Reading Time: 4 minutes

One of the interesting things about my current role is that it is two part-time roles. When I was hired, the role required a library director 49% of the time and a faculty member for the remaining 51%. It has resulted in a lot of unusual outcomes. For example, when I take a full day of vacation leave, only 49% of the time is calculated as leave because faculty do not get leave but library directors do. I have been monitoring my time to see what the breakdown is between the roles in reality and it’s surprisingly close to where it has been allotted. That isn’t by accident.

I am enjoying the position and wouldn’t have considered it unprecedented but it does seem to cause some normal processes to stop working. Leave taking was one. Administrative professionals are also supposed to track their time, in case it is audited. Faculty? Not so much. It isn’t clear yet whether I do or do not need to track my time, but I decided to start and it has been helpful. Not only does it allow me to consider what I have been doing which, in addition to my calendar, makes my monthly report to the Dean easier. It allows me to ensure I am keeping some kind of balance.

Here’s how it works out over the last 5 months. The buckets are somewhat arbitrary. HR falls into administrative a bit but sometimes HR applies just to me and my role. Service is any committee work, faculty meetings, or other activities that are not really what I would think are typical for my role. Scholarship and teaching are pretty obvious.

A pie chart. The piece in orange on the right consumes just over half of the time and is labeled administrative. The other slices are teaching, scholarship, service, and HR.
A pie chart showing time allocated to my role between mid-August 2024 and mid-January 2025.

I was a bit surprised by the teaching slice. I had not done any work in that category until the start of this calendar year. It has quickly absorbed a ton of my time. The nice thing about tracking my own time, though, is that I am not bound by a 40-hour work week. I use an Excel spreadsheet and capture the hours as they happen as best I can. It means I can note weekends and evenings when they happen, which is rare.

Deliberate Separation

Our kids find the whole arrangement funny. If the university is all round holes, I am something more than a square peg. We have likened it to a character in an Asterix the Gaul comic books. Pusillanimous sweeps half a flagstone and takes a breather. Then he sweeps the other half. Fortunately, unlike Pusillanimous, my split work personality is accepted and on purpose. But I have to be just as deliberate about how I use each half of my time.

A three panel cartoon. A Roman legionary is sweeping a flagstone on a parade ground. A foot appears at the left belonging to an officer, who asks "Is this your idea of sweeping a yard, Pusillanimous?" Pusillanimous makes a noise and responds in the second panel: "Look, I've swept half the first flagstone. I'm just taking a breather. Then I'll sweep the other half of the first flagstone ..." In the final panel, he finishes, "then I'll take a breather and go on to the first half of the second flagstone. Take ..." Not shown is when the officer loses his temper at the poor shirking soldier.
A cartoon panel from Asterix the Gaul in “Asterix and the Chieftain’s Shield

I wasn’t really sure how I would keep the two pieces separate. By keeping my own time sheet, though, I can see on a regular basis when I am leaning too much one way or another. It has caused me to block off my calendar or adopt particular habits to ensure that the balance is maintained.

Balance isn’t always possible. As the teaching component shows, I have been front loading my schedule with class prep before the semester started and grading has now absorbed a substantial piece. I think I’m finally reaching equilibrium of effort but it means that other categories are having to take a smaller amount of time.

It has also helped me reflect on how I have settled into certain parts of the role. For example, our finance person left in November and so our acquisitions processes have been a bit roiled. Until we hire, I am doing the triage on the incoming materials because I am the one who currently pays the invoices. This work has started to make a lot more sense as I navigate our financial systems and work with vendors. I will look forward to passing it off to our new team member when they join us, but I can already see the work become smoother for me as I learn and retain process information. I’ve even completed my first contract from start to finish!

When I was working in San Diego or the Law Society in Canada, my calendar was largely my own. It was empty because I tended only to block off meetings and I didn’t take many of those. It’s important to me as a library director to keep a lot of flex in my calendar so that I can have chances for serendipitous interactions with staff and others. It also means that, if an emergency arises, I have leeway to absorb it. I’ve written before about utilization. If you are fully utilized—working at 100%, let’s not even go into bogus 110%—then you have less opportunity to adapt and absorb change.

Now I am blocking off large chunks of time. For now, at least, I am dedicating all of Tuesdays to the course I teach on Wednesday and to grade homework turned in on Monday night. I may not be able to always protect that time but better to block it off now and adapt it later, than to run out immediately and fall behind on either class prep or grading.

Similarly, I have had to start to block off time to write. This has not been too hard, since our school doesn’t hold classes on Fridays. Most staff work from home on Fridays too. I have not because I like being in the office when I start a new role. But also it means that I have almost an entire building floor to myself and without the distractions of being in my home space. The ability to dedicate space and time to writing should mean that scholarship piece doesn’t disappear. It will hopefully mean I stay on course to complete the writing obligations I have for tenure.

Meeting scheduling habits are fascinating to me. We have someone at the law school whose calendar shows that it is permanently booked. You cannot see free space to send them a meeting request. At the other end of the spectrum, there are people who want to email meeting participants for availability. This results in a reply-all messages about availability, which could have been solved using a Microsoft Form or the Outlook Scheduling Assistant if everyone made their calendar visible.

While it has worked to schedule time, that mostly just diverts and corrals meetings and other interactions. It means that someone scheduling a meeting with me can see my general availability. Anyone in the building might still swing by. I also check email and so time gets diverted that way too. I have had about 4 phone calls since I arrived at the law school, so I ignore it now.

Protect and Serve

It means being more deliberate about protecting my time, too. I have never been someone who lives by email. Now I am particularly mindful about not checking email for hours at a time. This has caused some slight confusion when someone comes to my door assuming I’ve read their email. But I find that email is such a drain on productivity that I try to only work through it in bursts, not a constant flow.

One tactic I have taken to using is to leave my office and settle down on a different floor. We’re in a high rise and the librarians’ offices are secured against entry by students. So I head down to a commons area on the second floor to be visible. I’ll be holding office hours in the same space this semester, since the students can’t access my office. I also grab a chair in the early hours in our library, again as much to be visible as anything. But also it forces me to focus on the book I’m reading or the journal article that I’ve been stacking up for review. It’s also good for my mental health to get out and be among other people, even if we’re not actually interacting.

I am realizing already, though, that this is not something that is just for the start of my role here. I will need to be deliberate about this sort of time balance for the remainder of my time here if I want to get all of the things done that I want or need to do. It’s a balancing act that is new to me but seems eminently manageable. I just have to be constantly mindful. I think keeping a record will be a huge help towards that end.