Summary of Time Management Discussion 
at Faculty Retreat, April 23, 1999

Dave Patterson as Discussion Leader

Table of Contents
Just Say No!
Travel
Email
Using staff support
General Time Management Strategy
Managing a Large Class
Book writing
Rewarding purposely poor service?
 

Just Say No!

• The proper way to say No
• "Sorry, my plate is too full" or "Sorry, I've got so many current commitments that I couldn't do a good job on your request"
• If you give an explanation, the requestor will try to solve the problem so that you can say yes; don't give him or her a chance
• If you simply say "No," the requestor wants to know why, and then will try to solve the problem so you can say yes
• Why you should say No
• Pattersonism: "What counts is not how many projects you start, it's the number of projects you finish!"
• Therefore, do fewer tasks per year so that have enough time to really finish them, not just start them
• Ousterhoutism; "Say No now to have a chance to say Yes later to something better."
• Eventually you will say No after saying so often that you can't possibly do anything more. 
  Why not say No earlier and make life sane? The requestor can't know what state you are in.
• Its hard to go wrong saying No
• What if they ask you to do it in 6-12 months?
• Ferrarism: "Pretend it was going to be next week, and then decide what you would say if it was next week"
• How to decide whether to say Yes
• Always think on it overnight before saying yes
• Ask a trusted colleague whether he or she thinks you should say yes 
  (if you don't want to ask your friend, perhaps this indicates you want to say yes)
• General things that are very good for a career (added for the benefit of junior faculty):
• Serving on program committees of (good) conferences: provides visibility, contact with leaders in field, awareness of what everyone is working on, learning standards of paper acceptance, ...
• Doing your share of department service--especially as you get more senior--to avoid hard feelings by colleagues, some of whom will become chair and determine your rate of promotion

Travel

• Travel is the biggest time-sucking event: time away from class, time away from grad students, not sleeping well in strange place, jet lag, ...
• More importantly, time away from family is going to use up personal brownie points
• Therefore, be very careful in saying yes to events that involve travel
• Many faculty try to limit to one trip per semester, or at least miss no more than one class per semester or one week per semester
• Mon-Wed or Wed-Fri classes make it easier to avoid missing class, as it gives you 2 sequential business days for meetings
• If you are going to travel, spend money so that reduce days away from school and family 
  (Don't save money on airline tickets by spending a lonely Saturday night in some bad hotel at personal cost to your family and your students)

Email

• 100s of messages per day for many faculty
• Faculty, students, staff policy for email: don't expect less than 24 hour response time!
• No messages to faculty "Meeting/Talks starting in 5 minutes; please come now!"
• Please don't ask in the hall: "Did you read the email I sent you 10 minutes ago?"
• Only read email once a day, not at your most efficient time of day

(Note: if you reply more frequently, you will get more email to read)
• Try to send only 1 screenful in any message

Using staff support

• Take the time to train your staff; 30 minutes a week will pay off in your productivity
• To get them to do more, tell them a Katzism: "I'd rather you do more and be right 90% of the time; I won't yell about a 10% error rate."
• Treat staff well and with respect. Salary is only 3^rd or 4^th on job satisfaction and reasons people will leave a job. Respect, relationships are higher
• Remember what you Mom said: "Say Please, and Thank you" when giving tasks or getting results
• Faculty almost never praise anyone for anything; congratulate staff when they do a fine job
• Delegate! Micromanaging can drive away good staff
• Give a time frame for tasks, so that everything doesn't have to be done ASAP
• Meet 5-10 minutes a week toward the end of the week to let them know what to expect next week
• Remember "Administrative Assistants Day" and Christmas with gifts, thanks for the jobs well done
• Be prepared to pay to have staff trained (using spreadsheets, ...)
• Find things that they can do instead of you. Remember, the more work you can find for others to do, the more jobs in the marketplace and the lower the unemployment rate. Examples:
• "Here is a letter; send a Polite No reply letter to him or her" (See "Saying No" above)
• Please take this list of grades and fill in the bubbles on the grading sheet; let me know if there are names on one list but not the other
• Please go through my paper mail and take care of anything you can, tossing stuff you don't think I need to see (see Training Staff above)
• Here is the biobib form: please go through my calendar last year, talk to other staff (Crabtree, Grants Assistants with progress reports), and use Melvyl to find my papers to fill in as much as you can, then give it to me to look it over
• Please keep my schedule, and you handle all requests for time, but don't schedule anything for these times and days

General Time Management Strategy, Brewerism: "Categorize Quickly, and Batch Process Categories"

• Argument is doing similar tasks at same time can reduce overhead, improve speed of handling tasks: letters of recommendation, phone calls, ...
• Paper: colored transparent folders
• Email: Separate Folders
• Example: To Do, Phone, Consulting, Confirmations
• Returning/Making phone calls: Monday during East Coast/West Coast business hours (including personal calls)
• In general, well organized people have todo lists; each day, each week, each semester, and have a carefully planned schedule

