SESSION 7 TIME MANAGEMENT Jan Cuny, University of Massachusetts at Amherst Leah Jamieson, Purdue University Laurie Dillon, University of California at Santa Barbara So now we get to our final panel and this deals with something that's been implicit in all the other panels. And that's the question of "Gee, you have to be so excellent in everything and you still want to have a life. How do you manage?" And so this panel is about time management. My name is Jan Cuny and I'm from the University of Massachusetts. All day you've been bombarded with lists of things that you'll have to do [to be successful in your careers] and now we're supposed to tell you how you're going to manage to do them all in a 24 hour day. Shortly after I had agreed to do this panel, I began to worry that I didn't really know anything about time management: my life is complete chaos 30% of the time and the rest of the time it's nearly complete chaos. So, immediately panicking, I began to ask everyone I met for tips. Visitors would come through the department and I'd take them out to lunch, bring along a notebook, and ask them about time management. The interesting thing was that almost everyone I talked to -- and certainly all of the women I talked to -- said that they weren't very good at time management. Yet these were very successful people so they must in fact be doing a pretty good job of it. What I decided to do for this panel was to first go through some very general strategies that were common to many of the responses that I got. As I go through them though, you'll realize that they're all pretty straightforward and obvious. After the list, I'll get the other members of the panel to say, on a more anecdotal level, how they manage their own time. I think you'll see that there is a lot of individual variation in how you go about implementing the same basic strategies. There are two kinds of strategies: one helps to cram more into the time you've got and the other helps you get rid of things so that you have less to do. They're both aimed at using your time effectively. PRIORITIZE. This was mentioned by everyone. In a well known book, "How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life" by Lakin, it was suggested that you prioritize your list of things to do into A, B and C categories where A is really important, B is important, and C is everything else. Lots of the people I talked to do this. I keep my A list on the blackboard in my office and each item has a deadline next to it. Everything that makes it onto my board gets done but things that don't make it onto the board may not. When you prioritize your tasks, you should be careful to think in terms of long term goals. It's easy to get overwhelmed by day to day demands and lose sight of your objectives. I've also found that the list can get depressing: you come in the morning and there's this long list of things to do in front of you; you work really hard all day and nothing is gone from the list, in fact, the list might have grown. So I frequently go for "completions" as I call them. I'll go all the way down to my C list, if I have to, just to find something that I can finish quickly so that at the end of the day, I can say something was finished. Psychologically, that's important for me. DELEGATE. This is another really important strategy. You can delegate things in a numbers of ways [both in your professional life and in your personal life]. Professionally, make good use of secretaries and staff. Be incredibly nice to these people; they will save you over and over again. I didn't have time to proofread my final before I left town this week, so I [read it on the plane] and I had to make an emergency call back to one of the secretaries telling her to change the first question. Give a lot of responsibility to your graduate students. It's good training for them and it will make your life a lot easier. [While I'm here this week, my class has its final. One of my TAs is giving a review session, another is proctoring the exam. Let your RAs take care of submitting papers and help with reviewing papers.] In terms of your personal life, you can delegate many things too. Throw money at problems. If you can pay somebody to do something -- wash the laundry, clean the house, plow the driveway, mow the lawn -- pay them. I would also put letting your spouse take over some responsibilities under this category. I've got three kids and my husband does lots of the child care but initially it was hard for me to let him have those responsibilities. I felt that I should be the one to take them to the doctor's, etc. If you can let go of a lot of these responsibilities, you can save yourself a lot of time. BE ORGANIZED. MAKE A SCHEDULE. Many people feel that this is really important and the other panelists will talk about it but I'm the wrong person to discuss it. I'm very disorganized and I have a hard time sticking to a schedule although I believe intellectually it would be a good idea. [Of course, I can't entirely avoid scheduling classes, office hours, meetings, etc. so] the compromise that I've made is that I only schedule things every other day. Doing the semester it's usually Tuesday and Thursday that are unscheduled and during the summer, its usually Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. So even on my most awful days of back to back meetings, I can still think "Ah, tomorrow I have the whole day open." STAY FOCUSED. You have to stay focused both in the short term and the long term. In the short term, you have to stay focused on what you are doing at the moment. You are going to have a lot of different things to do in a day and one of the best pieces of advice that I got as a new faculty member was to learn to context switch really fast. You should also avoid "thrashing": you start out working on a paper that's due and then think "What am I going to say in class this afternoon?" so you switch to class preparation and then think "I've got a committee meeting in a half hour" and switch to working on that. In the end you don't accomplish anything. It's really important to stay focused on your long term goals. It's easy to come in early, work incredibly hard all day, and not make the slightest bit of progress in terms of your career. BE SENSITIVE TO YOUR MOST PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE TIMES. Most people have times of the day when they are more effective and times when they are less effective. These times have really changed for me. It used to be that my most productive time was after 11 pm but now it starts around 8:30 in the morning. You should be sensitive to these times and schedule the things that need the hardest thinking for your best times. Also be willing to stop what you're doing if you are not being productive. If you've scheduled the morning to work on a paper but you're getting nowhere