It’s that time of year again when I have to fill out my annual Faculty Activities Sheet, reporting on everything I did last academic year. Technically, I should’ve done this a while back, but it always slips into the December break.
This always takes much longer than it ought to, in large part because it’s hard to remember exactly when certain significant things happened, which leads to a lot of searching of my email trying to determine when various things saw print, and which of the available categories it fits in. I probably really ought to keep a running tally of my activities as the year goes along, but they tweak the form every year or two, so my attempts have always been thwarted– I end up spending a bunch of time working out how to convert from one version of the form to another.
It’s also kind of annoying because the timing always means that the things I’ve done most recently aren’t part of the window that’s actually being considered, which ends at the end of August. For some reason, my interesting activities tend to cluster in September and October, meaning that I’ve got a bunch of interesting stuff to report for next year, that I will barely remember when next year’s form comes around…
There is some satisfaction, of course, in seeing a big list of all the concrete things I accomplished in the past year. Even in a slow year (as last academic year was, for me), this is quite a bit of stuff. It doesn’t quite overcome the annoyance at having to do this busywork in the first place, but it helps a little.
In one consulting gig, I reported through 9 different managers in 6 different companies, and thus spent about 90% of my time writing weekly progress reports. Cost to tax-payer, (really!) was $1,000,000 per year of my actually productive time.
I like that you gave us the finite version of: “since the Last Progress Report, I Have Worked on This Progress Report; which is entitled since the Last Progress Report, I Have Worked on This Progress Report; which is entitled since the Last Progress Report, I Have Worked on This Progress Report…”
Maybe you should just keep an analog record–jot down important stuff on your calendar, or buy a $3 daily planner and keep notes in there. Then, when you have to do your progress report, no matter what format it’s in, you just have to flip through the calendar to remember when something happened. (If you’re like me, it’s not remembering what you did, but when you did it, that is the problem.)
1) Would you mind posting your progress report from last year or the last couple years? It would be interesting to see a concrete example.
2) What do you think of the idea that your college ought to make all these documents public? Right now, it is every hard for outsiders to judge just who is active among the faculty and who is not.
I’ve yet to manage to pull this off, but one of my mentors schedules a little time on Friday to write down what she has done the headings of the different “competancies” we are evaluated on and she also makes notes of anything the people who report to her have done that is noteworthy or a good example of a something that evaluations ask about.
When my younger brother died suddenly (at age 42), it fell to me to settle his estate. The lawyer told me, “Even if you don’t bill the estate for your time, you should keep track of your hours.”
That was just shy of five years ago. No-one ever did ask me for an accounting of my hours, but as a housewife with hobbies but no kids, nearly all my time is unstructured, and I have kept up the practice in this form:
I keep a file on the computer called WhereDoesTheTimeGo.doc. Every day I write a quick list of what I did that day. It’s a log, not a diary. Short and sweet. I don’t write in complete sentences except that on rare occasions I’ll add a parenthetical comment. When we travel, I jot things down in a notebook, and update the computer file when I get home.
This works for me. I document my life in other ways — a for-real diary (updated at milestones and turning points, genearlly), a very limited blog, a sketchbook — but the log keeps it all from turning into one big blur.
I keep a word document with the main categories – a new document for each year. Talk titles and dates, poster presentations and dates, non-standard meetings (and dates), service or outreach work (and dates), manuscript authors/titles go into this. I know it isn’t the final format so I’ll have to formalize it into whatever formatting that year’s forms are going to use – but it saves so much time to have all the data in one place!