A study of work habits of 30 academics at Boise State University showed that:
Faculty participants spent 17 percent of their work week in meetings – including those with students – and 13 percent of the day on email (both for research and with students). So combined, he says, 30 percent of faculty time “was spent on activities that are not traditionally thought of as part of the life of an academic.”
About one-third of work-week days – 35 percent – was spent on teaching, including 12 percent for instruction and 11 percent on course administration, such as grading and updating course webpages.
Just 3 percent of the work-week day was spent on primary research and 2 percent was spent on manuscript writing.
As I always say, people will do anything, and I mean anything at all, including attend useless meetings and dawdle with email and “update websites” all day long just to avoid doing research. I used to be one of them but then I took care of this problem.
I will now record everything I do in a week to compare my own productivity numbers to these. Uncharacteristically, I even have a meeting this week, so something will appear under “Service.”
Clarissa's Blog 
I agree with you that faculty–including myself–do distract themselves from research. But meetings aren’t necessarily something faculty attend to distract from research–they are most often required. I spend a minimum of 3 hours a week in required meetings. Sometimes I am in required meetings for 4 hours a week. I blow off these meetings occasionally but they are technically requirements of my job. So you are very lucky that you have so few meetings to attend each week! (I hate meetings myself.)
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And I’m sure they are also contractually obligated to update the course website for 6 hours a week. I wonder what that website is called, Facebook or Twitter? 🙂 🙂
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I’ve managed tons of web pages for my job. Oh, right, and built them in the first place. Not course websites, university ones. Because of this we were able to advertise courses, major, minor, not be cancelled; expand study abroad, and much more. It took a long time, yes, coding is tricky and making things legal for ADA and so on takes skill. You look down on this, I am sure, but you also complain when this kind of thing does not work. The bottom line is that someone has to get it done.
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So much money goes to pay administrators and support staff, that it’s not too outlandish to ask them to fulfill their duties so that I can do mine. I also complain when the campus toilets are not clean, but it isn’t like I’m planning to clean them myself.
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This is a faculty, not an administrative or secretarial job. And program design is definitely a faculty job, as is outreach and publicity (for academic programs, not the university as a whole).
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We ave a humongous outreach, recruitment and publicity offices staffed by crowds of very well-paid people. I don’t believe it is my duty to do their jobs or that it should be.
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Emailing is often directly related to teaching. I’m answering emails from my students a lot of the time. If email is related to courses, etc… then how is it not time traditionally thought of as related to the primary academic mission? This is worded in a very confusing way.
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Students email me mostly to offer excuses for why they won’t come to class. I don’t even read these emails, let alone answer them. Also, in the online course students submit assignments through email but that’s obviously teaching.
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Clarissa, I’d be curious to know how you got rid of this problem. Have you written about this before?
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You want there to be more tenure track jobs and various things taken care of, but you look down on the work it takes to get these things done and are not willing to do it yourself — and it is work that is, traditionally, faculty work.
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Which work do I look down on? Website maintenance? I’m not qualified to do it. I do what my contract specifies and the IT people should take care of software maintenance.
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It’s also bizarre that attending meetings is not thought of (by whom?) as part of “activities that are … part of the life of an academic.” My father was an academic from the 60s on and he certainly had meetings to go to. Emailing takes the place of phone conversations I no longer have, so there’s that also. At a pre-email era job I had we spent a lot of time on the phone in the evenings. I don’t think the reason Boise State professors don’t spend more time on research has anything to do with meetings or email.
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” I don’t think the reason Boise State professors don’t spend more time on research has anything to do with meetings or email.”
– And that’s my point exactly.
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At my SLAC, people had this compulsion to meet and not only meet, eat — everything had to involve a food ritual. I will say one thing for this, at least it was pleasant, if time consuming. I do know a kind of low level administrator who likes to meet and meet and meet for nothing, but I have never met a faculty member who does pointless meetings like that. Between what you say about your campus and what my friend who worked there earlier says, it is really really bad, has really really unprofessional faculty, for the most part. I am sorry.
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“Between what you say about your campus and what my friend who worked there earlier says, it is really really bad, has really really unprofessional faculty, for the most part. I am sorry.”
– ????? My university is phenomenal. I couldn’t possibly be happier with my work environment and the conditions. I have no idea what you even mean by this.
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