on it, drop it. Move on to something else. You can come back to it later. LEARN TO SAY "NO". You will be asked to do more things in your career than you could conceivably do in two careers so you have to be willing to say no. When you're asked to do something, evaluate it in terms of your long term goals and if it's something that you shouldn't be doing say no. Learn to say no nicely. I'm good at saying no to things in the immediate future; ask me to do something this week or next week, I'll probably say no. But I'm terrible at saying no to things in the distant future; ask me to do something in six months, I'll say yes, every time. This is a big mistake. MAINTAIN A BALANCE. A number of speakers on other panels have mentioned this. You really do have to have a real life. You'll need lots of time to work and you will have to work hard but you also will need time to rest, time to exercise, and time to have family and friends and an outside life. Your objective in your career is to do a lot of creative thinking; that is not the same thing as doing volumes and volumes of work. Ultimately, you will do more creative thinking and be a more productive computer scientist if you can achieve a reasonable balance in your life. That's really all that I wanted to say about these general strategies. I've given you a lot of information on my personal style of time management but there was one last thing that I wanted to mention and this is something that works well for me but does not work for everyone. I work well in crisis mode and so I deliberately schedule crises--Laughter, Laughter. If, for example, I have a paper that's due, I decide how much time its worth and then I back up from its deadline that amount of time and that's when I start that paper. This creates an enormous amount of tension in my life --Laughter-- but it means that I don't end up wasting inordinate amounts of time on last little touches that might not make much of a difference anyway. Again, this is not an approach that would work for everyone. I think I'll stop here and let Laurie and Leah give their personal slant on the topic and their tips. I'm Laurie Dillon; you are going to find out who I am as part of this talk, I guess, since one of the things that Jan asked us to do is talk a little bit about our education, what our job experiences are, where our children fit in and what stage we are in our careers. I'm not going to go into the detail we had originally planned because of the time. This is partly what qualifies us to be talking about time management -- right? -- the fact that we have very little time in our lives. This [referring to a transparency] summarizes my education. I had a couple of breaks [in my education] and one false start -- well, you might call it a false start -- I did four years of graduate work in mathematics. So I arrived at computer science in a round about fashion and didn't start my graduate studies until what I felt was quite old; I was 28 [when I started graduate work in Computer Science] and I took five years to finish. As for my job experiences, I guess the relevant things are that I worked for a year as an Assistant Professor at the University of Massachusetts (where I got my my PhD in Computer Science) and then I took a tenure track position at the University of California at Santa Barbara and, in the standard time, was promoted to tenure. As for where my kids fit into this scheme: -- Laughter--- Well, my biological clock was ticking and at about age 30 we decided that no time was going to be the right time to have kids (i.e. that this time was as good as any other). So I had my first child in my third year of graduate school. And the year at U Mass was because I was pregnant when I got my degree; it didn't seem like a good idea to start a new career at that point. So when I began at Santa Barbara I had a six month old and a 3 1/2 year old. This had a major impact on my career, needless to say. Jan also asked us to keep track of a "real day". On the day that I got the email message [asking for a schedule], I started recording what I did. This [referring to the next transparency] was my morning, just to give you an idea. --Laughter, laughter -- This was a pretty normal spring day for me -- actually it was a pretty good day. Lets see, I had my normal 6:30 shower and then I threw the kids in the shower. Breakfast was at 7:00. This morning we had science projects that had to be finished; there were some finishing touches [to add to them]. (Normally piano practice would be scheduled [for this time]; Nina had to find time for her piano practice later in the day.) We left the kids at school at 8:15. I got to school [8:30] and took care of my mail [9:00]. Then I had a this great [block of time] -- I try to do this regularly -- leave my mornings free for research if at all possible. So I had a 3 1/2 hour chunk of time [on this morning] to get some real work done. This was my afternoon [referring to the next transparency]. This was a very typical afternoon. Sometimes, I can work during my office hours, but [on this day] I was giving a midterm and so I had a steady stream [of students]. I gave my midterm at 2:00. We had a faculty-graduate student meeting at 3:30. I had to leave [the meeting] early to race home to pick up the kids [4:30]. I left them and their father at my daughter's softball game while I ran to the pharmacy [5:00] I returned to the game [5:30] and graded midterms while watching the game. ---Laughter, Laughter-- We got home [8:00]. The kids finished their homework. (In an ideal world they would have finished their homework already -- we have a housekeeper [at the house when] they come home from school and she is supposed to make sure that they get their homework done, but there is always some more to be done.) We prepared dinner, ate, cleaned the kitchen, got one [child] to bed, and got the other to bed. I graded midterms from 9:00 until 12:00 and took a half hour to wind down. So that's a pretty standard day. --Laughter-- I don't need a whole lot of sleep; I'm lucky that way. We were going to talk a little bit about our own personal style [of time management]. Jan has said a lot of what I had intended to say. I found that my personal style as a student-mother just didn't work when I became a professor. I was always the kind of person to save the best for last/get the the worst things over with quickly. If I had an unpleasant task to do, I would start on it right away and get it done. I found that this strategy didn't work as a professor; I became much more demand driven. I found that if I started on routine tasks too early I spent too much time on them. It was better, like Jan said, to back them up against a deadline. If I have to prepare an exam that shouldn't take more than an afternoon to prepare and if I start too early, I'll spend too much time getting