The Third Bit

Where the Time Goes

OK, so what am I doing if I’m not coding?

1. Teaching: at least two full days per week during term, and about half a day a week right now (because as I found out last year, if you don’t do enough prep over the summer, your fall is hell).
2. Reading: at least half a day a week, maybe more. This includes other people’s blogs and technical (journal) articles. The former are usually more informative than the latter.
3. Giving talks: about two days a month once you include prep and travel time.
4. Writing book reviews and opinion pieces: probably about the same.
5. Writing a “CS-1 in Python” book: probably averaging half a day per week right now.
6. Herding cats kittens: a day a week—a day and a half if you include grad students.
7. Writing grant proposals: variable, but I’d guess it has averaged at least two days a week since last May. Three small ones have come through, along with contributions from the Jonah Group and Idee (thanks, folks), but NSERC and a couple of other companies have turned down all the larger (i.e., more time-consuming) ones.
8. Organizing stuff: a day and a half per week. This includes student lunches with people from industry, DemoCamp, special issues of journals, meetings to introduce local companies with researchers in the department, networking on behalf of my grad students, etc. I could cut a lot of this, but I honestly think this is where I add most value.
9. Departmental responsibilities (such as preparing a proposal for a Professional Master’s in Computer Science): has been highly variable; probably averages half a day a week.
10. Keeping up with email: I send roughly 2500 email messages a month, and read at least three times that number; I think this takes 2-3 hours per day, much of it outside office hours.
11. Research: half a day per week, tops. I’m including everything from design discussions for DrProject to writing “real” academic papers in this category.
12. Socializing with colleagues: half an hour to an hour a day. Coffee-room discussions are where most small issues around teaching and organizational matters seem to get hashed out.

As you can see, there’s not a lot of room in their to learn Dojo…