship. When do you have the intellectual energy and the least distractions from students and family?
  • Figure out where you work best on scholarship. Is it at home, in your office, or at Schuler's?
  • Figure out your style of pacing. Do you do best if you extend work throughout the summer or go at a frantic pace for a shorter period of time and then crash?
  • Pay attention to class semester cycles and take advantage of them. Early in the semester there is less grading and the end of the semester requires less preparation.
  • Pay attention to family life cycles. Be aware of what is reasonable at different stages of your life. Develop scholarly plans with this in mind. The goal is to keep your scholarly life alive through the more demanding times of your families' life cycle, not to publish a book a year.
  • When you know you’re not going to work on a project for awhile, pay attention to its state at that point. Know where you stopped and keep good notes so when you pick it up again, there’s a minimum amount of recovery time.
  • Don't over prepare for classes. Once you have taught a class several times and you have a good working structure, students cannot tell whether you have prepared 30 minutes or 90 minutes.
  • Commit yourself to deadlines such as paper presentations to force you to get something started. Use these deadlines to force you to get a rough draft of a paper written for publication.
  • Use stress effectively. If you know you can find the concentration to prepare for next day's class at 10 p.m. but not work on a paper, work on the paper first and leave class preparation for later.
  • Always have small pieces to work on next to your computer. These pieces might be updating your working bibliography on a research project, doing a small piece of a rough draft of a grant proposal, reviewing a manuscript for a journal, etc.
  • Take 10 minutes on Friday afternoon or Monday morning to organize yourself for the next week. What are those small pieces that could be fit in during the week as you look at your schedule?
  • Use small blocks of time effectively:
    1. While waiting at the orthodontists for your children, read academic articles.
    2. In airports or on planes, trade off pleasure reading with academic articles and books that you need to read for your on-going research.

    Models:

    1. Same time every week (block out time and hold to it!);
    2. yearly cycles (focus in summer on research and other smaller pieces like book reviews, etc. during school year);
    3. look for blocks throughout the year (spring break, summer mornings, between end of semester and finals exam grading).