{"id":8823,"date":"2013-11-18T08:59:29","date_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:59:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/?p=8823"},"modified":"2013-11-18T08:59:29","modified_gmt":"2013-11-18T13:59:29","slug":"time-management-or-a-day-in-the-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/11\/18\/time-management-or-a-day-in-the-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Time Management, or A Day in the Life"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>In comments to the Sagan post, <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2013\/11\/13\/the-sagan-thing\/#comment-64014\">Niall asked about how I spend my time<\/a>. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it&#8217;s probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment:<\/p>\n<p><strong>Monday, Wednesday, Friday<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>06:00 &#8211; Alarm goes off. Wake up, get out of bed, drag a comb across my head. Release dog, start breakfast prep.<\/li>\n<li>06:30 &#8211; Wake SteelyKid, take her downstairs, give her breakfast. The usual division of labor is that I get the food, then carry her upstairs to go to the bathroom (because she&#8217;s <em>tired<\/em>&#8230;) and pick out her clothes. Then Kate nags her to actually eat her food, while I walk Emmy.<\/li>\n<li>07:30 &#8211; SteelyKid&#8217;s school bus comes, I take The Pip to day care.<\/li>\n<li>07:45 &#8211; After dropping The Pip off, I go to Starbucks to try to get a little writing\/ blogging\/ editing done.<\/li>\n<li>09:30 &#8211; Go to my office on campus. Generally, the plan for this time is to do class prep, grading, etc. The reality is this is when I get stuck doing paperwork and dealing with whatever nonsense administrative crisis has cropped up. A fair bit of blog-reading in this time, some paper-chasing<\/li>\n<li>11:15 &#8211; Head to the gym, health and schedule permitting.<\/li>\n<li>12:50 &#8211; Not always, but there are a lot of meetings held at this time, because there are no regular classes. Even if there isn&#8217;t a meeting, I try to be back to my office to do my actual class prep. Lunch at my desk, usually.<\/li>\n<li>13:50 &#8211; Class. Teaching Quantum Optics this term, which is fun, though I&#8217;ve been too distracted to do a really good job. Which I kind of regret.<\/li>\n<li>15:00 &#8211; More administrative fire-fighting, sometimes class prep\/grading. Meet with students who need something.<\/li>\n<li>16:30 &#8211; Leave campus to run errands, start dinner, etc.<\/li>\n<li>17:30 &#8211; Day care pick-up.<\/li>\n<li>18:00 &#8211; Home for dinner, then dog walking. Maybe a little computer time while the kids watch tv.<\/li>\n<li>19:30 &#8211; Bedtime. We alternate nights, so what happens next depends on which one I have. If it&#8217;s my night with SteelyKid, I read her three bedtime stories, and we may read her nightly books from kindergarten (if we didn&#8217;t do them earlier). Then I do dishes and make the kids&#8217; lunches for the next day. If it&#8217;s my night with The Pip, I generally end up spending about an hour getting him to sleep.<\/li>\n<li>21:00 &#8211; Social media catch-up, grading, class prep, leftover administrative nonsense.<\/li>\n<li>23:00 &#8211; Pass out.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p><strong>Tuesday-Thursday<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>I didn&#8217;t teach on Tuesdays and Thursdays this term, so I haven&#8217;t needed to be on campus those days, except for the nearly inevitable lunch meetings\/ colloquium. The early-morning schedule is the same as MWF, but the &#8220;hide in Starbucks and write&#8221; portion extends to noon. Then most of the time, I go over to campus until about 2, then the afternoon is spent errand-running (grocery shopping, shopping for kid stuff, occasional home maintenance, etc.). Sometimes a nap.<\/p>\n<p>The late afternoon\/evening schedule is the same as MWF, from about 16:30 on.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Saturday<\/strong><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>07:00 &#8211; Get up, becase I have lost the ability to sleep in. Collect The Pip, go downstairs to watch cartoons on tv.<\/li>\n<li>07:30 &#8211; Wake SteelyKid, bring her downstairs for breakfast\/ tv. Feed and walk Emmy. Social media time.<\/li>\n<li>09:30 &#8211; Take kids to SoccerTots (Kate stays home to revel in peace and quiet). About a half-hour drive.<\/li>\n<li>10:00 &#8211; SoccerTots. SteelyKid goes to the five-year-old class by herself, The Pip and I go to the little-kid class, which requires more active parental participation.<\/li>\n<li>11:00 &#8211; Collect SteelyKid from her class, get lunch, usually at the Five Guys in the Colonie mall.<\/li>\n<li>12:00 &#8211; Head home, with The Pip usually falling asleep in the car.