No Timelog Experiment

I arbitrarily chose today to mark the beginning of my sabbatical. In my mind, the most significant change I will be making is that I will NOT keep a timelog for the next twelve months. I had been keeping one since I started my tenure-track faculty position a long time ago; I even provided a ten-year snapshot with brief analysis in this blog.

 

Many faculty members maintain a flexible schedule through most of their careers. Sometimes work is done on evenings and weekends; sometimes one runs a non-work-related errand in the middle of a weekday. In that sense, their life is like that of a college student: Show up for classes and meetings, and do other work when you’re not in class or in a meeting, with more frenzied activity as a deadline approaches. Like some students, professors can also be procrastinators and constantly doing things at the last-minute. On top of that, there’s research. It never ends. There’s always something to read, something to think about, an experiment to run, and it constantly occupies one’s mind-space.

 

I’m an atypical professor with regard to time. From the beginning of my career, I made a clean division between work and non-work. I treated work as a 9-to-5 job (more like 7-to-4 in my actual case). When at work, I focused on work. When away from work, I did no work and did not check my work email on evenings and weekends. Studies suggest that most professors work significantly more than 40 hours per week; one that includes charts and breakdown of time usage claims 60 hours per week on average for tenure-line faculty although this is self-reported data. My average is 42 hours over more than two decades of data, and while my data is also self-reported, I meticulously logged my time use daily. But this also means, that when I’m at work, I have to be efficient to get things done. There’s no time for procrastination or distraction, and overall, this has made me a disciplined worker.

 

Keeping a timelog is very useful when you have a self-directed job with many different things you want to accomplish on top of teaching obligations and open-ended research projects. To make sure I was maintaining the balance I wanted, I regularly looked at how my time was being spent and make adjustments. This provides stricture and discipline, but I wonder if over the years it has reduced my flexibility and squelched my creativity. Perhaps I have even become risk-averse intellectually; honestly, I’m not sure. Hence, I am embarking on my no-timelog experiment. I will, over the next year, not place strictures on when I work and how I work, allow some of my work and non-work to mix, and observe what happens. My pitch to myself is that I am aiming for a wholistic sabbatical.

 

I did write a sabbatical proposal which was approved, so I do have some professional goals to accomplish. I have prior research I’d like to write up, new research projects I’d like to think about, classes I’m excited to overhaul, and new classes I’d like to design. Maybe I will learn a language; maybe I will do more traveling; maybe I will learn to use some new tech tools; and I will certainly do more reading! I would also like to be rested, refreshed and rejuvenated when I return to my regular daily job for the Fall 2027 semester. But one step at a time, and this morning’s blog post is just the first step on the first day of the next twelve months!