it perfect. So I wait until the afternoon before. That's a stressful way to work, but you get it done and you don't spend too much time doing it. Another trick is to be opportunistic. One of the nice things about our jobs is that we have a lot of flexibility and you can take advantage of that. I can leave work early for special events with the kids or to attend a play at school. I sometimes leave in the middle of the day [for a short time]. That means a lot to them; they know that I've missed work time to see them at school. Or I leave to take them to the doctor. I make up that time on the week ends or in the evenings. Something you can also do is make weekly chores into family activities. For instance, we all do the grocery shopping together. Now my kids are getting a little old for that; they don't like to [go grocery shopping any more] --Laughter, Laughter-- but up until now we have done it together. You've got to get your grocery shopping done and it's time that you spend with your kids. We fold clothes together every Sunday night in front of the TV set. The kids also help with yard work and they love to help cook. They feel like they've accomplished something. I try to take advantage of that to get things done and spend time with my kids. Another thing I feel is that it's important for your kids to see you helping out in their school activities. There are lots of different ways you can do this. Your child's teacher will send home sheets of things that you can volunteer for. I try to choose activities that are visible to my child; like going with the class on a field trip or going to school to help with the jogathon, rather than signing up for things, like grading homework papers for the teacher, that my children don't really appreciate. Sometimes having children can be an advantage when you want an excuse to get out of something at work. -- Laughter -- You don't want to do this too often, but for example, just recently there was a particular faculty meeting in which I knew they were going to debate the format of the masters exam. Well, it isn't really important to me whether the masters exam is oral or written, but its very important to other people in our department. I would rather spend that time helping out in my child's classroom [than debating the merits of the different exam formats]. Another important thing is to find places where you can go and you won't be bothered. If I'm in my office there will be a steady stream of students knocking at my door. If I've got an important deadline, in order to focus on it, I may have to find a cubby hole in the library, go to my husband's office, or stay home and work. In real crisis mode I intentionally ignore everything [unessential]. I don't answer my [routine] mail. I look at the subject line on email; if it looks critical, I look at it; otherwise, I don't read the message [until I have time to attend to it]. You can do that for -- maybe -- three of four days and then it gets a little risky --Laughter-- APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE. My name is Leah Jamieson and I'm a professor in electrical engineering at Purdue University. Jan asked us to give you a little bit of background: mainly the context of what time pressures we faced at what points in our lives. I finished my PhD from Princeton and immediately joined the electrical engineering department at Purdue. I was promoted and got tenure 6 years later, in 1982; I was promoted to full professor in 1986 and I have been a full professor ever since then. In 1989 I started a 5 year term as director of EE's graduate program. This is a half time administrative position. I had a daughter 4 years ago, so that was when I was a full professor and it was while I was director of the graduate program. I think probably the first reaction to that is "Well, piece of cake", and I will agree that in some sense this is one of the easy ways of doing things. I don't recommend it; it's just that the way things worked out in my life, this was the natural time for me to have a daughter. I was a full professor so I was not trying to get tenure and cope with all the pressures of family and kids at the same time. One of the things I am going to do here is take a few minutes to list the things I do now. [From transparency. WHAT DOES A FULL PROFESSOR DO? Supervising six Ph.D. students Grants/Contracts from ARPA, NSF, Motorola, AT&T, Kodak Director of E.E. Graduate Program Teach one course per year Editorial board of two journals Program committee for two conferences and two workshops Chair three committees: One at the University level at Purdue and two for the IEEE Signal Processing Society Member IEEE SP Society Ad Com IEEE CS Distinguished Visitor (Lecturer) Member miscellaneous committees End of transparency.] In some sense this may be a little bit depressing, but I think it's realistic and it's better to know this because in the long term it's not depressing. I think there is a myth that when you get tenure all of the time pressure, all of the hard work, all of the commitments evaporate and life from then on is a breeze. It's not true. Just to give you sort of a snapshot, I scribbled down basically what what am I doing now. This is a high level summary -- mainly it's to to suggest that tenure is very hard, and it is essential, and it is important, and certainly there is no pressure quite analogous to it in the sense that if you screw up you are going to lose your job. But the need to be able to manage your time continues, because in fact, what happens is that the responsibilities shift. One of the ways they shift is that some of the best pieces of advice that you have been hearing all day today are "Learn how to say 'no'." "Service counts one percent." "It's important to get involved in the right things but not to get involved in too many things." "Know your limitations: don't say 'yes' to everything in sight just because it will be fun, because there's simply not time enough in a 24-hour day to do it." One of the things that happens when you get tenure is that your responsibilities with respect to saying "no" to everything do in fact change. There are some things that have to get done, somebody has to do them, and in good conscience most of us can say it shouldn't be assistant professors who are doing them. But it also means that at some point you have to say "Well, I guess if that has to be done and the assistant professor shouldn't be doing it, maybe I have to be doing it." So there are things that you end up doing. With respect to committees, this will explain some of the things that show up in my schedule. In response to Jan's request to show what we did in an actual day: I am very priority driven and the day her message came in, the last thing in the world I wanted to do was pay attention to how I was spending my time, because I was busy doing other