Coffee heat rising

Stress control

Managing a large workload

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Full-time faculty at the community colleges here teach five and five: five sections a semester. That is a huge workload, especially for English faculty, who teach almost nothing but composition courses. A few senior people manage to land survey of lit courses, but most are teaching comp and remedial sections.

It’s unlikely Glendale Community College will hire me into the full-time position for which I’m interviewing next week. But just in case… It might be good to know how one would handle a very workful job like that.

Writing courses, of which composition is a variant, are extremely work-intensive. Students learn by writing and by getting feedback from knowledgeable readers. This means you not only have to grade their opuses, you have to try to comment intelligently on them. It’s a tall order when you’re looking at 100 or more students. How can any human being possibly grade that many papers, week in and week out, without dying of overwork?

Just now I’m using rubrics—lists of criteria agreed upon by the instructor and the students—to grade their papers. The rubric strategy allows me to gloss over errors that are outside the assignment’s parameters, including some issues that, in earlier incarnations, I would have attacked. So: when one limits oneself strictly to a set of rubrics, how long does it take to grade a set of papers?

The Monday students at Paradise Valley turned in the final drafts of their second essays last week. I brought the kitchen timer into the study, and here was the result:

Difference between the mean and the average time required to grade the first 11 papers that I read was negligible. All in all, it takes about 19 minutes per 750-word paper, if you’re moving fast and not being too picky. Probably requires a little more, since I neglected to start the timer just as I started some of those papers. At about 20 minutes per paper, how long should it take to plow through an entire section’s Golden Words?

The District caps composition classes at 25, but as a practical matter quite a few students drop during the first few weeks, so sizes should average around 20. So six hours and 30 or 40 minutes is probably a reasonable estimate of the time it would take to grade one set of papers from one class

It doesn’t count count the many distractions and extra work-makers that interfere, however. While I read these papers, for example, my computer crashed twice; the phone rang several times; the dog pestered me now and again; my client sent a raft of new documents to read; the choir director asked me to write a few lines of copy; and several times I had to google students’  factoids and assertions, leading me to wander the labyrinths of the Internet. So the activity of grading can be pretty gestalt. There’s no way you could get 6 2/3 uninterrupted hours to just sit down and get the job done.

But let’s suppose the total amount of time required to read one raft of papers came to only 6.67 hours. An instructor can control the number of papers that arrive at a single time by a) refusing to accept late papers and b) staggering the classes’ due dates. If you were skilled at this, could you limit your workload to no more than 40 hours a week?

Interesting!

In theory, you could accept as many as four sets of papers in a week without having to put in a 50- or 60-hour work week.

In reality, of course, that’s outrageous. In the first place, full-time faculty do a lot more than teach: they’re involved in faculty governance; they tutor and advise students one-on-one; and they enjoy endless, mind-numbing meetings. So three rafts of papers are probably about as much as you could handle in a normal week—that assumes you’d only have about five hours of meetings, student conferences, and other activities, a conservative estimate.

If you could engineer things so that you never had more than two sets of papers due in a single week, about 30 hours of class time and grading time would leave plenty of hours for the rest of the shenanigans involved in a full-time teaching job and allow you to have your evenings and weekends to yourself. More or less.

The take-away message here, if there is one, is that if you have any control over the due dates of incoming work, you should be able to keep a fairly large workload within reasonable bounds. It relates to my earlier theme day idea: don’t regard all the work that comes pouring in as one huge mass that has to be done right this minute. Map out priorities for the work, identify due dates, and schedule or delay tasks out in front of you, fairly close to the times when they’re due.

The reason I felt theme days were not going to work is that I’d failed to break free of the feeling that everything has to be done right away. Faced with two rafts of papers, page proofs for a large and challenging publication, a steady tattoo of new documents to edit from a client, a mountain of laundry, a filthy house, parched house plants, a garden in need of attention, a pool ditto, and an especially busy choir week, I started to panic.

The truth is, though, not everything has to be done right now. Recognizing that fact and putting it to work for you can go a long way toward freeing you from workload oppression.

Tempus fidgets

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Time does fly, and with it our little concerns and mores. When I entered a link to one of this site’s “pages” in yesterday’s post and then had some trouble persuading the software not to link to the old WordPress.com URL, I happened to read over the contents of “The Poison Poppy.” Time adds a great deal of perspective: getting your bowels in an uproar over a $220-a-month pay cut seems pretty silly, compared to a 100 percent cut in pay!

