Time is on my side... yes it is...

No, this isn't going to be a look back on the works of the Rolling Stones. But it is a song lyric that instantly comes to mind if I try to put a bit of melody to the theme of this week's blog. I could have gone with "I've had the time of my life" from Dirty Dancing, but I think that might be taking things a bit far. Maybe "We have all the time in the word" by Louis Armstrong at a push.

Something I read in e-mails or hear in meetings an awful lot is a variation on "I just don't have the time." This may be a sympathetic recognition of the lack of time while simultaneously gently nudging recipients of your e-mail to do something time sensitive: "I appreciate everyone is busy, but..." Or it may be the justification for why something ongoing is still... well, ongoing: "There's just so much going on that we don't have the headspace to..." Or it might be an unglossed statement of why something won't happen: "I just don't have the time to..." That last one is the one I hear most when it comes to change. But it's also what I hear most from people who are complaining about the amount of work they have to do. Only both keep coming up in a circular pattern from the same people about the same things. They don't have time to get done something that they are obligated to do, but they equally do not have the time to dedicate to trying a different way of doing the thing that they persist in complaining they don't have time to do because of that (and other things) taking up all their time.

Something surely has to give, because there is an unquestionable burnout among staff in higher education in every staffing group, whether academic, technical, professional, or executive. Now it can't be the work, because that's not going to go away as we try to reach further to do more for those we are responsible for (staff or student). There are so many moving parts to a university, so many elements at play in the life of a student or a member of staff that you can't pick just one thing and work it until it's fixed and then move onto another because it's all connected ( though it happens). Important things get kicked down the road like beat up tin cans until such a time as the rest of the cans have been dealt with. And that shouldn't happen because it stifles growth.

Okay, so the work will continue to grow as a university does. So what next? Well the only way to have less work to do per person is to get more people. Only that's not financially sustainable, and it risks ownership of the work and awareness of the effectiveness of the work becoming discombobulated. Of course, adding resource to a problem is the standard approach to most instances of being overworked or things falling behind. But that to me feels a little like sending in more people into the river from Desmond Tutu's quote, “There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they’re falling in.” You can't keep throwing people at a situation to get the work done, and you can't offer a nice blanket and a stress relief seminar to the people you pulled out the river only to send them back up river to the same shaky jetty to start a new project.

So the answer of course has to be that how the work is done has to change. This is where I both excel, and often come a cropper. And I'll say right off the bat that I absolutely do not do any work outside of office hours. No e-mails, no lecture writing, no marking, no nothing in the evenings or on weekends. That's something I've been told I have to be wary of saying, and it plays into what I'll talk about in a bit.

I've always been solution orientated, and I love a challenge. My mind works on the basis of looking at something and instantly seeing how it could be improved, or at least simplified to give the same outcome. Pretty much anytime someone has given me something to do and I've looked at it and thought "well that looks like a pain in the arse to do", I've simply come up with a way of doing it differently and more easily but without losing the quality of the original output (or I've improved on it, because why not). On occasion the initial doing takes some time to complete. But the idea in those instances is that when I've done it once, I need never put that much effort into the same thing again. My entire first year assessment is built on that premise. It took no time at all to design (maybe an hour), it took me several days to build from scratch (spread out over maybe a couple weeks in the quieter summer months), and it took me maybe another couple of hours to set it up. But that was it. Now I just take an hour each year to set it up and I'm done. The rest is automated. I can tweak it, add to it, enhance it as I learn more about my learners and their habits and behaviours, but even then that's 10 minutes here and there as an idea comes to me - the challenge of needing to improve it so it evolves as the students and the learning evolve.

What that does, is it gives me more time for more ideas. It gives me that headspace that so many claim they never have due to having too much to do. Arguably it also gives me more time, by automating the entirety of one level of assessment (over 200 students every year), to spend on marking and feeding back on assessments from a later level of study where automated assessment and marking just wouldn't be appropriate. Of course even there I don't spend more literal time on providing feedback as many of my colleagues. Instead I came up with a way of giving more feedback in less time and in a more meaningful way. I record audio clips and insert them inline as I read through the work for the first time. I don't read through it, dissect it, go back over it, add comments, read the comments, and come up with a mark. I talk through the work as I read it, offering conversational tone and detail on the good and the not so good. And because I've said it aloud, spoken my thoughts, and done that on the first pass, it's fresh enough in my mind that reaching the conclusion of the grade is that much easier. A 1,500 word essay goes from 30 to 60 minutes to mark (judging by the frustrated musings of some of my colleagues at how long marking takes) to 10 to 15 minutes, with about 10 minutes of audio commentary in individual snippets placed next to the relevant sentence/paragraph for the student to work through and learn from. I do the same thing with poster submissions or anything visual now, only in a one-take video/screen capture run through with digital ink annotations.