things. So when I got around to this -- in other words when preparing this came to the top of the priority list -- I opened my calendar, closed my eyes, and pointed to a day in my calendar. I do keep schedules because I live by schedules, so it was very easy to say what I did that day. The day started at 7:00, with sorting laundry, eating breakfast, and playing with my daughter until 8:00. I probably took a shower; that wasn't in the schedule. --Laughter laughter--. It turns out that this is a typical work day for about half of my days. I start out in the morning spending some time reading email. This is a Monday, so one of the very critical things for me for my personal way of managing time is in fact figuring out what things I have to get done this week. A week is an amount of time that is fairly easy for me to focus on, and at least I know that if I sort through everything that has to get done in that week I'm not going to let something slip that is really critical. "Am I giving a test this week?" for example. It would be good for me to pay attention to that. In this particular week, I was getting ready to go to a conference where I was chairing two meetings and I was up to the point where I had to organize agendas for those meetings to let people know what was going to be happening. During the day I kept coming back and working on that whenever I had some free time: a half an hour in the morning, an hour later in the day. I went to a Graduate Committee meeting, we had a faculty candidate interviewing so I went to the seminar, and I had lunch with my husband. This is also one of the sort of personal time management things: it is necessary to have a life for yourself. My husband and I found that one of the very few times that we can spend any time together and relax and just enjoy being together is by going out to lunch, so probably four days out of a week we will in fact go out to lunch together. This is almost a religious commitment: we do this because it's really necessary for both of us. In the afternoon I spent some more time working on the committee stuff, and had a group meeting with my graduate students, preparing posters and presentations for the conference that we were going to. There's a red box around the time window from 8:15am to 4:45 pm, and it's there for a reason. Our child care arrives at 8:00 in the morning and someone is due home at or 5:00 in the evening. The other thing I didn't mention is that while I was a full professor when my daughter was born, my husband was a non-tenured assistant professor. At 5:00 when somebody has to go home, it is more often that I'm the one. I've thought a lot about whether I'm doing this is this because it's always the woman who goes home, but I actually think that in this case it's much more of an academic decision. The assistant professor gets more time to work. The full professor has a lot of things to do, but if somebody's going to have to squeeze their schedule a little bit more, I'm probably the one who does it. At home I played with my daughter, we had dinner, and we did grocery shopping and errands as a mother and daughter activity, because it's a way of spending time together and they have to get done. This was an unusual evening: my husband had a meeting so he was off doing something else, so when he got home I took the opportunity to log in and work for about an hour. By and large, though, I simply do not get work done at home. Finally, bedtime rituals from 10:00-10:30. My daughter does not sleep much, so one of the reasons why I don't get any work done in the evening is because she is up until 10:30. After 10:30, I put laundry away. You'll notice that I sorted the laundry and put it away; during the day somebody else did it, so this is not not anything that I spent time on. Finally, wind down get some sleep. This is typical for about half my days, and I was depressed when I looked at it. I actually did look at another day to convince -- Laughter -- myself that I didn't spend all my days like this. And this in fact is one of the things I do with my schedule. I will trade off some days that are pure hell in terms of meetings, meetings, meetings where you've got to be in the right place at the right time, for the luxury of then having half days or full days where there is a lot of unscheduled time to be able to breathe and think and work on those things that take some number of hours of contiguous time to get some work done. And so the other half of my days look much more like this and I tend to enjoy those days more, I will say. Personal things with respect to the time management: I am definitely priority driven. On the other hand, I hate working under pressure. These two things sound like they contradict each other, and in some sense they do. But there are some kinds of pressure that I simply can't live with. I could not make up a test the afternoon before it had to be done because I would be nuts; instead, I just work very hard at deciding how much time I'm going to allow and make sure that it gets done in that amount of time so that other things can fall into place. I work by schedules. What has worked for me is basically a combination of long term and short term scheduling. By short term I mean "What do I have to get done today? What do I have to get done this week?" Long term, for the semester or year, what are my goals? What bigger projects am I trying to get done and when am I trying to get them done by? It took a fair amount of time to find schedules that felt right. This notion of packed days and open days feels right, so at the beginning of every semester now I work quite hard to try to set up my schedule in that way. I feel fairly constrained by my "time in a box", in that I feel that I do not have the luxury of saying "Well, I've got a lot of work to do to do this week, so I'll just work 14 hours a day instead of 9 hours a day." This is one of the reasons I schedule my time so tightly. I think focus is very important. This means just pay attention to what you are doing, and if you are setting out to do something, work on that don't get distracted. Get very efficient at things. For example, I open my mail to the extent that I open the envelop and separate the recyclable part inside from the non recyclable envelope, but for a lot of mail I don't spend any time looking at it. Know how long things take. This is actually one of the HARDEST things I found that it took me to learn how to do, but it is also been invaluable. If you're priority driven you have to be good at estimating how long it's going to take to do something, because if you guess wrong it's not going to work. It's something that's worth paying attention to. As you go through the process of making a test, how long did it take you to make up the test? Can you make it up in slightly less time the next time? You converge on