Speaker 1: Hi everyone, so welcome to another academic video. I don't know about you but I find there are never enough hours in the week to get all my academic jobs done, so in this video I thought I'd share a few tips and strategies that I use to do some form of academic time management. Now there's lots of videos out there about, you know, timetabling and scheduling your hours and working productively at different points in the day. This video isn't going to be covering those topics and I'm sure, you know, there's plenty of good material out there to go and find. This video is really focusing on academic time management, so maybe you're a researcher at university or a lecturer or maybe, you know, a teaching fellow. How do we manage our university duties and our academic time management within the university working week? And first up I thought we could chat about priorities and in particular I've been doing this job now for, you know, a few years as a lecturer. So if you're new to the channel, hi my name is Caroline, I'm a UK-based physics lecturer. I've been a lecturer now for a number of years and I've noticed that there are university priorities and that I have personal priorities, you know, and quite often the university has me wanting to prioritise teaching, you know, so delivering classes or preparing material or getting examinations ready or tutorial classes or admin duties, you know, I'm the admissions tutor. So from a university's perspective there are some priorities for the teaching and the admin that kind of pull at various points throughout the semester. But as a personal academic, so as a lecturer, personally I also have the pull of academic research priorities, you know, so I may want to prioritise getting in a research grant application or writing up a research paper or maybe reviewing the research output of one of our PhD students. So straight away when it comes to academic time management I think it's useful to just consider a little bit the different priorities that you have within the week and also their kind of nature, whether they are a university priority or not a personal priority exactly but one that you want to fulfil and achieve. Now the importance of these priorities will vary, right, so at times in the calendar year examinations are going to take top priority or teaching is going to take top priority but at other times I need to make sure that I am carving out enough time to allow me to fulfil my research obligations and also my research, I guess, kind of passion and the reason I signed up to be an academic because I want to both teach but also do research about a particular subject. So yeah, first up when you're managing your time don't exclude entirely those personal, it's the wrong word, but those kind of personal priorities that sit alongside those university priorities because actually my research personal priorities are part of my job, you know, it's a big chunk of my job to be an active researcher and so that needs to have time within my calendar just as much as the teaching and the admin roles. I should caveat by I'm saying, I'm not saying, you know, ignore your teaching or ignore your admin, I'm merely saying make sure that you recognise that you have time for all the things that are part of your job description and that matter within your job role. Okay, next thing, to help me with my academic time management I also kind of have an email expectation management system, I guess. Now different universities will have different requirements on how quickly you as a member of staff need to respond to a student inquiry. I do obviously look at all my emails, I check my inbox several times a day if an urgent student inquiry comes in and sometimes it does, you know, sometimes a student does require urgent action and of course that goes to the top of the priority list and I will be actioning that item straight away that day. But if it's just a general inquiry or, you know, some general feedback that I'm after on a piece of written coursework or, you know, an essay or something, then actually allowing those few days before responding means that I'm not constantly every day redoing all of my schedule so I can be more productive and actually complete the tasks that I plan to do that day and then schedule for future time to do the email tasks that have come in. As academic members of staff and indeed, you know, as many people in many professions, we have to multitask, right, so you are potentially juggling a lot of different activities simultaneously and they can be quite diverse. You might be, you know, proofreading a CV for a student, you could be writing a new module for your lecture course that's starting in the next semester, you could be responding to peer review on a paper, you could be writing up your research grant application, you could be preparing for an experiment, ensuring that your PhD students are ready to pass, you know, their their viva process and all of these things can be happening at the same time. Now I know some of my colleagues are amazing at doing, you know, multiple things all simultaneously. I find that for some tasks I can't juggle anything else whilst I'm doing them. So I'm a physicist and part of my role involves doing coding, so software coding and experiments. If I am working on a computer code, I find I really need to get into that piece of coding, I can't pick it up and drop it down again, you know, I need to kind of immerse myself in it, remind myself what I was trying to do, remind myself of why maybe it wasn't compiling and actually give myself that space to focus on a single task. The same is true when I'm marking, so when I'm marking students work, I need to focus on that single task. When I am preparing a lecture course, again if I'm writing a lecture, I need to focus on that single task. So what I do do is I do sometimes turn off my email inbox for a period of two, three, four hours whilst I focus on a specific task or I put my notifications on to silent so I'm not constantly being distracted. That way I can be more productive on the single task I'm trying to complete and then once that task is out the way I can then go back and I can have a look at my inbox or, you know, respond to colleagues and do the kind of like the multitasking again. But yeah, every now and then I need to have time in my diary which is single task time. It's not all day, it's not every day, and it's just points in the week that I try to pick out to say actually at this time I'm going to focus exclusively on this topic for a couple of hours and then I'll get back into the chaotic world of juggling many parts of being an academic here. I'm also quite conscious that whilst I'm trying to manage my time that I've got academic colleagues who are trying to manage their time as well. And so one of the things that I try not to do is to sit on something if I know a colleague needs it in order for them to progress their piece of work or an activity they're working on, you know. So if a colleague has asked for something and I can move it forward in my priority list or I can action it quickly or I can tell the colleague yes I'll definitely do it by this date, I try to give you know an informed schedule of when I'm going to do that activity for my colleague so they can have it in order to progress their piece of work. Because you know there's nothing more infuriating than when you can't progress one of your tasks because you're waiting on some information to come in and maybe you don't know when that information is going to arrive, is it going to arrive, has the person acknowledged that they're going to actually do that activity. So yeah I think personal academic time management but also factoring into that allowing yourself to be productive and timely for others so they can do their academic time management just makes for good relations really within a you know system or a business or wherever really. But yeah that's one of the things I do try to do. Doesn't always work, you know sometimes I may accidentally forget to do something or maybe I can't turn something around as quick as a colleague would like it but I do try where possible to facilitate what my colleagues need in order to keep their work streams moving forward. So yeah it can it can be tough I think as an academic you know there are lots of things pulling on your time, lots of important things for the university, important things for students, important things for your research colleagues. But yeah they're just a few things that I try to do to help me with my academic time management. Some weeks are more successful than other weeks you know some weeks I'm awesome at time management and other weeks maybe maybe not so much. But let me know how do you how do you cope? Do you find yourself having to work crazy long hours? Do you really try not to? You know I really try to have a really good work-life balance but again that can be a future video about how hard it can be sometimes to get that balance right. But yeah let me know in the comments how you manage your academic time and if you're new around here please do you think about hitting subscribe. Now it's a free channel on YouTube a place for us to talk about all things academic and university but in the meantime stay safe, take good care of yourselves and I'll see you next Monday for another academic video. Bye.