My plan for this blog post was originally going to be something thematic related to my field of work and research. However, due to an illness that I was still recovering from over the past two days, I didn’t have time to prepare the actual content that I wanted to cover. That’s also because today was Wednesday, and Wednesday is special in our college (German: Fakultät). On Wednesday, we have meetings, which means we don’t get much work done on actual content. In a few words, I wanted to describe what a typical Wednesday looks like for me. Perhaps you’ll see why I sometimes struggle with academia undertaken in this fashion.

• 6:25: Leave the apartment to catch the bus (I read The Economist at the bus stop and on the bus)
• 6:45: Arrive in my office (usually only the cleaning crew is there when I arrive, sometimes other custodial staff, as was the case today)
• 6:45-8:00: review material for dissertation candidates from our college (I did the required reading before Christmas)
• 8:00-8:20: breakfast
• 8:20-9:00: correspondence (usually email, sometimes Skype or snail mail)
• 9:00-10:00: generate final exams for students
• 10:00-10:20: break for stretching with a quick stroll to the bakery to pick up something for lunch (I didn’t have room in my bag to bring something from home)
• 10:20-11:15: plan conference attendances and possible paper topics (this is a special matter only at this time of year)
• 11:15-12:00: meet with the dean to preview topics for faculty council meeting next week
• 12:00-12:15: eat my sandwich
• 12:15-13:00: meet with the committee for finance and personnel (planned to last until 14:15, but we finished early)
• 13:00-14:15: spontaneous meeting with my boss to plan and strategize for an important meeting next week and layout our exams schedule (we also caught up on how the holidays were)
• 14:15-15:15: doctoral committee (was planned to go until 16:00, but due to an unforeseen paucity of contentious issues, we finished early)
• 15:15-16:15: further correspondence, refresh the to-do list for the rest of the semester
• 16:15: catch the bus home (and continue reading The Economist)

From this list, it should be pretty clear that I accomplished no substantial academic work or research today. Without a doubt, much of this is important work for the future of or college, but some of it is also clearly planning to plan. In my opinion, this presents one of the great hurdles in academic life these days. All of the time that I spend in meetings is time that I am not spending reading, thinking, writing, publishing, preparing lessons, advising students, or teaching. Germans call this akademische Selbstverwaltung (“academic self-administration”), and it features prominently in the scholarly landscape here. I’d be particularly interested in hearing how this is in other academic cultures. Is it similar?

The schedule I described (generally) only reflects Wednesdays. Nonetheless, it describes a typical Wednesday, which still represents 20% of my working week (and the working week of everyone else in all of these committees). My hope is that we can someday move some of this online (many meetings could have been an email) or at least move them to rooms that don’t have chairs. (I assume if everyone had to stand, meetings would go much faster. We could even make them go faster still by holding them while walking.)

That’s all I have time for now, since my daughter just got back from her play-date and is looking to catch up with me.