something and then you can manage your time better in the future. Thinking and planning away from the desk: A lot of the hard things -- for example, if I'm writing a paper and it need to be organized, or if I'm preparing a talk for a conference -- I can do fairly quickly, because by the time I sit down to actually do the writing or make up the slides, I've already decided what's going to be in it. I've organized it in my head, and I did all that at while I wasn't at work and while I wasn't at my desk. It is much more pleasant to think about what you are going to put in a talk than to pay great attention to the same episode of Barney for the fifteenth time. --- Laughter, laughter, laughter--. So it's a way of getting in some extra work time without hurting anyone. You actually get some of the hard things done and you are basically getting ahead of things. Know what you do well and when you can do them. When when I first started working, I would carry my backpack full of proposal related material home every night and I wouldn't get anything done because I don't work well in the evening. There is no way in the world I'm going to write a good proposal starting at eight or nine in the evening. I can grade papers in the evening, I can make up homeworks, I can even prepare classes in the evening. I can't do proposals. It took me several years to figure that out and eventually I started carrying home papers to grade and I got more done. I think organization does make a difference. My personal scheme is that I'm organized at a macro level. If I'm working on eight different projects, there will be eight distinct places in my office where each of those projects is, and I can find them immediately. For any given project, all the relevant material is in the right place. Within that stack, I'll organize it as needed. If I'm not working on it right now, I don't take time to put every paper in its place. When I get down to working on that project, I put the papers in their place and then I can work on it efficiently. Finally, eventually you do say "yes" to some things, but the key here is selectivity. Again, I think this mainly is a post-tenure process. How do you decide which things to say yes to? There are some things that, one way or another, you don't have a choice. But if you do have a choice, ask yourself two questions: Is it going to have an impact, that is, is it something that's worth your doing? And are you going to enjoy doing it? Those are the criteria that I concentrate on in deciding which things to do and which things not to do. I just want to say about a minute's worth on the fact that managing your time is very much related to having a life and some sanity. Put your life in your schedule. Going to lunch with my husband is in my schedule: neither of us commits to other things at lunch time. Also, if you are married and have children and you and your spouse are both working, you need to have some kind of protocol for or who gets extra time to work, and it's best to work that out in some way that is not tension creating so that everything can go as smoothly as possible. Spend money not time. You are making money once you've got a job, and time is probably a lot more valuable. Which things you spend money on instead of time depends on what you like to do. If you love to cook, obviously cook. If you don't love to cook, eat out. This also applies to having people over, entertaining, seeing friends. Are you are going to cook dinner for friends when you feel like you have no time? You don't have to do that. You can buy dinner: you can buy pizza, you can get take out food. It turns out people don't mind: they would rather have the chance to spend some time talking with you, and what you've done is you've spent some money to make it easier to spend some time with your friends. Basically, priorities work at home too, in deciding which things you are going to do. I do not clean. I do not do laundry. In some combination of my husband, my daughter and I, we probably cook about half of our meals; the rest we eat out. The bottom line with time management is that you have to decide what are you going to do. If you are trying to decide whether or not to do something, ask "Is it important to be doing it?" and "Is it fun?" I think you've been hearing a lot today about a lot of pressures. Nobody is ever going to claim this is an easy job, an easy life, an easy career. But it has to be fun, so you need to get it under control enough so that it is fun, because that's really what makes it worth doing. APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE. I made a schedule of a typical day for me as well but it is really not too different from Laurie and Leah's so I think we'll skip it move on to questions. So I hope you have some and if you don't, we do. Are you ever ahead of schedule? ---Laughter, Laughter-- No. Once, right before I left town, I had my students finish a paper ahead of schedule. When I got back, I noticed a Federal Express bill and asked them why they had Fedexed it when it was done early. They answered that they didn't know that you could just mail a paper in by regular mail. --LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER. I would agree, I don't think I'm ever done ahead of time. In fact I've learned that almost routinely people will give you another three days or a week, if you really need it, for a conference paper. It's good to check this out in advance. See what the hard deadline is. Do you just to have a paper mailed by this date or does it have to be on the person's desk by this date? Yes, I would also agree, nothing is ever done ahead of time. Maybe I shouldn't say this, but almost routinely people will give you another three days or a week if you really need it, for something like a conference paper submission. It's good to check this out in advance, obviously, and see what is the really hard deadline when things need to be in. Also, do you just have to mail it by this date or does it really have to be on the person's desk by this date? (Panel discussion) It's important, though, to know which deadlines can slip and which can't. Proposals for programs are typically in the category where the deadline is absolutely rigid. You simply need to meet be able to make the distinction about which things can likely slide a little bit and which ones can't. We haven't had as much time during this conference as we wanted to to talk about kids and so I wanted to put in or or a couple of words about that. When you are having a baby -- and there are all kinds of stories about what's the best time to do that -- don't expect to do a lot in the first year. Even if somebody takes care of the baby 24 hours a day, you are still sort of getting back to normal and you are still sleep deprived. It's usually not the most creative time, so give yourself a break and assume