So now I have headspace. But being an academic is more than marking, right? There are the 18 odd lectures each year, the 35 or so lab practicals, the tutorials and workshops and events to teach or facilitate. And I'm also a programme lead for a 500 to 600 student undergraduate course, so I have responsibilities to the smooth running, quality and wellbeing of that course and its students. I'm also lucky enough to be involved in a whole host of committees, boards and projects outside of my primary role that have the potential to help a lot more people outside my course. So that's a lot of time spent in meetings or handling student queries and problems, and planning, organising, checking, compiling, assurance, governance, and everything else one might associate with an undergraduate degree course at strategic projects and all that. Well that's where the simpler ways of working come into play. The small things that you'd think were just tips or minor short cuts. But when they all add up, when you use them connectively, they become an enormous time saver.

• Adding lecture slides and handouts to the VLE via live OneDrive means if I make an update I don't need to re-upload the thing. It also means I can get better quality analytics on how many students downloaded a copy of or viewed the online version of that file.

• Adding assessment dates and links to Blackboard course calendars and showing students how to sync those with their Outlook calendars means real-time updates and fewer notifications of changes.

• Sharing spreadsheets via OneDrive or Teams about timetables, workloads means collaborative working with accompanying comments and posts to discuss - and that in turn means less need for meetings, more shared ownership of the work, and the very nature of asynchronous work meaning not having to wait for those meetings to get things done.

• Collecting data and student voices continuously either through Microsoft forms, or collating it in Excel from other central sources so that I can modify anything from individual student support to frequency of programmatic drop-ins, to predicting assessment workloads.

• Joining and contributing to Teams and communities to share ideas, solve problems, help others, and cultivate a network of support.

• Adaptive release, time release, task based access to resources... it's all there in the set it up, sit back and move onto something else category.

Those are just some of the more digital tweaks to how I work and teach and conduct my admin. But on top of that is taking that... I guess it's a skill (?) of looking at something and seeing a more efficient way of doing it, and ascertaining whether it actually needs doing or if it's something that we do simply because we always have. A recent example of that is as easy as asking a team not to send me an e-mail with an attachment every time a particular event was recorded just because "in times of yesteryear doing so was the only way of a programme leader knowing it had happened" (and for some reason some past lead actually wanted to hear about it each time even though there was nothing they needed to do with that information beyond being vaguely aware it happened). But now we can provide access to databases and reports in a live format that I can (or at least should, but the central processes haven't caught up with me yet) access when I need to know to check an individual or to look for patterns. Saves me time, saves them effort (saves my inbox some space), and is one less unnecessary distraction taking up my finite brain space.

Where I come a cropper is that apparently my not being stressed, not being worked to the bone, and having lots of free time to pursue new ideas and projects and to help others, upsets some people to hear I, unlike so many others, am not on the brink. That to admit I have free time, or to show how easy I might find something is bragging, showing off, rubbing it in their face. I struggle with this because the whole point of showcasing (or in their minds, showing off) is to demonstrate that if we all take a step back, maybe take a little time up front to learn something new or build something new, or just to reconsider why we might do something, we can all save a tonne of time in the long run. Time that can be spent improving the good stuff, fixing the broken stuff, and helping people get to a better place where they can be better, both at their jobs and in their minds. A colleague who has now moved on to a very senior position elsewhere once said to me on hearing that I'd been warned not to say how easy I found things or how much time I had, "How will anyone ever learn to change if they don't know what's possible? You should not be scared to show people what you're capable of, you should be shouting it from the rooftops."

In many ways time is on my side, because I have lots of it due to the way I look at situations and the way I let my creativity take over. I get to enjoy the fun parts of my job, make light of the niggling parts, and take on more than most without getting even close to breaking. But then again, it also works against me because I find it frustrating that when faced with simple solutions to save time and enhance provision and effectiveness, people either don't see the simple facts, fear they can't do any different than what they have already been told, or they outright refuse to try. It means I'm sitting around waiting for other people to do their part before I can do the next bit, or there's no point trying something new at all because no one else has the time or the inclination to try or be involved or use the output too. Other people's lack of time slows me down. Plus the time it takes for anything to really change for the better can feel like an eternity when that change beyond yourself (and those you work with who do see and pick up your practices and ideas), and your ideas becoming the next way of doing things can only come about through the right people in the influential positions having vision. They need to be able to recognise that something is amiss, that people are tired, that efficiency in one or more areas is not where it should be to maintain quality, to be willing to see the potential in alternative ways that ultimately save time, and to adopt those themselves in their more visible positions of conducting business to set the example to those they are responsible for (I'm honest with my students in that sense and show them many of my ways of working that might help their studies). Because without vision, we're just looking in the rear view mirror at the past and wondering why it's catching up to us so fast. When really, time is a river, and it flows one way - make more of it and enjoy the ride.