These days I feel a lot calmer about the money situation (among other things). As a matter of fact, where next year’s financial pickle is concerned, I no longer care. If I end up living under the Seventh Avenue overpass, tant pis. I’ll be in good company.

For about three years there, I was in a constant state of uproar; during one of those years, I was in a chronic rage.

The whole flap over the destruction of my swimming pool, which took place shortly after I moved in to my present home, created a great deal of angst and downright fear, particularly after a judge would not let me, SDXB, or my lawyer leave his courtroom until after Mr. B*** was seen driving away from the parking lot. Having two barracuda lawyers urge me to sell my house and flee—and describe in exquisite detail what they imagined Mr. B*** to be capable of—was pretty bloody terrifying.

None of that hysteria died down until M’hijito proved, by installing a phalanx of infrared cameras, that the ensuing pool pump “vandalism” incidents were happening because the equipment was defective, not because Son-in-Law was hopping the fence once a month to fool with it. But overlapping that was the Great Desert University’s ballyhooed partnership with PeopleSoft, which led to five months of incorrect paychecks, missed retirement contributions, an attempt to void 200 hours of accrued vacation time and declare me ineligible for vacation, insane abuses of my staff members, wrong information (surely  not outright lies?) from HR, and a $220 de facto monthly pay cut. And this was superimposed over the slowly but steadily growing issues surrounding My Bartleby, the single most unholy personnel issue I have ever had to deal with—one that dragged out over four excruciating years.

Looking back on it, I realize how close to a breakdown I must have been. It’s no wonder I ended up in the hospital with stress. What is a wonder is that I survived at all.

Well, now that only two months remain in my tenure with the Great Desert University, I no longer feel an irrational hatred for the institution (it’s like hating rainfall or the moon in the sky). True, a trip to Tempe does evince a flinch reflex, and I do look forward to never having to enter that burg again.

In spite of the year of unemployment and enforced penury coming up, I feel comfortable about the future. Money happens, after all. Some things are better than a regular salary. Some things are worse than penury.

Theme Days: A way to organize time

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Ever get the feeling that you just can’t keep up with all the stuff you need to do? That there’s so much ditz to cope with that you can’t get to the important things, but if you do the important stuff first, then there’s no time left to deal with the steadily mounting pile of ditz? Lately, I’ve felt my life is out of kilter because I don’t organize my time well enough to keep up with all the challenges,  chores, and commitments that fill my days to overflowing.

Yesterday I worked from four in the morning to nine at night, with one break to fiddle with the pool equipment, one break to reheat some leftovers for a midmorning breakfast, and…and that was it. When I could no longer type another word or edit another confused sentence, in came an e-mail from the client expressing his wonder that I hadn’t edited two other documents he was in a hurry to get. It was almost 10:00 p.m. before I got up from my desk and stumbled into the kitchen to fix dinner.

Lists have always worked pretty well for me. But recently the sense of being utterly overwhelmed has left me too flummoxed to write lists. What to put at the top of the list? And how to get through all the things that need to be done? And when the stuff on today’s list doesn’t get finished (because there’s just too darned much to do in 12 or 14 hours), what gets lost from tomorrow’s list?

My lists sink beneath an ocean of too-damn-many-things-to-do-at-once.

Lately it has occurred to me that instead of compiling endless lists of tasks to plow through, it would make better sense to devote blocks of time to working on one general type of activity. Anything that didn’t fall into that category would be put off to some other block of time, which would be dedicated to a different kind of activity. “Blocks of time” would be restricted to whole days and half days. Theme Days and Theme Half-days.

On a theme day, all I would work on is projects related to the specific theme. And quite a few themes come to mind.

For example: I need to spend a fair amount of time on freelance projects. Right now, that work gets stuffed in around the many other things that need to get done, and it often suffers because something I perceive as more urgent gets pushed forward. Before long, I’ve fallen behind on the editorial work and then find myself laboring, bleary-eyed and fuzz-brained, to finish a late project—at midnight or one in the morning! The quality of the work suffers, and so do I.

So let’s suppose that instead of resolving (vaguely) that I must get to thus-and-such a project tomorrow (and tomorrow and tomorrow, and so on to infinity…), I had a Copyeditor’s Desk Theme Day. What would happen on such a theme day? Or on any other theme day?