that you are going to need some sort of a mental break the year that you have the baby. How long does it takes to prepare a lecture and what is a realistic expectation when you are starting out as a new professor for class preparation time? I've found that it varies dramatically. This year I taught two courses, I taught a compiler construction course for graduate students and a discrete math course for undergraduates. The compiler course took over my life -Laughter-. It had been a long time since I'd taught compiler construction so I started pretty much from scratch. I spent 6 or 7 hours on every lecture and some times it was more. On the other hand, I'd taught the discrete math course many times before and so I'd spend about 45 minutes before each lecture on it. The first time you teach a course it takes an incredible amount of time. Once you've taught it a few times, the time demand goes down of course. It also depends on the area. Discrete math is the obvious example; I've taught it a few times too and the subject matter never changes [so its much easier the second or third time]. I find that its best if I don't prepare a lecture too far in advance [for a course, like discrete math, that I've already taught before]. Rather than, say, reviewing all the lectures for the week over the weekend, I'm much better off if I wait until the morning or the evening before the lecture to go over what I am going to say. On the other hand, programming languages change all the time and no matter how many times I've taught the [comparative programming languages] course, it takes an incredible amount of time. The students feel that, if you don't know all the idiosyncrasies of every new language, you are an incompetent professor and you shouldn't be teaching this course. That's absolutely consistent with my first my experience. The first semester I was teaching an algorithms course. It was material I knew cold and it was still taking me four hours per lecture to prepare simply because of the process of deciding what to write down when and in what order. It gets better with practice. I think that the master teacher tapes that Janie referred to are ways of helping you with organizational things and style. The other point that Ginnie Lo mentioned which I thing is absolutely critical is that there is no comparison between preparing a course for the first time and preparing it for the second or third time. If your department doesn't have some mechanism for giving you some priority on teaching something because you've taught it before, it is worth asking that this be incorporated into the process of making teaching assignments. One additional point: If you know people who have taught the course before -- for instance, you should immediately [upon being given a new teaching assignment] go to whoever last taught the course at your institution) -- see if you can get copies of their lecture notes and their syllabus. Or if you know someone from another institution who has taught a similar course and who you know to be a good teacher, ask them. I used Jan's notes [for one of the first classes that I taught]. I was just going to say that Fran Berman and I exchanged formal language theory questions for years. we'd switch and I would take [some questions from] her final and she would take [some questions from] mine. I got up to talk about nannies or it "pays to pay". You are all going to have careers that pay well and the chances are that you are also going to have a spouse who has a career that pays reasonably well. The most important thing you can do is pay for time that you want to spend in ways that are important to you. For me the most effective way to do that has been to pay to have a nanny. It's not the best solution for everyone necessarily but -- I know that my husband Nick will agree with me -- the best thing we ever did was hire a nanny who also has housekeeping duties. Just pay well. Put energy into the relationship because this is an employee and a semi-member of your family; it does take time to manage the person to have a good relationship. Spend time picking the right person. It is an incredible boon. Right now we are both at a conference and we are happy because we know that our kids really love our nanny and they're having a good time while we are away. Of course we have bribes like whenever we go away they can each rent a video game and a video and have a trip to Jimmy's where they can buy junk food. --Laughter. Well it pays to bribe but the bottom line is that a nanny is a wonderful solution. It's really cost effective and if you put an effort into finding the right person your life is 100 times better. I just want to say that I didn't have the experience that Fran did of losing creative time after the birth of a baby. I don't think that happens to everybody. I guess it doesn't hurt to prepare by reducing your responsibilities if you can but I've hard from many women that that some of their most intellectually creative time were immediately after having a baby. So don't be too depressed at the thought of loosing a lot of time after having a baby. My favorite rule of time management, which I invented myself, is that up to $20 an hour I buy time above $20 an hour I sell time. --Laughter, laughter- Now there is an immediate corollary to this: I have never in my life taught an overload course and I have never in my life taught a course during the summer. One of the rules of the game is to avoid letting yourself be exploited by teaching part-time in any way. Of course, you have to have some way of managing your funds so that even in bad times you still have money enough to do the things you feel need to be done. I'm just finishing my fourth year as a faculty member so or I'm or I've gone through a lot of these things that we are talking about here. I have a son who is two and a half years old. He was an unplanned pregnancy and he arrived in September. My word of advice is don't do that. --Laughter, laughter, laughter--. Now, I'm not advocating anything medical but if you can plan your pregnancy, you will make things a little easier for yourself if you try for an April, May, June --Laughter-- time frame. Enjoy that summer, don't do it for September. Earlier, we talked about extending your time clock. My time clock was not extended and you should not expect to get it extended but you should ask. I am the only woman in my faculty; in my entire school, with seven departments, there are only five women. They didn't know what to do. I was the first one who had a baby. --Laughter. I taught class 10 days later. Don't do that either. --Laughter. In the last two and a half years, the world has gotten better. Look at all these women here. This is the first time I have ever seen this many women in one room ever. This is great --APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE-- this