One of the keys to my productivity (and avoiding procrastination) is to schedule things during a time of day when I have an appropriate amount of energy. I try to do things that require a high amount of concentration in the morning, when I have more energy and am naturally more focused, and things that require less concentration in afternoon, when I seem to naturally want to take a nap. I also work out in the morning, because that gives me the energy I need to get through the day.

The tricky part is working around things that I don’t have control over the scheduling of. My ideal schedule would have me get up, work out, write for an hour, read for an hour, work on whatever my most important task is (aside from writing) for 30-60 minutes, then shower and go to work. The reality is that I would have to get up at 2:30 in the morning to make that happen.

Here’s how I have figured out my fall daily schedule. I’ve listed everything I want or need to do on a regular basis that I control the scheduling of or at least have some input on. I’ve then indicated how much energy/concentration that task requires of me and then ranked everything by importance, with 1 being the most important and 11 being the least important. Finally, I’ve taken the energy/concentration level needed and importance level into account to determine when that task would ideally be scheduled. (I’ll write at some point in the future about assigning importance levels–I always want to give everything a 1 or 2 in the first round of doing this.)

So my ideal day would look like this:

A.M. – work out, write, read, most important task (MIT)
P.M. – meditate, teaching prep, meetings, bureaucratic stuff, activism, email, PT/doctor’s appointments

It’s unlikely that I would need to do all these things on any single day, so I can sketch out a daily schedule that combines some tasks so I can do whichever one most needs to be done on a particular day. Notice that I only do this for tasks that have lower importance levels or that I know don’t happen very often.  

Then I can come up with time allowances for each one. The concept of a time allowance is that you work on the assigned task for the amount of time allotted rather than until the task is completed. If the task isn’t done when the time is up, you just come back to that task the next time you have time allotted for it.

Then, using the schedule I sketched out above, I can plug in things like a commute, a shower, lunch, etc. and start figuring out what time things need to happen to accomodate the things that don’t have flexible times.

This is now my default schedule. On days that I have something that isn’t a regular engagement, like going to hear a visiting speaker or working intensely on a bureaucratic report that has a tight deadline, I will deviate from this schedule, but 80% of the time, this is the schedule I’ll follow through the fall semester.

One of the biggest light bulb moments I’ve had in terms of scholarly productivity is that when I work on writing when I’m energized, things go better. This probably sounds obvious, but for years–ahem, I mean more than a decade–I tried to do my writing in the afternoon, the time recognized as nap time, coffee time, and slump time by most everyone, including me. Despite my strong daily desire to take a nap in the afternoon, I thought it made sense to plan to write in the afternoon. My reasoning was that by then I would have gotten all of my tasks for the day done and I’d have this delicious open period before me.

But most days, by the time 2 or 3 pm came, I did not have all of my tasks done, so I was grouchy, slumpy, nappy, and stressed out about being behind. I would then spend my “writing time” trying to catch up. Why did I not catch on to this insidious pattern after it had repeated itself thousands of times? Sigh. I don’t know for sure.

But one magical day, after my usual morning workout, which leaves me full of optimism and energy, instead of going straight to the shower, I sat down at my computer, and something amazing happened: I wrote for an hour straight with no trouble. I fell into the “zone” in which you lose track of time and just revel in your current activity. After this happened a few times in a row, I came up with a theory–if you write when you are energized, things will go well, and if you write when you are not energized, things will go not so well–and I decided to test it by keeping a log of my writing times and productivity for a few weeks, sometimes writing in the morning and sometimes writing (or attempting writing) in the afternoon. You can guess what my log revealed: yes, it was no fluke–when I wrote in the morning, when I was energized, I wrote more and it felt less like a chore; when I wrote in the afternoon, when I was not energized, I wrote very little and it felt like a huge burden.

Now I try to write as early in the morning as is possible, even if it’s just for a few minutes. Writing for 20 minutes at 6 a.m. results in more words for me than writing for 45 minutes at 4 p.m.

Now you may not be a morning person and perhaps your high energy time hits at 8 p.m. My advice is to then reconfigure your schedule so that you can write at 8 p.m. as often as possible. Whatever your high energy time is, that’s when you should write, and if your schedule doesn’t allow that, then figure out when your lowest energy time is and write as far away from that time as possible. (If you’re not sure when you have the most or least energy, try this.)

Sleep hygiene is the official term for your sleep practices, including things like napping, what you do to wind down before bed, setting your bedtime and wake time, and what you eat or drink before bed.

I was not always a good sleeper, but for the past nine years I have been a champion sleeper, getting 7.5 hours of good quality sleep almost every night and waking up feeling refreshed.

I know that getting good quality sleep is not always within your control. My daughter did not sleep through the night until she was six, which means I did not sleep through the night for her first six years (which is why I am able to pinpoint with accuracy exactly how many years it’s been that I’ve been getting good quality sleep). In addition to caring for children or other loved ones, we might have health conditions, work schedules, and other circumstances that make it impossible to get high quality sleep on a regular basis. However, there are quite a few things you can control to help yourself get higher quality sleep.

