Writing in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Cal Newport asks a simple, yet important question: Is Email Making Professors Stupid? Newport’s essay challenges both faculty and the academic administrators who support them to carefully consider the potential damage of distraction generally and email specifically. In my book, How to Get Tenure: Strategies for Successfully Navigating the Process, I raised some of these same questions in the context of pre-tenure faculty. In today’s post, I want to share an excerpt from the book that addresses the problem with email.

NExternal calls for accountability, political attacks on faculty members, the decline of tenure-track positions — the reality for faculty today is as challenging as at any time in recent memory. Add to these factors the ratcheting up of research expectations, teaching loads, service obligations and administrative requests, and how can we possible expect faculty to get everything done?

Reflecting on the current state of higher education, Nobel laureate Peter Higgs said, “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.” The time pressures on faculty members — and particularly pretenure faculty members — are much higher than previous generations faced.

As a result, faculty members have to manage daily demands as well as long-term priorities in order to succeed. While we need a system for managing our calendar and to-do list, we also need a renewed focus by both senior faculty members and administrators on the work that matters most. In the absence of a larger institutional focus, each of us has to take charge of our careers and make sure we are doing that work.

Indeed, we should focus less on how to improve efficiency and more about what faculty members are actually doing. Productivity tips and tricks can be helpful, and I often encourage my colleagues to try new approaches or software solutions to save time. But efficiency for efficiency’s sake or to free up time for administrivia is pointless.

Greg McKeown, the author and business consultant, suggests that productivity is often about doing less, not more. McKeown argues that by doing less, we can spend time on work that really makes a difference. When I think about faculty work today, this idea, which can admittedly seem like a self-help trope, actually holds power to both reduce the constant feeling of busyness while also improving the quality of our work.

For example, what if you spent more time creating an interactive activity for class than revising the look of your lecture slides? What if you created an answer sheet with clear explanations to distribute to class rather than writing brief notes in the margin on each individual student exam? What if you checked your email three times a day instead of three times an hour? Think of the progress you could make on your highest-priority projects. There are countless examples, within our control, where we could decide to focus on creating value for our students or in our research endeavors rather than letting busywork take over our day, week and semester.

After his return to Apple, Steve Jobs significantly reduced the number of product lines sold by the company. Reflecting on his strategy in 1997, he said, “People think focus is just saying yes to the thing you got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully. I’m actually as proud of the things we haven’t done as the things I have done.”

So, how do you do this? First, you have to view time, at least to some degree, as a zero-sum game. You only have a fixed amount of it, which means when you say yes to something, you are also saying no to something else. If you agree to meet with a student group for an hour on Wednesday afternoon, that means saying no to an hour for research and writing. Saying yes to staying late for a committee meeting means saying no to your son’s baseball game.

One of the joys of faculty work is that we can find many intellectually stimulating and engaging opportunities to get involved on campus. A few people enjoy committee meetings, but advising students, leading research labs or writing an article or book are all aspects of our roles that brought us to the academy in the first place. Thus, you are rarely deciding between good and bad requests for your time, but good and better options.

We have to consider how the decisions regarding our time each day, week and semester shape our careers. For faculty members on the tenure clock, the ever-present anxiety to achieve tenure can be derailed by daily decisions to focus on things that do not help advance your tenure case. Of course, that does not mean you should never do something if it does not help your pursuit of tenure. But you will struggle if you do not prioritize the work that your institution and tenure committee value.

In the end, time is a zero-sum game that requires trade-offs. We all make these trade-offs every day, but often without thinking about it. Trade-offs exist in balancing professional work in teaching, research and service — as well as between our professional and personal lives.

The best way to tackle the zero-sum game and better prioritize our time is to make explicit the trade-offs that exist in faculty work. When a new request or opportunity presents itself, ask if it is something you want to pursue and what you would have to say no to or stop doing in order to say yes to the request.

For early-career faculty members, discuss with senior colleagues and mentors the trade-offs you face, and seek help in making these decisions. Administrators should consider the requests being made of faculty members and think about the trade-offs required to satisfy a new reporting requirement or change of software.

One of the worst things that can happen is that we justify the increased demands. “I have to work all the time, but only while I am on the tenure clock.” “I have to prioritize my research for this deadline, but then I will give attention to my teaching.” Such temporary justifications have a sneaky way of becoming permanent reality.

This essay first appeared in InsideHigherEd on February 7, 2019.

It has been a rough few weeks for college presidents. I recently spoke to Adam Harris from The Atlantic about the recent controversies surrounding college presidents and want to share his insightful article for today’s post.

Who Wants to be a College President? Probably not many qualified candidates.

