The meeting scheduling crisis is an indicator of a much bigger problem

What does it mean that a half-hour spot on your calendar a few weeks away is such a rare and valuable commodity?

Our calendars are so packed, there’s no time to address real priorities and generative work. This has been the theme of my past couple weeks, let me share four recent things that have brought me to this line of thought:

a. I was on an advisory board meeting for an externally-funded faculty development project, which everybody thinks is a valuable endeavor. We got around an incomplete objective. What stood in the way? The faculty involved could not find time in their calendars to get together. It was simply an impossibility. Someone wrote a big grant, had big plans, and the thing didn’t happen because the calendar would not allow it.

b. I opened up bluesky on Friday and a bunch of professorly folks were (reasonably) venting about the absurdity of doodle polls that expect us to protect several blocks of time until the person scheduling a meeting makes a choice. Is there a better way, I dunno? But wow, this resonated with people.

c. A professorly friend was asking online for advice about how to respond to people who want to schedule meetings that could be quick emails, without sounding rude. Such as a useful response to, “Let’s schedule a half hour meeting to prepare for this upcoming event,” when it’s obvious that this prep meeting is unnecessary. (Layered into this was the gendered dynamic, in which women get unreasonable guff for being assertive about their own time.)

d. Last, in the past few weeks I’ve had a couple things that temporarily exploded my calendar. (My dad died in hospice, which was and is inevitable and horrible and full of grief. Of course everything on my calendar evaporated into inconsequential for some period of time. Which also if you’re wondering why this newsletter has been quiet, now you know why.) I should point out that absolutely everybody in all of my realms have been supportive and understanding. Also, even though I cancelled some important professional travel, some other highly necessary travel popped up. Now that I’ve recently returned to work, I realize that for several months my calendar will be experiencing adverse repercussions of this unscheduled bereavement leave. I think it says… something… that being unexpectedly pulled away from work for a week and a half can cause so much long-term tumult.

What does does it mean that our work calendars are so densely packed? I suggest a radical answer: we are too busy. Of course. We know this. A corollary to this answer might be a little more radical. We need to make ourselves less busy. What could that look like, how might one accomplish this, and what does this mean for being successful for our jobs? I think this can be a win/win/win, no losing at all, if one can pull this off.

One of the most resonant things I wrote on my earlier blog was about how being a professor is an “octojob.” All of us are expected to be researchers, teachers, grant writers, advisors, lab managers, mentors, and outreach specialists, travel agents, and more. It is not only a lot, it is genuinely too much.

How are we supposed to focus our work as professors, when we experience so many competing demands? Might we take some inspiration from [semi-obscure movie reference] Jack Palance’s character in City Slickers who says that the meaning of life is his index finger? You know, just one thing. Maybe we could put up two or three fingers for things that we really care about? Can we stop waggling all ten of our fingers like Wallace about to chow on some Wensleydale?

Imagine taking a visit to a university, and having a chance to chat with everybody in an academic department to learn what they do for work. Office managers pull together many pieces to keep things running. Advisors advise. Lab prep people prep the labs. Research techs do research. Lecturers teach. And professors do, it seems, a little bit of everything? Some of us might do more research, some of us might do more teaching, but we all do a lot of the other stuff.

Demands for research productivity have steadily climbed to absurd heights over the past few decades, just as universities have grown to expect that classroom teaching results in actual student learning. Funding agencies now expect us to ensure our work has a broader impact on society. And if you’re running an outside grant that you’re expected to bring in, you probably are spending several hours every week on associated paperwork for procurement, travel, and timekeeping. And the standards for mentoring junior scientists have climbed and downright exploitation of student labor has become unwelcome in many places.

We are expected to do a lot. I think it’s really wild, and it didn’t used to be like this. Yet I am not harkening for those “good” ol’ days, because I don’t want to return to the lack of standards for teaching effectiveness, or scientists who think that their work should not be responsive to the public good, or a lack of equity or accountability in student training. We have been moving higher ed most definitely in the right direction, but it turns out a lot of these changes are relying on professorial labor and it doesn’t feel sustainable.

It’s not just that universities are expecting so much of us. We are expecting so much of ourselves. How often do I interact with trainees who want to do all the things that their mentors are doing, and even more on top of that. How did this come to be?

Here is one hypothesis: Some folks are very high achievers, and generation after generation of high achievers has resulted in an extremely elevated bar. Sometimes to clear this bar, folks imagine that there isn’t bandwidth for effective teaching, or quality parenting, or being a responsive mentor.

I’d like to think that most of us are perfectly reasonable human beings who want to spend time on being effective teachers, quality mentors, invest in parenting and the success of their spouses’ careers, and go to the lengths to engage with community partners to ensure our science will have social impact. Because this stuff matters, even if all we’re judged on his our ability to be a publication factory. So we simply just try to do it all because it feels like this is the only way to do the right thing to get tenure without exploiting everybody around us. And after doing it for so many years in a row, hoop after hoop after hoop, this value system gets internalized.

