I am on work email these days in the hour of 7:30-8:30 while I am also getting Tiny Boy ready for school. He does math. I do email. He watches TV. I do email. Etc. Several days this week I woke to a series of emails from my chair that he sent around 10 pm. And then we began trading replies back and forth in these early morning hours. He also has school-aged children. I will say I was quite grateful that last night, as he sent the 5 pm Friday email, he also said he'd refrain from sending us email over the weekend, though we were free to reach out to him anytime (old colleague! new chair!).
I am not saying anything earth shattering. I am struck more and more by how much email=work. Organizing a visit for a guest writer? Email. Reminding my students what they need to read for next week? Email. Revising the program website? Email. I could go on. If email is not always itself the method of doing work, it is the method of communicating and disseminating the work. I can't think of an aspect of my job that does not entail some email.
So much of this email work is delegation or trading work back and forth. I need a conference room reserved so I can check that off my list? I ask our assistant (over email). My chair needs us to read documents to contribute to our fall planning letter? Yup, that's an email (with attachment!).
I'm even asked to do things over email that are not rightly mine to do. (i.e. random high school kids emailing me for help with their book report)
I feel like for the most part I have reasonably good email habits. (They could probably be better. And I need to think seriously about how.) But as I've been paying more attention to how I spend my time I am quite struck by how much of it is spent emailing. Because most of my admin work involves email. And this right here is why I absolutely refuse to accept student work over email (I've started using our course management system for some things but mostly still prefer paper)
How did faculty do work prior to 1994? (For me, that was the beginning of email. And graduate school. For others it might have been slightly earlier or later.)
Anyway, if you have ANSWERS about how to deal with all the email, let's talk!
I am not saying anything earth shattering. I am struck more and more by how much email=work. Organizing a visit for a guest writer? Email. Reminding my students what they need to read for next week? Email. Revising the program website? Email. I could go on. If email is not always itself the method of doing work, it is the method of communicating and disseminating the work. I can't think of an aspect of my job that does not entail some email.
So much of this email work is delegation or trading work back and forth. I need a conference room reserved so I can check that off my list? I ask our assistant (over email). My chair needs us to read documents to contribute to our fall planning letter? Yup, that's an email (with attachment!).
I'm even asked to do things over email that are not rightly mine to do. (i.e. random high school kids emailing me for help with their book report)
I feel like for the most part I have reasonably good email habits. (They could probably be better. And I need to think seriously about how.) But as I've been paying more attention to how I spend my time I am quite struck by how much of it is spent emailing. Because most of my admin work involves email. And this right here is why I absolutely refuse to accept student work over email (I've started using our course management system for some things but mostly still prefer paper)
How did faculty do work prior to 1994? (For me, that was the beginning of email. And graduate school. For others it might have been slightly earlier or later.)
Anyway, if you have ANSWERS about how to deal with all the email, let's talk!
My only suggestion for dealing with e-mail is to keep it corraled to fixed times, but that's hard when people neeeeed stuff from you.
ReplyDeleteI remember before there was e-mail, though! Lots of requests, announcements, etc., came on paper. One checked one's box at least twice a day when one was on campus (and at home felt free of all that). One used the phone to reserve conference rooms. When I started my job, the chair, who had never learned to type but didn't like to burden the secretaries with jobs he could do, used to handwrite memos and run them off on the ditto machine. I wonder if I still have any purple notes in his handwriting deep in a file cabinet somewhere.
After (creepily? sorry?) reading your entire archive over a few weeks (pregnancy round ligament / back pain --> insomnia), I felt compelled to delurk. I'm also an infertility veteran, intermittent insomnia sufferer, stressed new homeowner, and an academic (of the medical stripe, so similar hierarchy and weird politics, different breakdown of job responsibilities and activities that get you promoted) entering parenthood for the second time around. I have no idea what I will do with a second tiny demand on my time. Thank you for making me feel less alone.
ReplyDeleteI also wonder about what people did before email, and have trouble visualizing the fresh hell that has been described to me of having to call the nurse’s station to get handwritten lab results read back to one if calling before the printouts had been run up from the lab.
More pressingly, though, I wonder what I will do about email. I love to read on my iPhone, but struggle with non-narrative nonfiction (eg self help and reference books) in this format because any charts and tables are completely mangled. I’ve been thinking of ordering a physical copy of Getting Things Done to see if it helps.
Would also love an update on your promotion situation and the donor embryos — but you don’t have to address those topics at all obviously. I just find myself suddenly caring about an internet stranger — maybe it is the quality of your writing? Or the sufficient degree of overlap in experience? — So if these are topics you want to write about you have an eager audience.)
(See, I do not write for a living. See what I just did to those dashes? And to all these parentheses?)
Hi, Amy!! Thank you so much for delurking; no need to apologize, though--the blog is there to read. But really you read the WHOLE thing?!
ReplyDeleteCongrats on the pregnancy!
Short version: I did get tenure [right around the time Tiny Boy was born]. I still have not gone up for promotion to full. Will likely do so this year. Turns out I have something resembling PTSD. Go figure. Embryos are still on ice--legally still mine but emotionally given away to someone who is now a good friend.
If you'd like to 'talk' feel free to email me at gwinne [at] yahoo [dot] com. Or let me know if there's other stuff you want me to blog about.