How do you keep track of what you have to do?
I use Microsoft To-Do — which is different than Microsoft Tasks. It’s pretty much the same as the way people use different notebooks, I’m just always paranoid I’m going to lose the notebook, so I do it digitally. I have about a dozen lists for various projects or teams — office crew, chairs, regular meetings, evals, scheduling, stuff like that. I want to go through the lists a few times a week, but mostly end up doing it on Fridays, which is fine if I’m good at marking things as “important” when I put them in. What I mean is, when I put something on the list that has to get done, you can mark it with a little star that puts it on a little sub list called “important.” That’s just the app — not something I set up. Then, I can look at “important” in the morning, and click another little icon that sends it to a list of things I need to get done that day. Everything is really easy to move around, and every single thing I have to do or might have to do is there, so I can easily move it to “important’’ when the time comes. Before I log off at night, or before I get started in the morning, I move what needs to be done that day from the “today” list to the calendar. If it doesn’t fit, I have to figure out what to tweak. When I say it, it sounds kind of complicated, but it’s an app on my phone and it’s mostly swiping and clicking.
How do you use your calendar?
My calendar is my daily to-do list. One of the people who first helped me get organized in my life used to always say that you have to put your to-do list on your calendar, otherwise you’re really just pretending that things are going to get done. And that is so true for me. I mean, if you don’t make the time for that thing, like, literally make the time, when is it supposed to get done? Over time, I’ve also noticed it’s helped me figure out how long things really take. I also color code everything. I started that after I got this job, and I was just blown away by the meeting time and the email time compared to the time actually doing things. So, I started color coding so I could look at a week and get a quick look at where the biggest chunks of my time went.
How do you plan for and manage the day, the week, the semester?
The day and the week, I do through Microsoft To-Do. Besides that, we also have a theme for each day of the week in the office. Monday is scheduling and staffing, Tuesday is personnel — which is evaluations and hiring, Wednesday is money, which is buying stuff and payroll issues and Friday is about catch up and communication. That’s when I send out updates to the division and go through longer emails I want to write to people. That’s been really great, because even when things get super crazy, I know I’m at least going to check in on that topic in a week. Also, when it’s crazy for me, staff are working on those things on those days. So it helps me delegate, too. For the semester, I do have a running list of regular things that happen in any given month, like someone else mentioned for this. I put those things on my calendar during summer and winter breaks. I also take a day-long personal sort of retreat day during the summer and winter breaks, to look back at what happened, decide what my goals are in addition to Frank’s and Melanie’s and start to figure out what the weeks are going to look like in order to get that all done. I block that out on my calendar. I don’t really put anything on my calendar that I don't have to do, so if I’ve blocked something out — like a goal or a project — I know I can’t just delete it from the calendar, I can only move it. If I move it too much, I have to ask if it’s really important.
What’s the best process or system you’ve set up for yourself or your department/office?
I think the document we use to build and staff the schedule. It’s a pretty high functioning spreadsheet that allows us to move forward on building and staffing the schedule without even having to email each other. There are drop downs to tell me or the others involved what the next thing to do is. Like, the offer is accepted, so we change the status to “send to ISA,” or mark it as “offered” till we hear back from faculty, so we really know exactly where are all the time. We can sort it in all kinds of handy ways. When I got the job, all of that was still happening on paper, so it was pretty radical and just completely transformed the time it takes and the accuracy and we can look at it in different ways and make better offers.
Another thing we’re trying is a thing I call the budget book. It’s a spreadsheet tabbed for each budget we’re a part of. The crew updates it from PS Financials a couple times a month, and we keep the history of what we’ve done with those budgets in the same sheet. The requests, the allocations, etc. It’s just a way more efficient way for me to look at budgets and understand the context and history better than it is to dig through PS financials for a day.
And our themed days is the other big one.
Best lesson learned the hard way?
It’s hard to pick. These jobs come with a lot of hard lessons. One, for sure, is that you should lean toward over communicating. It’s always hard to balance that — you know, when do people stop listening or reading? But when you’re talking to as many people as we are, the thing that doesn’t seem worth mentioning is almost always the thing somebody thanks you for mentioning. And we've all seen what happens when we don’t include folks in decision making — at best it just slightly erodes trust, but I’ve also seen people make things around a particular project really difficult just because they’re mad because we didn’t get their input. Anyway, it’s a good reminder that it’s always better and easier to get input. It also just ends up helping me adopt a totally transparent approach to everything. That part has been a stress reducer, and it reminds them that we aren’t this nefarious group of secret decision makers, you know? I mean, we can’t be — the contract and the Senate and shared governance literally don’t allow for that. So, when it happens it’s usually just a mistake someone made because they were moving too fast.
One other good lesson, I think, is realizing I can live with not always meeting people’s expectations — or maybe it’s more accurate to say their perceptions of what they should be able to expect. People often have some pretty unrealistic expectations of you. And it doesn’t always mean you’re not working hard enough or working hard enough to meet those expectations. Sometimes, it’s just not realistic, and they don’t understand your job well enough to know that.
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Something to think about:
“Typically beginners have a ton of information being thrown at them. Helping them eliminate so they can focus is more helpful than giving them more.”
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The Rabbit Hole (resources, content, etc. that are relevant to the job):
The ultimate cure for overwhelm (a very short essay/long tweet)
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