Copyeditor’s Desk Day: Read the current client’s manuscripts, proof detective novels, index page proofs; hustle business

Teaching Day: Prepare for classes, meet classes, read student papers, enter grades & attendance, communicate with students online

Cleaning Day: Do laundry, clean house, wash the car, clean out the garage, organize closets

Shopping Day: Run around the city chasing down food and household necessities

Gardening Day: Clean up the yard, fiddle with the pool

Bookkeeping Day: Enter data in Excel & Quicken, reconcile bank accounts

Social Day: Hang out with friends, go out and do something fun

Choir Day: Sing

Blog Day: Write and schedule a bunch of posts, submit stuff to carnivals, host carnivals, study SEO and AdSense, learn more stuff

Some of these activities don’t require an entire day’s worth of effort at any given time. So a single day could consist of two Theme Half-days. Choir, for example, occupies the better part of Sunday morning but is over by about 11:30. Sunday could be a double-theme day, then: Choir Day and Shopping Day.

The to-do list would contain only tasks and goals related to the day’s theme, plus of course the basic survival chores. So a Sunday, to continue that example, would be mapped out with a list like this:

• Breakfast
• Feed dog
• Walk dog
• Church
• Change clothes
• Bolt snack-like lunch
• Write shopping list
• Go to Costco, Target, WalMart, Safeway, Trader Joe’s or Sprouts, AJ’s or Whole Foods, & Ace or Home Depot
• Unload car, unwrap & repackage bulk items, and store purchases
• Dinner
• Feed dog
• Walk dog
• Read & answer e-mail
• Check blog
• Fall face-forward into bed

Other types of activities need only be done once a month or once every couple of weeks. Bookkeeping, a half-day project, can wait until all the bank statements are in hand and then be combined with some other activity that can be completed in half a day: light housecleaning, for example.

Some activities need to be done every day or nearly every day—but they may or may not need to occupy an entire day. These themes could be assigned to days as activities need to be addressed, and shifted as workload demands shift. Hence…

Saturday
• Blogging, Socializing

Sunday
• Choir, Cleaning

Monday
• Copyediting, Teaching

Tuesday
• Teaching (grade papers)

Wednesday
• Gardening, Teaching

Thursday
• Copyediting, Shopping

Friday
• Blogging, Teaching

Saturday
• Copyediting, Teaching

Here’s the beauty of this scheme: it eliminates the gestalt. The frantic, scattered Brownian motion-like activity that consumes every day is replaced with focus on a set of closely related tasks.

To-do lists are focused instead of impossible agglomerations of disparate jobs that are running late.

And they’re shorter. Anything that’s not related to the day’s theme doesn’t appear on the to-do list. That helps to rein in the sense that you have so many things to do that you don’t even want to get started.

I haven’t tried this plan yet, but starting tomorrow I’m going to.

Think it’ll work? Do you have a system that works for you?

Image: Alvesgaspar, Shepherd Gate Clock, Royal Observatory, Greenwich. GNU Free Documentation License. Wikipedia Commons.

Choir!

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Hey! The director of the choir where I used to sing (or, more accurately, pretended to sing) said I could come back. Even though I was with the choir for about three years, last weekend I revisited his summer workshop for newbies. Since I’m very naive about music—never learned an instrument and can’t read music—every time this guy opens his mouth I learn something new.

It’s ironic that even though I’m strongly averse to organized religion, my life has been so miserable since I left my husband that going to church has been about its highest point. To the extent that I have any sense of the noumenal, it barely rises to the level of agnostic, and my family has a dark history with organized churches that rings through the ages like time’s endless echo.

I joined the choir for several reasons: first, because I’d attended a number of services and realized the impressive music program was effectively delivering a free, very high-quality chamber music concert almost every Sunday; then because each summer the choir used to travel to Europe and sing in various elegant venues; and finally, because this particular church is a node of old Phoenix’s upper-crust society and I hoped to meet an eligible man.

Well, wouldn’t you know I’d take up this crass reasoning in 2001. After 9/11, the planned trip to Italy was canceled when the State Department issued an advisory urging that Americans not go there. The director probably would have canceled anyway, since he and about half of his followers were frightened enough to be wary of air travel, but the advisory made up his mind.

