Reading Time: 7 minutes
The semester has come to an end. I’d picked up a course to teach at the last minute and so that is also now complete. The pacing in an academic law library is quite different from what I’ve experienced in other organizations. Far more ups and downs but also coupled with the expectation of wearing multiple hats. I am still working on finding my own stride.
For reasons that I discussed earlier this year, I have been keeping track of my time allocation. At first it was just to meet a potential future administrative obligation but it is now something that is helping me to reflect on time management. This last semester was sufficiently overwhelming that there were days where I forgot what I’d worked on the day before. Since I’m wearing multiple hats, as many academic law library directors are, this meant that some days were dedicated to one hat and others to another.
Fine Lines
This can be a bit disorienting. It is substantially different from my experiences in a primarily administrative law library director role. While you might also be doing professional speaking or writing, that tended to be very much an isolated project. Time management would normally involve balancing multiple administrative tasks—invoice management, hiring, governance reports or meetings—that were all, to some extent, under the same umbrella.
I think this is, in part, because in that sort of role, I was acting as part of or for a team. There was a sense that the work I was doing was contributing to the forward motion of the organization. There was a whole-ness to it.
I don’t feel that so far with my current role. The law library side, the operations piece, feels very distinct from the faculty side. This may be because, in our organization, I bridge the two sides. It means that, when I am doing work for one or the other, the work is isolated as a contribution as well. When I take on a course and teach, it is helping the organization overall but is of relatively little value to the library. My work on budgeting is necessary for the law school operation but has zero value to my forward momentum on tenure. When I pivot in either direction, there is a much greater sense of separation in the work than I’ve experienced before.
Time Lapse
My role is 49% operations and 51% faculty and so I’ve been trying to hew close to that split. One thing I probably need to work on is communicating that split to people so that they know that, when I’m in the office, I’m not 100% focused on operations.
My eight-month snapshot shows a manageable split between the roles. I keep a running spreadsheet and, for the most part, feel good about the categories things fall into. This is the view after two semesters, one of which involved teaching and also included both the creation of a book proposal and researching and writing an article for publication
But if I look at just the last semester when I taught, the balance of time changes significantly. Teaching has absorbed time from every other category except HR (which also ramped up because we are hiring).
The numbers reflect my reality. They also hide that more of this time has occurred outside the typical operations hours of 9-5, Monday to Friday. In other words, it is not that the tasks have switched within the same amount of time; the amount of time has expanded. I have felt stretched on the operations side and some projects that I had hoped to move forward have instead sat on the back burner. At the same time, operations functions like budgeting and approaching year end have spiked, so even the operations time is not focused on the things I’d prefer to focus on.
Learning Curve
Some of this is because I’m still on a learning curve (or perhaps more than one). Over time, I think it will become more familiar and so there will be less a feeling of working two part-time roles. At the moment, though, the time investment is making it hard to feel that sense of integration.
To be clear, I’m focused entirely on things that are within the scope of my role. This is not what Canadians refer to as “working off the side of my desk” which suggests “not my job” sorts of tasks. I think that can be an added challenge and I’m pretty good about drawing a bright line to keep those at bay. The strangeness comes from having a bright line where either half of my role is “not my job” to the other half.
As I reflect on the past semester, I can see a couple of reasons that the time imbalance occurred. For one, the course I was teaching required a lot more preparation than I had expected. It was my first time teaching it and so this required a greater amount of time for me to work on the materials to feel comfortable with class time. In future, this gaining familiarity would probably happen before the semester rather than on the hoof. Or, if it’s a course I’m developing myself, I’ll have the benefit of having some expertise.
At the same time, the operations functions required a steep learning curve on our financial systems and how they work. That is also now largely behind me. The nice thing about learning a system is that there is a certain amount of stability in how the inputs and outputs work. It may not be a great system but at least it will usually work the same way each time.
Teaching did not provide that certainty. For one thing, there was a tension in this course—which involved 60+ students doing bar essay writing—caused by volume and grading. For me to feel effective, I needed to be providing feedback on their writing. But each graded assignment absorbed 20-30 hours of time if the feedback were to be meaningful. That time block was constrained by the need to get the feedback to the students before the next assessment. It’s not surprising, given the data chart, that teaching compressed every other function.
I had a funny discussion with a colleague about feedback on finals. Would they notice if we didn’t provided feedback on the finals, given that so many of them graduated? But I explained that, for me, the only point of grading is to give feedback. So I gave feedback on the finals even if it goes unread.
There’s also the need to find your own method. Due to the time constraints, I was taking 9 or 10 hour stretches and just grading as steadily as I could. For me, getting into that zone and having the repetition is a positive. At first I thought about doing that with the final exam too, but a colleague who I respect highly had an alternate approach. Since there is no additional assessment, they break their grading out into chunks to make it manageable. This has the added benefit that you can focus on more than just grading in a single day, like library operations. Even 60 finals can be managed in chunks of 5 in fewer than 2 weeks.
