My Track Record

Work-wise, my summer is over at last. I start fall-quarter teaching on Monday. Related: I just revised my 46th and final chapter of PowerPoint slides, thus (barely) meeting my main summer goal of completing those revisions before the fall. I just have one more small step, which is to post the slides to the course website, thereby locking them down (i.e., preventing myself from tampering with them further).

I feel good, overall, about these versions of the slides. I created a bunch of good new Test Question Templates and improved some of my previous ones. I also organized each slideset into 3-5 logical subsections, which should reduce student confusion and should help me chunk my video lectures into shorter segments.

I can almost imagine declaring these slides good enough to reuse as is next quarter.

But first we will find out whether starting the quarter with finished slides makes my quarter a healthier experience, or just enables obsessive over-revision of other aspects of my teaching.

I’ve made some tangible progress since my last report.

Perhaps the biggest initial problem with my summer plans was that I had a million different “important” things that I “needed” to work on. OK, maybe not a million, but at least six: online labs (both for Human Anatomy and for Human Physiology), online lectures (for both courses), biology teaching songs, not-yet-written manuscripts (two or three), further development and dissemination of Test Question Templates (TQTs), and old/ongoing email.

When faced with a list like this one, I’m generally likely to either (A) focus on my favorite item (unlikely to be the most important one) while neglecting everything else, or (B) bounce back and forth between several items without making much progress on any of them.

To avoid such outcomes, I needed a clearer prioritization of tasks and some simple-yet-useful metrics of progress. I decided that my #1 priority for the summer would be editing my slides, in part because that was compatible with a simple-yet-useful metric: if I did six chapters’ worth of slides every week, all of the slides would be done by the start of the fall quarter.

During the first week of the six-chapters-per-week regimen (July 20-24), I managed to complete six chapters. However, it took most of the working hours that I had not previously committed to other meetings and deadline-sensitive tasks.

During the second week (July 27-31), I again completed six chapters. By cramming in some extra work in the evenings, I was able to devote one full weekday to a family hike.

If I can keep this up for six more weeks, I’ll be in great shape slide-wise.

But don’t ask me about my email inbox. Or my manuscripts. Or my labs…

It probably doesn’t need to be said that Alexander Hamilton and I have little in common. In watching Lin-Manuel Miranda’s masterpiece on Disney Plus, though, I couldn’t help but notice certain parallels.

Hamilton, as portrayed by Miranda (and by his primary source, a biography by Ron Chernow), is a workaholic who “write[s] like [he’s] running out of time” and who devotes considerable (possibly excessive) thought to his legacy. When George Washington sings to Hamilton, “History has its eyes on you,” it seems like an unnecessary warning. I almost expected Hamilton to fire back, “Well of COURSE it does!”

As I continue to struggle with work-life balance, one of the recurring themes is that certain tasks take way longer than they need to, simply because I want them to come out extra-well. My revision of my slides is a fine example.  Nobody is insisting that I make five hours’ worth of changes to these slides. Nobody is even recommending it. In fact, everybody is recommending against it. Yet away I go again into my PowerPoint time warp. Why?

Gaining a better understanding of my perfectionism is one major goal of my therapy. Where does it come from? What dials it up or down?

Here is a first draft of an answer. For some (often writing-related) tasks, I hold myself to certain high standards as a way of convincing myself that I am important and deserving of attention and praise.

That’s pretty self-centered, isn’t it?  Yes, but most people are self-centered.  My advantage is that I am relatively conscious of my selfish tendencies, and can compensate accordingly.

With that decently developed self-awareness, I can admit a personal desire to, in the words of Hamilton, “not throw away my shot.” Part of me wants to become famous, even if that fame is limited, say, to my own campus, or to fellow singing science instructors.

Obviously, it’s OK — admirable, even — to try to do certain things well enough that others might be impressed, and might remember what I did. But if I continue to define huge chunks of my life as “my shot” — always important enough to consume all of the hours I have available — then the work will never be under control, and I will never have a shot at a normal life.

Today I forced myself to buckle down and revise some specific course materials for the fall. I chose to revise some PowerPoint slides corresponding to Chapter 2 of our physiology textbook.

The good news?  I did it! I kept my nose to the proverbial grindstone and made a bunch of useful revisions. The slideset is now clearer and better organized, and it gives the students more and better opportunities to take notes and do practice problems.

The bad news?  Revising this one file — a file that was already in decent shape — took me FIVE HOURS.

This is, more or less, the fundamental issue that I encounter over and over again. I like revising course materials; I like making them more student-friendly. (I’m only half-kidding when I tell people that my pedagogical specialty is reinventing the wheel.) But taking five hours to revise one chapter’s worth of slides makes me the poster child of unsustainable behavior.  I must be able to work more efficiently than that… Right?

As I’ve mentioned, work-life balance remains elusive for me.

This summer I’m approaching the problem with a two-part plan: (A) psychotherapy and (B) a vacation from paid teaching so that I can get a good jump on preparations for fall.

I didn’t turn in spring-quarter grades until June 23, and then I had to play inbox-catchup for a while, so I’ve been slow to admit that part (B) is not going well. But it isn’t.

Today — thanks to the continuing blessing of a live-in mother-in-law who cares for our two young boys — I had many hours in which to work. 8:10am to 4:30pm, to be precise.

Many people would LOVE to have that kind of a workday.  So what did I do with this wonderful gift of abundant work time?

Well, I worked on a presentation for this Friday (~1.5 hours), worked on a COVID song-in-progress (~1.5 hours), read and wrote emails (mostly work-related; ~2 hours), went for a bike ride (~1 hour), ate (~0.5 hour), hung out with my 13-year-old (~0.5 hour) … and I’m not sure where the rest of the time went.

Conspicuously absent from all of this, of course, was any specific progress on fall teaching.

I didn’t feel as though I was being grossly irresponsible, and yet I made zero progress on the long-term goal that is my best ticket to a healthy fall quarter.

I think the next step has to be something like requiring myself to spend at least three hours a day, every day, to specific fall curriculum issues (revisions of PowerPoint slides, revisions of lab exercises, etc.). And fit in the email, music, etc. around that, rather than vice versa.

If I need to sacrifice some summer fun in order to have a sane, not-completely-exhausting fall, I will.