By Adam Harris, The Atlantic

Carol Folt had to make a decision, and none of the options was great. The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill chancellor was caught between a conservative Board of Governors that seemed to favor returning a monument of a Confederate soldier, known as Silent Sam, to the pedestal from which it had been yanked last fall and a student body that heavily favored its permanent removal. The stakes—her job, but also the security of UNC’s campus—were high.

In a letter to the campus community on January 14, Folt announced that she’d made up her mind. She’d be stepping down at the end of the semester, and she’d be taking down what was left of Silent Sam, immediately. “The presence of the remaining parts of the monument on campus poses a continuing threat both to the personal safety and well-being of our community and to our ability to provide a stable, productive educational environment,” she wrote. “No one learns at their best when they feel unsafe.”R

Folt’s choice highlights the tightrope that university leaders walk between ideologically driven boards and their campus constituencies. “When you get right down to it, the relationship with the board—and the extent to which the board is separate from campus, and doesn’t necessarily have a full appreciation for the different views that may exist on campus—that disconnect puts presidents in an incredibly difficult position,” Michael Harris, a professor at Southern Methodist University who has studied the turnover of college presidents, told me. That difficult position may be one that fewer qualified candidates for college leadership are choosing to take. One survey noted that in the past decade, more current college presidents have been sidestepping the traditional pathways to leadership and, anecdotally, even some of those nontraditional candidates have turned down potentially tumultuous positions. But if leaders with higher-education experience won’t do the job, who will?

The Board of Governors was, predictably, furious with Folt’s decision. “We are incredibly disappointed at this intentional action,” Harry Smith, the board’s chair, said in a statement. “It lacks transparency and it undermines and insults the Board’s goal to operate with class and dignity.” The board met the next day and accepted Folt’s resignation, but not effective at the end of the semester. Instead they gave her two weeks.

The accelerated ouster was the culmination of years-long tension at the university between the ideologically conservative board and university leaders. Margaret Spellings, the president of the UNC system, who announced she’d be resigning this year as well, had her own tensions with the board, including over her decision to ask the state governor for help in deciding Silent Sam’s fate. She had been hired after Tom Ross, the former system president, was himself forced out by the board in 2016. The rapid cycle of hiring, resignation, and removal creates a problem for the university. “I don’t know who would want that job right now, given the board and its ideology. And I worry about who they would find palatable enough to put in the position,” Harris told me. “One of the great university systems, and one of the great universities, is going to be damaged by this process.”

That tension between a college’s board and its president isn’t one exclusive to the UNC system. A few years ago, following a string of athletic scandals, Harris wanted to know whether more college presidents had been fired in recent years—or whether they had their resignation accepted on an accelerated schedule. Two years ago, he and Molly Ellis, a graduate student, published what they had found. Yes, the study said, over the past two decades presidents had been getting fired more often. But the why was perhaps more interesting: Boards have always had the responsibility of “hiring and firing” a president, but “there’s a sense of activism among boards now,” Harris said. “Historically there has been a little more deference than boards are willing to give now.”

Of course, it isn’t just board oversight that could make the job of college president seem unappealing. Provosts, or even deans, who may have been groomed for the position might balk at the fundraising and politics associated with it. And these days, many open college presidencies come ready-made with crises. John Engler recently became the second president to leave Michigan State University in one year. The University of Oklahoma’s president, Jim Gallogly, is trying to navigate instances of racism at the institution, notably, a Snapchat video of students wearing blackface and saying the N word that went viral this month, which follows another racist viral video at the institution in 2015. There’s also an ongoing crisis at Baylor University, which is dealing with the fallout from a sexual-assault scandal.

“The number of qualified candidates is probably on the decline due to the job being less attractive, and I think we have boards trying to look for outside-the-box hires that more often than not don’t tend to work out,” Harris said. Those outside-the-box hires could look like Rex Tillerson, the former secretary of state, who was courted to be the next chancellor of the University of Texas system; or like Mick Mulvaney, Donald Trump’s acting chief of staff, who met with the University of South Carolina’s board before ultimately deciding that he was not interested in the position of president.

A board has a responsibility to a university, one that can be corrupted when political ideologies are introduced, Harris said. “That fundamentally damages a university, and that can take generations to recover from,” he said. He pointed to the damage that politics have done to the University of Wisconsin system as an example. It’s a public higher-education system that was admiredby the world, but it’s been hampered by controversy after budget cut after controversy over the past decade, and, in short, it’s suffering. It’s the kind of situation that UNC is hoping to avoid, but one that it, and other institutions, may be on a collision course toward as boards become more ideologically driven—and if qualified candidates continue to shy away from university leadership.