Professors on the tenure track usually have a contract that sets out how we are supposed to divide our time between research, teaching, and service. The most common model, and the one that guides both of our careers as assistant professors, is 40/40/20 — that is, 40 percent research, 40 percent teaching, and 20 percent service. But is that really how we work?
The pandemic has of course disrupted everyone’s work routines. In the spring of 2021, working from home and feeling anxious about our productivity, we started to reconsider the relevance of the 40/40/20 model. When you work entirely from home — where, on the one hand, time feels stagnant, and, on the other, you are always at your workplace — do you end up doing more? Or less? Which categories of faculty work get most of your attention, and which suffer?
To find out, we decided to plot our weekly work schedules (in history and religious studies, respectively) for the spring-2021 semester. Nowadays it’s possible to track your time closely through several apps, but we opted to try to plan our workweeks according to an “ideal” breakdown, and see what happened. So in a hypothetical 40-hour workweek, we would devote 16 hours to research; 16 hours to prepping for class, teaching, and grading; and eight hours to service work for our institutions and professional organizations.
In what follows, we share observations from our test period, advice on time management, and thoughts on faculty work culture of the future. But first it’s important to note that we are well aware that most faculty jobs are not on the tenure track — they are contingent positions that typically pay only for teaching. We know we are extremely privileged to have appointments at research universities where we teach a 2-2 load (two courses a semester with an occasional overload). We also want to acknowledge that the pandemic has worsened existing inequalities across academe.
Still, while our conclusions will be particularly relevant for tenure-track academics, we think lecturers, adjuncts, and other faculty members might be similarly nervous about performance reviews and interested in improving their work-life balance. In sharing our experiences here, we have two aims:
- To shed light on assumptions that underlie faculty work culture.
- To encourage all of us to feel less guilty about any difficulties we’ve had in being productive during tense times.
Teaching. Some work obligations take priority in academic life because they happen whether or not we have completed the preparation, and teaching is a prime example. The time we spend either in class or in office hours is protected and largely immovable on our calendars.
Yet when we began tracking all the time we spent on teaching itself or teaching-related work — prep time, office hours, communication with students and TAs, graduate-student mentorship, maintaining online course sites, planning future assignments and guest speakers, finding material, and grading — we were shocked to learn that, despite feeling like a majority of our time, teaching even a new course seldom filled 16 hours during a typical week. Obviously it requires a lot more time if you are teaching four or five courses a term, and grading work varies significantly, depending on what point of the semester you’re at, as well as on the type of course and the number of students.
By the end of our test semester, we were including factors like emotional labor and mentoring in this category, as well as curriculum planning and other teaching-related training. But it was comforting to realize that the feelings we associated with teaching were somewhat outsize in terms of the actual time required. Many of us feel emotionally drained after teaching, and it’s important to keep that in mind in timing it with other work responsibilities.
Service. In tracking our work hours, we realized this was the category with the largest variety of tasks. Some, like standing-committee work, are obvious and recurring. But many other asks are ad hoc, with short turnaround times. We had predicted that service would require eight hours in many weeks, and less than that in other weeks. In practice, we had a hard time determining what to count in this category, but often went far over the eight-hour mark as deadlines approached.
It’s tricky to pinpoint what qualifies as a “typical” amount of faculty service because we often don’t know our colleagues’ service commitments. Many studies have shown that service duties are often unevenly distributed, with women and members of underrepresented groups doing more such tasks than their white male counterparts. But it is not always obvious how junior faculty members could say no to service tasks in trying to protect their research time.
Among our observations after tracking our own service:
- Both of us are affiliated with programs housed outside our home departments. While such opportunities certainly helped to create dynamic research programs and extended our professional networks, they also occasionally added to our weekly service loads.
- We realized how inherently service pertains to our research (more on this below). For instance, we are regularly asked to report about our work, apply for grants, and describe how we would use the money to funding agencies or donors.
- Finally, both of us are actively involved in professional organizations and academic journals on many levels, and are invited to review different types of scholarly contributions in our fields.
All of the various, interconnected aspects of service made it the hardest category of work to track, plan for, and anticipate, and we ended up creating a new category (which follows) to encompass a big chunk of this faculty work.
Administrative tasks and email. This invisible but constant work complicates the 40/40/20 model. Email, for instance, easily fits under research, teaching, and service, and — it turns out — eats up a significant part of every workday for us: It often requires an hour or two every day, or 12 to 25 percent of a hypothetical 40-hour workweek. We email administrators, students, committee members, grant agencies, research partners, and colleagues for all sorts of professional and personal reasons. In which category should all of that time be counted? How much time should we devote to it?