I tried this but found that I was too often derailed by other activity. I struggle to block off the time necessary to keep that focus. Also, I can be a procrastinator deadline oriented. Then a day would go by with no grading, and so my quota would go up. In the end, I reverted to what had worked for me and dedicated full days to grading, interspersed with full days without grading. This, plus sticking close to my practice of (a) blocking off time from my calendar and (b) closing comms (email and Teams) during that time, worked for me.
Future Imperfect
As I said to my Dean during my performance review, this pacing is a particular challenge on the faculty side. It’s different from what I think of as strategic planning. On the operations side of a law library, you can plan out projects ahead and build in flexibility to adapt as things change. You can delegate and lean on others for their (often greater) expertise in area. There is a budget cycle that largely defines the pacing for the law library. The money is given and the money is taken away, and so pacing is based on these parameters.
For me, the challenge right now is on the faculty side. It’s largely an isolated endeavor, with each person working toward their own goals. Even though I was teaching a course that was being taught by 3 or 4 other instructors, I know that our course materials were different. One instructor gave a 3 hour final exam while most others gave a 2 hour final like I did. It is enjoyable but also a bit disconcerting to be left to one’s own devices, especially when you’re new to the environment.
Similarly, there is this issue of keeping the pipeline full of future projects. Whether it is working on research or writing, there is a need to have projects percolating. This can be done in a manner similar to strategic planning but the uncertainty comes not from the budget but from other places: what courses are being offered, what curriculum needs there are, and so on. The challenge is also to get enough things in the pipeline—future activities, engagements, and so on—to be able to fulfill your promotion obligations but not so many that, if there is a need to course correct, you are unable to do so.
I have been looking into law review printing costs and production process and came across this article on “Fixing Law Reviews” by NYU Law’s Barry Friedman. It was a fascinating read about how faculty game the system to get into more prestigious journals—”Today we all play the game of Offer-and-Expedite, in which authors who have received one offer to publish a piece engage in a mad scramble to obtain a better offer from a review perceived to be ranked more highly“—and the impact on the students who run the reviews. It was all new information to me.
Frankly, the whole law journal system makes very little sense to me. It’s not even the proliferation of journals and the focus of accrediting bodies on scholarly publishing. When you work in law libraries where law journals serve little to no purpose or when you see that, as Prof. Friedman puts it, “judicial citations to scholarship are declining“, you wonder about all of the time and effort put into the system. But that is a topic for another day.
New faculty may not realize that there is a publishing cycle; perhaps mentors know this information or it is imparted in some other way. I certainly would not have considered that. Sure, there is a cycle based on the actual issue release, but my experience in submitting work in the past is that it is taken on a rolling basis. You submit it when you’re ready and, if it’s accepted, it goes into the next available issue. Not so, apparently, in law:
Of course, the four hundred articles per editor figure also misleadingly suggests this workload is spread out over a long period of time, when it is not. Rather, articles generally are submitted in two waves, one in the early spring and one in the late summer to early fall as school starts. If you want an article accepted, you submit on cycle, preferably in the spring.
Fixing Law Reviews, Barry Friedman, 67 Duke L.J. pp.1311-1312 (2018).
This may be one perspective and it may have changed since 2018 as so much else has. But it is interesting to me nonetheless. Layers upon layers to unpeel. It’s not enough to just put projects into the pipeline but the timing may be more consequential than is obvious at first.
I do not get the sense that this is something I need to dwell on yet but it’s in the back of my mind. It means that one approach would only envision article submissions in a specific window. Given that tenure has a limited number of years to be acquired, that window only opens 6 or 7 times. This means that the article needs to be researched and written on a schedule prior to that (so fall/winter at the latest, or, ideally, at least started during the prior summer).
Perhaps this is why tenure may only require two or three pieces of scholarship within a six-year period. Not only are they intended to be extensive pieces of work, there may only be so many opportunities to get them past gatekeepers. It makes me wonder how much research gets left on the cutting room floor, not finding a home for publication before it is superseded or becomes out of date, requiring the author to start over.
This may be a reflection of where I am in my career and my past publishing. I don’t have any concerns about writing and researching. It’s the time management and eking out the time to get all the component pieces done which seems the most challenging aspect of this. I am still learning whether the expectations I’m experiencing are self-imposed or if others are not aware of how my role is split between operations and faculty activities.
It’s still early days, though. I’m confident that a full year will give me more perspective on what’s achievable and how to balance the work. I’m hoping by then to also have a better balance between operations and faculty obligations and feel that they are more blended.