Okay, I’ll agree that this hypothesis is a two-dimensional portrait and I realize that our realities are more complex and nuanced. Nonetheless, I’ll stand firm on a kernel of truth in this narrative: we all have experienced an evolutionary arms race in research output that is not sustainable. The consequence of this evolutionary army race is that to meet expectations, we’ve got to cut some big corners. We sacrifice the quality of the research to increase the quantity. Far too often, our trainees get the shaft, our spouses end up with an inequitable share of domestic labor, our students get shortcuts in teaching, and our colleagues wind up doing departmental governance work that we should be doing. (Note that all of these other things are highly gendered, because women are somehow expected to excel at all of these things that are not research? [cue the Barbie monologue]). Is it possible to do it all? I think so, but a lot of it won't be done well, or be done to satisfaction, or while retaining one’s mental health in the long term¹.

In our line of work, we need to carve out time for thinking, solving conceptual problems, writing, and reading. That’s on top of personal time on evenings, weekends, and vacations. I would say that the vast majority of professors I know are just barely treading above all of our responsibilities. We realize that asking anybody to put a thing on their calendar for us is a big ask. It’s harder to say no to people who we value because we know that they know how much they’re asking of us.

How to fix the calendar bloat problem? The traditional advice is to say “no” a lot more often. That’s a critical element, but I think there’s more to it than that. I surely have not fixed this problem for myself, but I think in the past couple years, I’ve made a bunch of progress. To be clear, I’ve been able to pull this off because I’ve leveraged the privilege that comes with being a tenured white professor guy. I think I need to own that and as I went about this task, I’ve prioritized not taking advantage of the contributions of people who don’t have the luxury.

How to arrange your calendar to actually have time for things that matter? It’s important to do some personal strategic planning, introspection, and map out of one’s priorities. The summer before last, I made a catalogue of all of the things that I was working on, and then put what I thought was a reasonable time frame for progress on these projects that I was hoping to accomplish, in a Gantt chart of sorts. Then, I set about putting all of this stuff on a calendar so that I would be able to dedicate my time to all of these tasks if I did them satisfactorily, with a realistic view of how much time it would take to do the work. Some of these things need to be done very well to be useful, while others just need to get done, and I made a point to distinguish this with my time allocation.

What I discovered came as a genuine surprise. I should not have been a surprise, but I’ll admit that I was. I saw that it would take about ten clones of me to be able to do all the things I was trying to do. I knew I was trying to do too much, as that was the point of the exercise, but I didn’t realize how extreme the situation was.

Then came the hard work and introspection. I chose to decide what really, truly mattered and what didn’t. What was I doing to help others and what was I doing merely to satisfy my own interest in being involved? What was sustainable and what was draining me too much? What things helped grow capacity for my students and colleagues, and which ones sucked the air of the room? What research projects would make a difference for scientific advancement, and which ones were fun but not as rewarding in the long run?

Then, I pulled the trigger. I pulled lots of triggers. Having decided on two research projects that really mattered to me, I unplugged the rest or let them lie fallow. I called quits to a few incipient collaborations, and announced I was just done with some lingering projects. All those manuscripts that have all the data but need to be written up? Those would continue wait for another time, by intention. Then I dropped off two editorial boards (both of which I’d been on for quite a long time, so I had fulfilled my commitments), for the first time stayed away from committee roles in my favorite professional society. For some projects, I found people and organizations to adopt them and make them more sustainable. I stepped off a couple university-wide activities, scaled back on invited talks, and hit pause on recruiting new students for the lab. I drew tighter boundaries on who I was mentoring and advocating for, while also recommitting to public engagement.

The bulk of my work was the administrative role I was reassigned to. To get this under control, I committed to simpler framework of what I was able to accomplish considering that it was not humanly possible to do even of a fraction of the things that this role deserves. Essentially, I decided that flailing at too many things was worse than getting the highest priority things done right. I think it’s worked out well since then, though I sometimes am frustrated about the progress that I’m not making, I also realize that if I try to do more, less will get done. Also, this prioritization exercise helped me realize more tangibly that I was captaining the Kobayashi Maru, so I am metaphorically putting effort into collaborating with the academy to reprogram the simulation to prevent the Klingons from blowing us away.

If was back in my tenure-stream faculty position, how would I trim back? Aside from several limiting side projects and collaborations, I suppose this would involve making sure that I reduce university service/leadership activities to those that are most necessary and/or personally valuable, and then making sure to invest into those to do them well (if the quality of the work matters).

This intentional effort to pare back on goals and projects wasn’t about planning to accomplish less, it was designed to get more done. Instead of spinning wheels on projects while overcommitted, I was able to increase the quality and impact of work and ultimately get more done.

In this evolutionary arms race, I’m calling for disarmament by all of us by restoring reasonable expectations of ourselves and our colleagues. The place where this needs to be heard the most is by people who are evaluating the work of junior colleagues. Are people getting awards because they have the most publications, or because their work is the most inventive, impactful, and valuable to the field? Are people getting tenure because of dollar amounts and h-scores, or because they are established among colleagues as talented scholars who are generating ideas that move the discipline forward? Are students getting admitted to grad school because they had access to authorship opportunities as undergrads, or because they have the talent and potential to increase the soundness and build capacity for the community?