That notwithstanding, I found I loved singing in the very fine music program, and even though I didn’t buy into the religious dogma, sitting in the choir loft following the ritual as it evolved through the seasons had an effect much like meditation: it forces you to focus on something other than yourself and your petty woes. And I liked the people a lot.

This worked out well for two or three years, until I moved from teaching to low-level administration. In teaching, you get to work any 18 hours of the day you choose. Establishing and directing a high-profile operation housed in the dean’s office required fewer hours, but I needed to be on campus from eight in the morning till five or six at night, to which was added a commute that took an hour each way. This left only the weekends in which to do survival tasks and maintenance work, which around this place are considerable.

I’d joined the chant choir as well as the senior choir, so I was singing Saturdays at evensong as well as every Sunday morning. There just weren’t enough hours in a two-day weekend to handle all the work that had to be done and spend half the day on Sunday plus late Saturday afternoon down at the church. And some nights I’d arrive at Wednesday evening choir practice so tired I literally could not hold a conversation—by eight o’clock I could barely speak, much less sing and far less understand what the director was trying to teach us and remember it until Sunday.

Then came the day that a guest speaker took the pulpit and told us that if we didn’t buy into George Bush’s agenda in the Middle East, we were not good Christians and not good Americans.

I just went right through the roof. I don’t consider myself a good, bad, or any Christian. But I am a loyal patriot, one who has lived in the Middle East a long time, and by then I could see the road that man was leading us down. Any halfway conscious entity who looked hard at it should have been able to see it. It was clear to me at the time that this country was headed toward disaster, the very disaster we see manifest today and that, oh believe me, my friends, has barely begun: the harm the Cheney-Bush administration wreaked upon this country will not resolve itself in my lifetime and possibly not in my son’s. And since most of the readers of this blog are my son’s age…well: you see the cause of my acute annoyance.

I hung around for a couple more weeks, hoping that I could climb down off the ceiling, and I talked to the newly installed priest about the effect these ill-considered and (IMHO) insulting words had, suggesting he might want to allow a response. This didn’t register…mostly, it appears, because he had too many other problems to cope with. So I quit.

As it develops, he’s no longer with us. Apparently he had a difficult time with the complex politics of this particular urban parish, a little more yeasty, I guess, than it appears on the surface. I’m sorry to hear that, because he was a good man. A new pastor has been hired and is on his way to pick up the reins as I scribble. The guest speaker, a much respected, otherwise politically liberal rabbi who has been an Arizona fixture for decades, is now too elderly to have much more to say.

So. We’ll see. I hope this works out.

Stress Control: Second insight

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Yesterday I described a small epiphany that freed up as much as two hours a day of precious morning time. It helped to relieve the stress and frustration aggravating the bruxism, the insomnia, and the general irritability that help to make my life miserable. Surprisingly, a day later another, equally significant revelation dawned.

Second moment of insight: blogging has been consuming way too large a chunk of my day. And because I’d been doing it first crack out of the box, every single day, it added to the time-stress created by a huge raft of daily chores that need to be done before I can even think about going to work or having a life. It prevented me from getting any exercise in the morning, and…well, it can’t be healthy to spend hours on end staring into a computer monitor.

The minute I would roll out of the sack, usually around 5:00 or 5:30 a.m., I would take the dog out briefly and then stumble directly into my office to call up WordPress. This had become such a firmly established routine that Cassie would run straight to the office after finishing her morning business.

Then I would spend one to two hours writing and cruising the blogosphere. From there it was on to cleaning the pool and watering the plants, another one- to two-hour set of tasks. All this took place before I so much as brushed my teeth, to say nothing of feeding the dog, brewing a pot of coffee, and fixing my own breakfast.

I don’t want to quit blogging, first because I enjoy it and second because FaM is just beginning to make a little money. But long before this, I’ve thought that I devote far too much of my attention to computer screens and far too little to living a normal life.

A day after the pool insight, I happened to feel rested enough to write three posts in one day. As I was about to publish the second one, it occurred to me that I could buy a day of vacation from blogging by scheduling that post to go live 24 hours forward. And the third post could go up two days forward. Hmmm…two days in which I would not have to write for the Internet.

I already had a guest post in-house and was about to ask Stephen Taddie for permission to post his latest investment letter: two more days off! Suddenly, I had the makings of a five-day break.

Next morning I stayed far away from the computer, much to the dog’s confusion. Didn’t even check the e-mail.

