work habits

Last term I usually spent four days a week on campus. Tuesdays and Thursdays were teaching days which pretty much meant that prepping, teaching, marking drafts of papers, working with students during office hours, and e-mailing occupied all of my time. Fridays were meeting and miscelaneous catch-up days: Humanities Department meetings, English Discipline meetings, junior faculty writing group meetings, more e-mailing, more marking papers, letters of recommendation, too much web surfing, some reading, a little bit of writing.

That left two writing days, one of which I would usually spend at home and one at the office. Not a bad system in terms of productivity. I wrote a full draft of an article and revised twice thanks to help from the aforementioned writing group. (Just about ready to mail it out.) Also wrote three encyclopedia entries and got them sent out. Worked on 4Cs presentation. Worked on planning two future writing projects: one article on representations of race and class in several recent Detroit memoirs (work done: lots of reading and note-taking, zero writing aside from a few blog posts), and one more extended research project centering on a Wayne State-run "freshmen/community college" initiative from the 30s (work done so far: located awesome archive, began planning out possible generative themes). Refereed several articles. Two writing days: one at home, one at school.

That's more output than most semesters back at Miami, but I never really found a groove in terms of weekly schedule. Also, I was told time and again by colleagues here at UM-D that they were surprised I spent so much time on campus. A common UM-D trope is: "we're a commuter school...that goes for students as well as faculty." The culture of the place fosters (nay, explicitly encourages) working at home. That was NOT the case at Miami. Not that I feel pressured to follow this trend necessarily, but I'd like to experiment with more working at home. Makes sense: I spend just over an hour each day on the commute, and more gas $$ that I'd care to admit. But I have to work against the urge to do laundry, take Hyatt on a few extra walks, and spend practically half the day cooking. So my new practice this term: two days at home, writing, Mondays and Wednesdays.