Managing a Large Class

• Recruit TA's!
• Working with your own grad students in a class is a good way to get to know them in a working relationship
• Ask hotshot undergrads from last semester if willing to teach in your class; both the experience and the pay is good, and you they get to know a faculty member better, which helps with letters of recommendation
• TA's are not paid all that much in a semester (especially undergrad tutors); you can add money from industrial donations (or startup funds) to hire an extra 10 hours to room for someone to act as Head TA; in any case you are buying an extra 10 hours of time per week of work that you don't have to do, and that is a rare but wonderful opportunity in academia
• Recruit Readers!
• CS61 series relies on readers to carry the load of many students
• Pay is good and work is not too hard, and it makes it much easier to hire TA's if you can find readers
• Carefully plan your class schedule, taking into account events you know will happen: faculty retreat, conference trips, ...
• Make sure it is always marked "Tentative Schedule" so students don't get mad if you change it
• early planning can help you get rooms in advance, such as for evening midterms
• In CS it is common to put the lecture notes in native format (as well as pdf and postscript for the students to print), so that next instructor can start their and improve them. Here is an example for CS61c. Perhaps EE should adopt same model?
• In the tradeoff between inventing new assignments each semester (to reduce the chances of cheating) vs. using existing assignments (to reduce the chances of bugs in the assignments), its certainly less work for you and TA's and probably better educationally (in terms of frustrations over too hard assignments and errors) to reuse assignments
• Get to know the names of the students, or at least the ones who ask questions. It makes a more friendly atmosphere in the class. 
  (Some of us use digital pictures online to help everyone to know each other)
• Exams
• Try to get started early to reduce the number of misunderstandings; everyone should do the exam themselves
• If you start 2-3 weeks before and work with the TAs, they can help you makeup the exam
• Try to write down what each question is trying to test in terms of the big ideas of the class, how long you think it should take to answer question
• You can't write good questions without also writing the solutions at the same time
• If someone has a conflict with the exam, always arrange for him or her to take the exam early so as to act as a guinea pig to help debug the exam
• Multiple choice questions can be effective, especially if there can be more than one right answer and they have to select all the right answers
• Grade exams all together and expect to supply the food and drink for the group
• Many of us offer evening midterms to reduce the time pressure on students and to give the staff a better chance of having test that is not too long; I aim for a target exam time (e.g., 1.5 hours) and then multiply by two for the evening slot to allow for underestimates of question difficulty (i.e., 3 hours)
• Karpism: "The three most important tasks to teaching well are:

1. Preparation
2. Preparation
3. Preparation"

• Nothing worse than walking into class suspecting you're unprepared
• Preparation can let either let student questions guide the lecture or you tell students you will answer that question later in the lecture
• Its embarrassing to look at a slide and say

"Why did I put that point there?"
• It avoids the long solliloquies that may (or may not) be interesting to the students, but are not significant to the class

Letters of Recommendation

• For undergrad classes, 1 paragraph to summarize class, 1 paragraph summarizing students performance in class, 1-2 sentences remarking on what I see from a copy of their transcript and their resume
• First Example
• Second Example

Book writing

• Why write a book?
• Vision of better way to present/teach ideas
• Improves your writing skills due to more practice plus feedback on presenting ideas by readers, students, copy editor,
• If book is popular, get name recognition and respect in field
• If book is popular, get significant financial reward

(even for upper division or grad level text);
• Textbooks cost > $80, with an average selling price to the bookstore of about $60; if your share is $10-$15/book and it sells 5,000 to 10,000 copies per year, ...
• Royalties come for several years after one year of hard work; like a annuity
• Why you shouldn't write a book?
• You are still an assistant professor, and a book counts very little as a publication; its rare for a book to have a research breakthrough that is not first found in papers
• Books count more on teaching side of case than research side
• To make a lot of money! I've co-authored 5 books: 3 were artistic successes, 2 were commercial successes
• How to write a book?
• See Pattersonism above; need to shed work to find time to write a book
• Try a sabaticcal with book writing being the most important job you're doing
• Work VERY hard in spurts, with Alpha, Beta deadlines and field tests, critical reviews in between deadlines
• Finish in a single year, so less revision due to changes in field
• Here is the schedule Hennessy and I followed for writing the first edition of "Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach"

Rewarding purposely poor service by Chair giving them less to do?

• Consider implementing a "service point" system to record level of service per person, saving a history over the years (not part of heaven point system)
• Service expectations differ depending on seniority
• Service points helps chairs: avoid assigning too much to good citizens, recognize those doing less than their fair share
• Publication of service record may affect behavior? Chair may change future assignments based on past behavior?