is phenomenal. The classes I teach are this size but all men. You should ask for relief from teaching and to stop the tenure clock. Go for it. I made the mistake of not asking; don't do what I did. I go up for tenure in a year and I still think that I'll be successful but there is no reason to go through what I did, this adverse time management. Make things as good for yourself as you can. Everybody wants you to succeed. Thank you. I have two questions. This is the end of my fourth year, so I am in the same position as the previous speaker but I've had to teach a lot of different classes. I want to know whether it is reasonable to tell your chair: "No, I can't do this; it requires too much additional prep time. I have to spend time on my research." I'm somebody who is very conscientious about prep time and maybe I over prepare but I spend hours and hours and hours per hour of lecture on all my new classes. I've had to teach six different classes since I have been there. What I ended up doing was telling the chair if he gave me anything new I was going to have to leave because it wouldn't be worth staying because I wouldn't get tenure. I think he understood that. Was this reasonable? Yes, it is reasonable. In most departments, people really do want you to succeed but they also have a long list of courses that they want taught. If your name comes up and you agree to do the course, they'll just assume its OK. If you think its too much, you should say so. The reason I taught compiler construction this fall was that I'd been asked to teach it the year before I got tenure and I'd said that I had other things I needed to be doing that year but that I would teach it next time it came around. My second question is related. Last semester I spent on average about 70-75 hours a week working, away from my two young kids. I ended up with a daughter who wouldn't talk to me any more or she would tell me that she loved her daddy and her sister. The end. --Laughter-- and I realized that she couldn't be any more blunt than that. I talked to my my chair about this and he gave me the impression that this is normal and that I should expect to have to put in this many hours if I want to get tenure. And I want to know whether this is normal. I got the impression from the schedules that were put up that you don't have to put in this much time. I don't put in 70-75 hours. I would say more realistically that I put in about 50 hours [on a regular basis] but then there are times when I have to put in a lot more. I think I put in, in an average week, probably 60. There are weeks where I put in more than that and there are weeks when I'm completely burned out and I put in a lot less. You can put in an infinite amount of time into this job; there is always more stuff to do and it will always be better if you do more. For me personally, if I had to chose between this job and the rest of my life, I'd choose the rest of my life. You have to decide on your own priorities and how much time you can put in to the job; it will take as many hours as you put in. I think at this point I work about 50 hours a week, most weeks. There are times when something really has to go out and I will work a fair amount more than that, typically by getting up earlier in the morning so my family is not particularly aware of it. I will just get up at 4:00 in the morning for most days for a week when I'm working on something that really has to be done. When I was an assistant professor I think it was more typical that I worked between 55-60 hours a week. If I look honestly at what I was doing then and what I was getting done and what I get done now, I get more done now in 50 hours than I used to get done in 60 hours, and it's simply by selecting what I'm doing. I think there are some basic decisions. For example, there was a lot of talk this morning emphasizing that it is much better to to have one paper of high quality than two papers at second-rate conferences, even though it may be appealing to have two papers. It's better to put in the one and a half times as much work and have the one good paper than to put in twice as much work and have the two average papers. And there really are a lot of explicit decisions that have to do with trading off time verses quality and which things you are going to do and which things you are not going to do. But 70-75 hours sounds like too much to survive. I just want to comment on freezing the tenure clock. I interviewed this year and I'm old enough that I need to have children sometime in the near future. So after I got offers, this was an important negotiation point for me. I told people that I knew I was going to have a baby and that it was going to affect my productivity and that I wanted guarantees that my tenure clock would be frozen. At the University of Massachusetts, four women had gone ahead of me and had children and had gotten tenure, so the chairman there was very understanding; it was no problem. It was a non-issue. At one of the other schools that I was seriously considering, they had never had a woman faculty member come up through the tenure process and they certainly never had a woman have a baby. When I told them that it was important to me, they went to the dean who said that I would have to take a leave of absence for at least one semester to get my tenure clock frozen. I told them that I couldn't come under those circumstances and so they went back to the dean and they reduced the time but I still would have had to take a leave of absence for a month. I don't think that it's the ideal but it is one point of leverage: departments are right now trying to hire women and and they will go to their deans for you and talk about those issues. I do recommend that you wait until you have an offer before you enter into --Laughter-- that negotiation process. I'm Ginnie Lo from the University of Oregon. I mentioned that I didn't follow the tenure path quite according to the normal schedule. I talked to a few women about it at break, but Fran suggested that I tell everybody so that people know that there are other options. It wasn't smooth but I started out my tenure track position in '85 at the University of Oregon. I was full time on the regular tenure track schedule and I found it unbearable. We have four women in our department now and we will soon have five women but at the time I was the only one with children and the men had wives at home for the most part taking care of the children. They just did not understand the commitment to family. Also I wanted a level of commitment to family that involved volunteering in the schools, being there for the kids sports games. I didn't want to be an absentee parent with my kids in day care all the time. So in my third year I was not doing very well and I actually was ready to resign. I decided that this wasn't a career