Here’s an added wrinkle to the story about the timesheets that are now required of all professors.
We already report how many hours a week we work. It’s done 3 times a year, and it’s broken up by activity. There are 8 or 9 categories of work and you put in hours for each. So now you have to remember exactly what you put in that form and tailor the new daily reporting so that it corresponds to the other reporting. Got it?
Me neither.
It’s all nutso-boom-boom of the highest order.
Clarissa's Blog 
If I had to guess (and it would be an unkind guess, based on prejudice, so perhaps unwise) I would say surmise that whoever is responsible for this new time-sheet system is dishonest and regularly cheats employers of his time.
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When I worked in consulting, we had to account for every half hour so the bean counters knew who to bill for the work we did on their projects. I kept a diary noting the time I spent each day on which projects
Unless your bosses are using the timesheets to get funding, the only justification for requiring detailed timesheets is the kind of micromanaging that depresses morale but boosts the self importance of busy body HR types
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“We already report how many hours a week we work”
Oh look! A dead horse! Good thing I have a whip to hand!
This is also neoliberalism in action. The neoliberal mindset hates, hates, HATES, anything that can’t be quantified and counted and is totally incapable of comprehending qualitative and/or wholistic processes.
And, as I’m sure you realize, you report by category of work because they’re looking for opportunities to cut costs somewhere…. probably by firing office staff and giving you their jobs (for no extra money of course).
Have they started talking about the idea of office staff being rooted in white supremacy yet?
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Time tracking every week is total bullshit, but be glad you only have eight or nine categories. At my university, we are each assigned one random week of the year in which we are supposed to track our activities. The worksheet they give us is a massive table that has at least 30 different categories of work. We can record our time spent on these activities in increments as small as three minutes. I do my best to fill it out accurately, but I think it would be impossible to really be accurate unless you hired someone to just watch you work and track things the entire week.
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Oh God. OK, I’ll stop complaining now.
I don’t know if I should be happy or sad that there are places more insane than mine.
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30! Merciful heavens!
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3 hrs/week: time spent figuring out which of these 30 categories my labor best fits…
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“which of these 30 categories my labor best fits…”
I doubt if they have a category: useless bureaucratic busy-work
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It looks like the category “tracking my time for this time sheet” would be the largest of all.
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The only good thing about our huge timesheet is that there are lots of categories that just don’t apply to my job. It includes a number of things like federally funded research, media appearances, clinical supervision, and consulting for government agencies that are always zero hours. The worst part for me are the categories related to students. If I remember correctly there are lines for advising students, meeting with students in office hours, and communicating with students via email. So where do I put the time if I write an email to a student about an advising issue during my office hours?
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” where do I put the time if I write an email to a student about an advising issue during my office hours?”
Count it three times! And…. if you’re feeling, create a complicated system that justifies that, while making no sense whatsoever and hopelessly confuses the amounts of time, and submit with the time sheets with the suggestion that everybody adopt it…. for the sake of convenience because it made your work so much easier!
“I divide student work into decimals. Then I multiply by three and then divide that by two (after factoring in ‘planning for working with students’ which, to be honest, takes up a non-trivial part of my work days. So… in this case the email took four minutes to write but six minutes to plan so I add those to 10 minutes and then multiply by three 30 minutes divide that by two for 15 minutes and count that as .25 hours of combined work which is actually .33 of the academic hour which is 45 minutes. The .08 hours left are assigned to service, of course.”
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This would be a very simple programming script to write.
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