The email burden was already heavy but has become even more so during the pandemic, with ever-changing rules and regulations. Dealing with all of those messages seems more like pure administration than research, teaching, or service. And what about other difficult-to-categorize tasks, such as training, informational meetings, or professional development?
In tracking our days, we found that the area of work that was the least controllable was administration. Almost any meeting or conversation with a student or a colleague has the potential to create more administration. Every service-related task includes some administration. It monopolizes more and more of our days. Junior faculty members especially need clear advice on how to keep the administrative workload manageable.
Research. When we were first plotting our work schedules, it was all too easy to block off 40 percent of a week for research. The time was right there. Why hadn’t we just blocked it off on our calendars before? We were excited about this new work plan and how much more research we would manage to accomplish from then on!
Cut to the end of this test period, and, to be honest, not once did either of us ever manage to dedicate the full 16 hours we’d set aside purely to our research. Our blocks of research time were always interrupted by something more urgent: A student needed immediate advising, a departmental emergency needed to be resolved (such as a sick-leave replacement), or a family medical appointment or emergency arose. Data on submissions to academic journals during the pandemic show how acutely the pandemic affected research productivity, especially for women who carried the burden of homeschooling and child care during school closures.
Research time, we found, also bleeds into other categories of faculty work. For instance, conference preparation and presentations (including travel time) are important parts of research dissemination, but it doesn’t feel correct to count a four-day conference of 32 hours entirely as research time. Conference participation also may include some service, such as different types of committee meetings, and, naturally, some social time.
As administration requirements grow, the time devoted to actual research shrinks. Any new research project or collaboration comes with more administration and email. Prioritizing writing and analysis in this category of faculty work is key to proceeding confidently on the tenure track, since for most of us in a 40/40/20 position, research is the most highly valued block of our work time.
Concrete takeaways. During the pandemic, working from home has made it both easier and harder to get things done. Thanks to Zoom and other technologies, you can work all the time, except that doing so has resulted only in work-from-home burnout. The faculty’s newfound awareness and ability to use technology and work remotely have merely added to the levels of exhaustion, and research is the area of work that will most likely suffer from that tiredness.
How you approach your workload — whether the model you are guided by is 40/40/20, 60/30/10, or 100-percent teaching — will necessarily be highly personal and specific to your field. But we did come away from our schedule experiment with some advice that may be of use to other faculty members and graduate students as you traverse the work-life minefield:
- Take the time to track your workweek and learn where your time is going. Pay attention to your working patterns and how they change, based on time of day, day of the week, and other factors.
- Ask around about work-life balance. We both found ourselves talking to other academics about our experiment, during it and after it had finished, to find out if they had had similar experiences, and to get feedback from our mentors. We don’t have enough conversations about faculty work and how we manage it.
- Set a limited amount of time each day for “administration,” a catchall category that would not be counted in the 40/40/20 split. In other words, acknowledge how many hours you have at hand for actual research, teaching, and service. Accept that an hour or two per day is likely to be spent on the administrative chores required to do the rest of your work.
- Reduce the amount of time you spend on email by adopting and refining a sorting system tailored to your campus email program. Practice email triage to cut the time you spend rereading and searching for messages. Assign tasks received through email to a specific time slot on your calendar.
- Are you doing too much service or too little? If you aren’t sure, a good first step would be to ask your direct supervisor or personnel committee: How do your service commitments compare with those of other faculty members in your department? Asking colleagues to reflect on the amount of service you do may open a conversation about reducing a service overload or saying no to future requests, without worrying that it will negatively affect your evaluations.
- Consider limiting your service time to two areas that are most important to you. Think of them as your service specialization or “brand.” When other requests come in, ask yourself, “Am I the best person for this?” Resist the urge to accept any tasks that, in the moment, seem easy or important but are not within your two areas of interest.
- Find rewards that help you keep your writing and research time a priority. For example, invite a colleague at a similar career stage to be your accountability buddy or writing partner. Join a writing group on your campus. That way, you will allow social rewards, break time, and other benefits to coincide with your writing time.
- Be strategic in planning downtime during your workday. In our test period, we asked ourselves whether our hypothetical eight-hour workday included any unscheduled or unstructured time. When we are on a campus, space determines some natural breaks: We are not actively working when walking to a classroom or to a meeting. If you are still working from home or teaching virtually, consider ways of incorporating into your workday a fake commute or building in time to change locations, stare out the window, or remove yourself from email and other tasks for short breaks.