Now, with neither the pool-and-yard frenzy nor the writing-and-surfing session starting my day, a good four hours of the morning were returned to me. If I got up at 5:30 or 6:00 a.m., by 7:00 or 7:30 I was ready to get on the road.  And best of all: I felt neither frazzled nor horsewhipped!

So, that’s how I’m going to deal with blogging from here on out:

• Write about three posts twice a week, and schedule them out over the coming days.
• Do at least one easy-to-scribble retrospective “Best of FaM” post a month.
• Solicit guest posts to give friends and fellow bloggers a say at FaM.
• On days when I’m not writing, stay away from the computer monitor as much as possible.

After a couple of blog-free and pool labor-free days, I began to feel a lot less stressed. It’s no wonder my temper has been short, and no wonder I’ve been grinding my teeth. On top of the workplace headaches, I’ve been trying to do too many at-home jobs—half of them unpleasant jobs—in way too little time.

So, two small flashes of insight led to reorganizing routine activities so as to free up four hours of time—every day. Have you had a similar experience? What strategies do you use to keep yourself from being overwhelmed by responsibilities and tasks?

Stress Control: First insight

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In two small moments of Insight, I recently figured out how to cut down the Himalayan Range of chores that face me every morning and thereby relieve a great deal of daily stress.

My days start with more work than I can easily handle, most of it ditzy stuff that frustrates because it’s never done. Even as you’re plowing through chore after chore after endless chore and you’re just beginning to see what you hope will be the end of it, whack! There’s a pot you forgot to wash, another plant to water, a new mess to clean up, another timer dinging at you. And it’s tooth-grindingly frustrating because you know that when you finally do finish, tomorrow morning you’ll have to do it all over again.

Harvey

A major contributor at this time of year is the pool. The summer winds have come in, bringing no rain but bushels and bushels of devil-pods and strappy devil-pod tree leaves. I took Harvey the Hayward Pool Cleaner up to Leslie’s to be fixed after he came to a dead stop in the shallow end; turns out he’d quit because he was choked with devil pods.

LeafBonnet
Runs on the garden hose!

While I was gone, the pool’s system came on. Checking to be sure I’d remembered to put the skimmer basket in, I realized the pump’s circulating action had raked all the pods and leaves into a couple of big mounds, up against the pool’s north wall. With the debris piled in one place, it was pretty easy to suck up the litter into the bonnet cleaner—a chore that usually takes a half-hour or forty minutes, when I have to run the thing back and forth over the entire floor of the 18,000-gallon pool and over all the steps, and then flip it over and try to skim the worst of the twigs and palm-tree detritus off the water’s surface. With Harvey’s hose disconnected from the skimmer pipe, the pump had pulled all the floating debris into the skimmer basket—a half-bushel of junk that didn‘t eventually drop to the bottom to choke Harvey again.

Studying this much-easier-to-deal-with state of affairs, it occurred to me that I could pull Harvey out of the pool in the evening and drop in the skimmer basket. Then, instead of running the pump from about 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m., I could set the timer to come on around 4:00 a.m. By the time I got out of bed at 5:30 or 6:00, the system would have run 90 minutes or two hours, long enough to push the junk on the bottom into a single pile and to skim the floating trash off the top. Then I’d only have about ten minutes of work to clean up the Harvey-gagging stuff. Once that junk was out of the way, all I’d have left to do is drop Harvey back in the water, where he could vacuum up the dust that blows in every evening.

“All I’d have left,” because it also dawned on me…duh! Hosing the dust and incipient algae off the tiles and pool walls doesn’t have to be done at the crack of dawn! As long as it’s done every day or so, it can wait until evening, when I usually go in the pool anyway.

So! Next morning, an hour and a half to two hours of daily drudgery dropped to about 20 or 30  minutes of easy work.

That freed time to take the dog for a walk before the heat came up and still enjoy breakfast 90 minutes or an hour earlier than usual. By 8:00 in the morning I was ready to leave the house: something that normally doesn’t happen before 9:30 or 10:00.

Better yet, I didn’t feel just whipped when I climbed into the car. The jaws were not clenching, I felt much calmer on the road, I did not (for a change) feel like murdering my fellow drivers. And though I could do without spending my days at GDU, for the first time in many a moon I did not arrive at the office with a chip on my shoulder.

Refreshing!

Tomorrow: A second liberating insight