After getting craptacular sleep for most of my life (the six years that my daughter wasn’t sleeping plus most of the years before that because of stress, depression, difficult work schedules, and frankly, terrible sleep hygiene), waking up feeling well-rested the last few years has been truly profound in improving my quality of life. For example,

• I can think clearly most of the time.
• I handle stress better.
• It is easier to maintain a regular workout schedule.
• I get more high quality work done on a regular basis without stress.
• I procrastinate less.

Faculty tell me all the time that they didn’t get enough sleep because they were up late grading papers or doing research or reading or writing. My thought is that whatever it is they were doing was probably not done nearly as well as it would have been if they had gotten good quality sleep and then did that thing.

If you want to start getting higher quality sleep today, here is what I suggest:

• Use an app or create a spreadsheet to track your bedtime, wake time, and how you feel for a few weeks to figure out how much sleep you actually need. I always thought I needed 8-9 hours a night, but when I tracked it, I found that I actually feel and perform best on 7.5 hours a night. I also learned that going to bed and getting up pretty early (to bed by 9:30 and up by 5) is best for me. (In a perfect world, I would go to bed at 8:30 and get up by 4, but I’ll be damned if I can get to bed by 8:30 most nights).
• Once you figure out the sleep schedule that works best for you, try to stick to it every day of the week. I usually shift things later by about an hour on weekends, but on the weekends when I stick to my weekday sleep schedule, things go better.
• Restrict alcohol and electronics in the hour before you go to bed. Metabolizing alcohol can cause you to wake up in the night and the evil glow of electronics can disrupt sleep cycles.
• If you can’t fall asleep after 20 minutes, take melatonin or get up for a few minutes to read. I find that on the rare occasions that I don’t fall asleep quickly, staying in bed stressing out about not getting enough sleep makes it even harder to fall asleep. The first time I tried this, I was amazed at how well it worked. I thought getting out of bed would “wake me up” more and make it harder to fall asleep, but when I came back to bed 15 minutes later, full of melatonin and having read some poetry, I fell asleep almost immediately.

Finally, it may help to remember that our students practice notoriously horrible sleep hygiene and we do them no favors when we talk about how unrested we are. Instead, we can model good sleep hygiene for them–and maybe even those colleagues who like to brag about how sleep-deprived they are.

It’s common at a teaching institution to feel pulled in too many different directions by your job. Sometimes this pulling can actually be quantified. When I was hired, for example, I was told that 50% of my time should go to teaching, 30% to scholarship, 20% to service, and the remaining 50% to the Writing Center, which I direct. Do the math and you’ll see why I wondered whether the job was actually going to be any less work than the 6:6 load I had left at a community college. (The answer is no, it’s not less work!)

Other times the pulling comes from an embarrassment of riches, such as the year I was invited to participate on several time-intensive committees for causes I was deeply invested in. I had the option of saying no to any, even all, of the committees, but I truly wanted to participate and felt I had something to contribute to each one. I ended up joining two committees and saying no to one but wishing I could clone myself to serve on the third one, too.

Other times we feel pressure, either internal or external, to do more, whether it’s taking on another class, chairing a committee, mentoring another student, or something else. We can technically say no, but to do so might have consequences we’d rather not deal with (the class gets cancelled and the students are SOL, the committee ends up being chaired by someone disorganized, the student flounders without mentoring and ultimately drops out).

To help me prioritize in the situations in which I do have some degree of say, I have a simple system: I designate a specific area of my job to be the priority each semester. I have four areas of responsibility: teaching, service, scholarship, and the Writing Center. I choose one of those to be the priority area for fall and spring and two to be the priorities for summer. I don’t advertise which one is the priority for the semester, and I don’t use it as a justification to slack in the areas that aren’t priorities. This system simply helps me make decisions when I feel stretched too thin; for example, I want to return papers in tomorrow’s class and I am behind on a draft of an article. If it’s a teaching semester, I’ll prioritize responding to the papers; if it’s a scholarship semester, I’ll prioritize the article draft. This system basically acts as a tie-breaker for me.

It’s easiest to see how this system works by looking at four years’ worth of semesters. First, I make scholarship and the Writing Center my summer priorities, with scholarship getting the first half of the summer and the Writing Center getting the second half.

I make teaching the priority once every academic year, alternating between fall and spring so that the classes I routinely teach during a particular semester don’t get more or less attention than other courses.

Finally, I fill in the remaining semesters by alternating scholarship and the Writing Center, but balancing them between the semesters.

Earlier in my career, I alternated teaching with service and did a ton of service. More recently, I’ve become aware of how unevenly service is distributed by gender (see this and this) and made a conscious decision to put my time and energy elsewhere, thus the absence of service on the grid. Again, this doesn’t mean I don’t do service–it just means I don’t prioritize it.

So over the course of four years, teaching, scholarship, and the Writing Center each are the focus for four semesters.