Around or against the clock: time management tips for higher education teachers

Academics often come to higher education as subject matter experts, not teachers (guilty as charged). With little knowledge of curriculum or pedagogy to draw on, new educators can find designing courses, units and lessons to be a fraught and time-intensive process.

Here are five hard-earned tips to help you better manage your time as a university or further education teacher.

Learn your craft

Knowing why you are teaching what you are teaching, learning how to organise a curriculum that makes narrative sense and how to work towards student-centred outcomes makes, in my experience, the whole process of teaching easier and faster. And it will save you from repeating the same old ineffective lecture model that you may already know well. A clear process will also remove the need to reinvent the wheel every time you encounter a new subject area.

• Read more: managing time, tasks and well-being in academia
• How to survive the academic treadmill
• Advice for winning at the part-time ‘game’ in academia

The best mistake I ever made in academia was to volunteer to cover an Education 101 class 10 years ago. I knew nothing about the subject and was lucky to stay even a page ahead of the students. But, boy, was it worth it. Almost overnight, I became (far from) expert in social constructivism, backward design and constructive alignment. I left that classroom knowing that I didn’t know much but also knowing that I needed to know more.

From there, I enrolled in a graduate certificate in tertiary education. Many universities offer these free to their staff – if that’s the case for you, grab the opportunity with both hands.

Plan your lessons

A very few educators can wing their way through lectures, tutorials or workshops. For the rest of us, careful planning ensures that the subject we are teaching (and each session within that) has a strong narrative. Things don’t just happen one after another in the classroom; they happen for a reason, each building on the previous and setting up the next.

A carefully planned approach also means we are less likely to either run over time (and not finish the lesson properly or disrupt students’ timetables) or run short of material.

Get real about how much time you have

I ask new students to complete a weekly planner, noting everything they do: sport, recreation, sleep, gaming, attending classes, canoodling with partners and so on. This helps them identify how much time, and when, they will have to study and work on assessments, readings and such.

Careful planning – weekly, semester and yearly – can help academics balance their workloads, too. Academic work can be amorphous; outside classroom teaching hours, our time is often our own to do with what we will. This can lead to procrastination, procrasti-baking -washing, -gardening and so on, and to a lack of awareness of how much time we do have to get things done.

Academic work often spills over and out of the nine-to-five, too. Midweek may be quiet, but the weekend could be filled with marking that needs to be turned around quickly. The more aware we are of our time, the better able we are to find time for the things we need, and want, to do.

Get to know those who can help

Make it your business, during quiet times, to get to know the people whose job it is to answer questions that are outside your purview as an educator. Students may come to you to ask about enrolment, fees, accessing university systems, how to transfer in and out of courses and so on. Some students may need help with literacy, numeracy and accessibility.

You still have to deal with them in the name of student support and retention. However, contacting the people and bodies whose job it is to support students beyond the classroom and organising effective solutions for yourself and students can take a lot of your time. It makes sense to know how to direct queries and where to seek help.

As an academic, you’re part of a much larger and often much better-qualified and prepared team – make the most of that.

Avoid perfectionism

It can be tempting, as an educator, to get everything right, all at once and on the first attempt. We want our classes to be successful, our student feedback to be perfect. But we often waste a lot of time finessing that which can be better learned by doing.

My first dean (wise woman) told me that it takes three deliveries of a unit to iron out the wrinkles. So expect errors, expect that you’ll get things wrong or want to make adjustments. If you’ve got a good lesson-planning system, it’ll be easy for you to record these moments so that you can act on them in review. Plan for continual reflection and ongoing work to improve units – don’t do it all at once. Take your time.

The sometimes precarious nature of academic work means we often feel inclined to say “yes” to everything we are asked to do; it’s easy to overload in the hunt for promotion, tenure or publication. As a freelancer first and an educator second, it’s taken years for me to feel comfortable saying “no” to anyone in regard to work, but it’s been a journey worth the effort. Setting clear boundaries and expectations with management and students can be a confronting and uncomfortable process, but doing so will mean you are more able to manage your time and so work more comfortably and productively with both parties.

John Weldon is associate professor in the First Year College at Victoria University, Australia.

If you would like advice and insight from academics and university staff delivered direct to your inbox each week, sign up for the Campus newsletter.