I realize that I was able to pare back on everything on my docket because I have already proven myself to everybody who I feel like I have needed to. I no longer have to jump through hoops developed by other people. This realization comes along with my commitment to not subject my junior colleagues and peers to arbitrary hoops. Impactful science and effective teaching are not one size fits all.

Almost everybody employed in academia has the capacity to support the professional development of others by shaping our expectations. Even if you’re just partway through grad school, you might be teaching and odds are you have some undergraduate mentees who are looking to you for setting goals and expectations. What are you expecting, and how is your use of this person’s time aligned with those expectations?

When I started in my current position, I was fortunate to have the mentorship and support of a departmental chair who decided that his most suitable role was to deal with as much of the bureaucratic nonsense as possible and smooth the path for faculty, so we focus on things that matter for student success and research progress. He did his darnedest to protect our time. Now that I’ve moved into a variety of leadership roles, I now see a variety of ways that he supported us that were invisible to me at the time. He was extraordinary role model in this regard, and his successors have followed in suit. He often made a point to simply drop by with a short question of one person, when lots of other folks would turn that same thing into a meeting for several people.

It reminds me of the time when Steven Heard wrote that he just got out of [something like] a ten-hour meeting that cost thousands of dollars. (In a quick search I didn’t find it in his archives, but I know it’s there somewhere!) What was this meeting? The duration was one hour, but it took ten hours of people’s time because ten people were in the room. And if you calculate the time that went into scheduling, attending, and the lot work associated with it, yeah it was thousands of dollars. (It’s a blur at this point about the blog post, but that was my take-home message. Memories are unreliable, eh?)

I won’t forget one piece of advice that one friend gave to me years ago: “Your greatest resource is your own time.” Sure, you could have lots of funds available or not, or lots of staff available or not, or some fancy equipment or not. But you can do amazing things with your own time when you apply it well, and if something is valuable for you, then it needs your time if it is to flourish. When I don’t have what I need, I realize that if I plan to creatively and efficiently put my time into a thing, I can make that thing succeed. A certain rate of failure is normal and expected but to do the thing, you gotta take the time to do the thing.

Another standard piece of advice for doing generative work when you’ve got a lot going on is to create a consistent and substantial block of time in your schedule and protect it so that you can focus your individual on a project that really matters, just for (usually) writing. This semester, I’ve managed to block off my Wednesday afternoon. When people ask if I’m free, I’m not. Because that time is scheduled! I might choose to put something else in that block, but when I do, I move that block to another slot.

Yet another piece of standard advice: allocate your time in proportion to your priorities. This can be hard to operationalize. May I suggest a corollary to this? Your expectations of the time of other people should reflect what (you imagine) their priorities are, not your own.

What happens if you find yourself perennially experiencing this dilemma that your work demands you spending a lot of time on things that are not your priority? I think this falls into two categories. The first one is when there’s too much bureaucratic overhead, like when I have to spend far too much of my time doing forms for travel, purchasing, HR, and so on, because the administrative apparatus of my university isn’t designed to support faculty work adequately. Not much to be done about this except to find workarounds, get efficient, and pray/work to reform the system.

The other category, which is really problematic, is when there is some piece of your actual job description and it doesn’t align with your priorities. For example, are you a professor and you don’t want to put in the time for professional development as a teacher. Or if you have research trainees but you don’t or can’t make the time to work with them to foster their professional growth. Or you're expected to bring in external grant funding but the grant writing grind is entirely not your vibe. What do you have to then? Well, you need to change your priorities, or manage to change the condition of your work, or you need to get a different gig.

I think a lot of people find themselves pursuing tenure-track positions without really understanding what the job is. Because all the way through college and grad school, we don’t really get a look under the hood to know what the job is, and even if our advisors talk about it, it’s hard to really communicate what the job is like. Some people want to run research labs and make discoveries that change the world, some people want to teach and directly impact student lives in the classroom, others want to be the mentor who makes a difference for junior scientist, and so on. But it turns out that being a professor is indeed, all of those things. How many of us got into this gig wanting to do all of those things? So I think it’s an area of professional growth to alter one’s priorities to align with the job, or it’s reason to find a different job, or it’s a reason to be unhappy and do some parts of the job poorly. Not everybody has to be great at all the things, but when doing certain parts poorly harms other people, that’s not okay.

Speaking of priorities, I’m excited for a new project and new collaboration during sabbatical. And the proposal for this work won't write itself, so I’m gonna stop right here.

1. Some folks are apparent exceptions, right? Once in a very long while there will be some people around us who manage to do all this stuff quite well. I’m thinking of a particular person who somehow manages to be the entire whole package by being the Actual Best as researcher, grant writer, teacher, parent, mentor, advisor, colleague, who is smart, wise, kind, humble, earnest, and all that, but also seemingly having a well-balanced life too. They are absolutely great to have around as role models and are even better for keeping one’s ego in check.