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The afternoon\/evening schedule is highly variable. The Pip will nap until 14:30 or 15:00, give or take, and depending on how I&#8217;m feeling, I&#8217;ll either nap with him, or get him to sleep then try to get a bit of work done, or take SteelyKid off to do something fun. We&#8217;ve had some recent success with play-dates in this time block, and may look to do more of that&#8211; SteelyKid is old enough now that when one of her friends comes over, they can entertain themselves with relatively little parental participation.<\/p>\n<p>We try to hold to the same dinner\/bedtime schedule on weekends, depending on what else we decided to do.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Sunday<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Early morning is the same as Saturday, then:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>10:00 &#8211; Take kids to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.schenectadygreenmarket.org\/\">Schenectady Greenmarket<\/a> (Kate stays home to revel in peace and quiet). When it&#8217;s outside, this also generally involves a trip to the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.opendoor-bookstore.com\/\">Open Door bookstore<\/a>, because it&#8217;s right there. When it&#8217;s the indor market, we usually just hang out and listen to music for a while.<\/li>\n<li>11:00 &#8211; Lunch with kids at Panera.<\/li>\n<li>12:00 &#8211; Grocery shopping with kids.<\/li>\n<li>13:00 &#8211; Home, nap with Pip.<\/li>\n<li>14:30 &#8211; Regular babysitter comes over to play with SteelyKid. Generally, I go to campus or Starbucks to try to get some work done, the exact destination depending on what sort of work is most badly overdue.<\/li>\n<li>17:00 &#8211; Babysitter leaves, come home to make dinner, then baths and bedtime.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As I said, this is about to change, as fall term classes are ending. I&#8217;m going to shift into full-tome writing, so the hope is for every day to look like the Tuesday\/Thursday schedule above, hopefully with less errand-running and shorter lunchtime visits to campus. We&#8217;ll see if that works out. We&#8217;ll resume something like the above in early January, though I&#8217;ll have a lab to teach either Tuesday or Thursday.<\/p>\n<p>There are also occasional departures from this&#8211; some nights, I&#8217;ll pick the kids up and go out to dinner with them&#8211; through a weird quirk of psychology, I&#8217;m much happier dealing with them out in public than at home. If I&#8217;m home, my computer and all my work things are <em>right there<\/em> reminding me that I could be doing something useful, but five minutes after I start trying to do anything, the kids will suddenly demand my presence. It drives me nuts, and I end up getting snippy with the kids, then feeling guilty about that. When I&#8217;m out at a restaurant (chain place, mostly, where I&#8217;m not wrecking the ambiance by bringing in a couple of little kids), it&#8217;s much easier to accept that nothing useful is getting done during that time, and I can be more chill.<\/p>\n<p>In exchange, Kate will sometimes take them solo for dinner at home (she finds being out in public with them more stressful than being at home), while I go to the occasional evening event on campus, or just have a working dinner at a restaurant with my laptop. There are also a lot of weekends when we&#8217;re on the road to visit grandparents or whatever, and a depressing number of weekdays when one kid or the other is sick and needs to stay home\/ go to the doctor. The above is the base schedule for a typical week, though.<\/p>\n<p>But, anyway, there&#8217;s a glimpse of the glamorous life of a parent, associate professor, and not-entirely-happy-about-it department chair. Bet you wish you had my job, now.<\/p>\n<p>And here, have a thematically appropriate song:<\/p>\n<p><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"420\" height=\"315\" src=\"\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/P-Q9D4dcYng\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In comments to the Sagan post, Niall asked about how I spend my time. This is about to change, as today is the last day of my class for the fall term, then we have an extended break, but it&#8217;s probably interesting in a life-in-academia way to put up my schedule at the moment: Monday,&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/2013\/11\/18\/time-management-or-a-day-in-the-life\/\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Time Management, or A Day in the Life<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8823","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-academia","category-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8823","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8823"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8823\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8823"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8823"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8823"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}