that worked for me so I did turn in my resignation. The dean said "No, you are a good faculty member; you are talented. We want to find a way to work it out." So he proposed a half time tenure track position for me for the rest of my period which extended the time. In the negotiations I got half the teaching load but that was really the only concession. I tried to negotiate half the service but it was so vague what service was, so it ended up not getting written in any agreement. My research I feel I do full time and I feel I do as much service as any full time faculty member. I work about 40 hours a week for half time pay. There are some disadvantages of doing it, but basically I used the money to buy time. It was worth it to me and I feel very balanced as a faculty member doing it this way. It feels good. I would say the disadvantages are that I'm the only person in that position and so that sometimes I feel not quite a whole faculty member. But I really am not treated differently. My vote counts. I enter into all department decision making on an equal footing. I see the other faculty members working at a frenzied pace all around me and I feel that I am a little bit slower and that sometimes that makes me feel inferior. Other times it makes me think everyone else is nuts---LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER --in the department, so it goes both ways. I'm trying to think of any other advantages or disadvantages. Maybe some people can't do that for financial reasons, I just had the luxury to be able to do that. Also, when I negotiated it, I didn't pretend to quit -- I really was going to quit. I think for women entering, once you`ve got the job offer you can try to negotiate something along those lines. I think many universities may have some extensions of the tenure clock for having a baby but I think your parenting responsibilities and time commitment are the same for older children. The nature of your responsibilities changes but the time commitment is still there even as your kids get older. My kids are now 11 and 13. I still put tremendous amounts of time into volunteering at their schools and going to all of their sports events, (Jan and I talked a lot about that), and helping them with their homework. I am very involved with their homework and it's very enjoyable. I feel I put a lot of creative energy into them and it's been great. So that's worked well for me. And I'm hoping to get it (half time tenure option) established as an permanent structure at the University of Oregon that's made available to men and women from the outset as an option. APPLAUSE, APPLAUSE. I'm glad to follow that speech because it's sort of along the lines of what I wanted to say. I also have had two children, one before getting tenure and one after. I think the current way things are set up --- what you need to go through to manage both your professional life and your personal life after you have children within the academic environment --- is pretty draconian. I think it can be done and it can be very satisfying but many of us are working to change the policies. Certainly one of the things that has been mentioned is trying to negotiate for yourself -- whether it's before you get to an institution or after you are there -- for teaching load reductions. The other thing I want to say is that the CRA Committee on the Status of Women is working on coming out with a model policy that we would like to see adopted everywhere. Once that comes out, we will need everyone here -- as well as anybody else you might know of -- to support it so things really are more manageable in the long run. In the meantime, there are ways of getting it to work out but you have to work really hard at it. I just wanted to follow this up by by commenting about the flexibility that it exists in industry for these situations. I work 80 percent time for 80 percent pay and I work for a company that is flexible enough to allow that. I am in a manager and do that. It's not just in research groups that that happens: there are people in throughout the company -- male and female -- who have arranged to work part-time. Now not it's not possible to do every job that way but I think that once a company becomes invested in you, there is often a reasonable amount of flexibility in allowing this kind of thing. At my company, I am really encouraged to see young men more and more taking advantage of that opportunity to spend a day at home with their children. And I think that this is an issue which is not just a female issue and should not be presented just as a female issue. It's a issue it's an issue or parenting for men and women and if companies and universities are brought around to understand it from that perspective than I think we have a lot better chance of getting more uniform treatment of people in that regard. I am going to say something that I think is a little controversial, two things. I agree completely with what Jill said about presenting parenting as a women's issue: that's the wrong way to put it. I think a lot of the problems that women face in their professional lives are the results of MEN not facing up to their parenting responsibilities. --Reactions, noise, voices, claps. I think that's where the real progress is yet to be made. So I would say to those of you who have not yet chosen the father of your children-- LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER, LAUGHTER--don't have children with a man who says he wants children but is not willing to change his career path at all. Just don't do it.-- Laughter--. The second thing is that there has been a lot of talk about how to get tenure and have children at the same time. And I think that that should certainly be an option for people who want to do it that way. But I would like to put in a plug for -- if impossible; if you have time safely to wait until you start your family -- waiting to have children until after you have tenure. So for those of you who are still early enough on in your life, wait; for those of you who don't have time, obviously it should be an option to do both at the same time. For those of you who do have time and can make this choice, I thinking you will be making your life much easier if you choose to wait. And probably you'll be making the lives of your kids and your kid's father a little easier too. I think it's preferable to wait if you can. Now the big point of this meeting, at least in my mind, was to help more women get tenure, so I hope everyone feels inspired. Go out there and use all the good advice you got. All of us who are later in our careers know how good all of this advice was. We are hoping that all you younger people understand that. We want to see lots more women tenured at really top places, so we are counting on you to carry out what we have told you about. And thanks for coming.