Something I dislike about being a full professor is the amount of administrative work you have to do - and that you agree to do, even if you don’t have to, simply because you want to do your share. A professor will not normally have any training that’s relevant to this type of thing. You can find lots written about productivity and time management, but to a first approximation, it’s all useless.
The problem is that we do not have systems that scale to handle the volume and variety of information that needs managing. Each class we teach is a project. Each class we will teach in the future is a project. Each committee we run is at least one project. Each dissertation we advise is a project. Each paper we’re writing is a project. You get the picture.
Then there are the communications. And the reference material we need to keep. And the papers we need to store for future reading. It goes on and on.
“Don’t check email in the morning” works for a content creator, but I’m not a content creator, I’m a professor, grad program administrator, and editor. I read three sentences of the articles written by content creators and wonder why I clicked the link. The only thing I’ve found that works is GTD. I don’t read about GTD. I practice it.
It would be easy enough to handle this volume of information if that was my job. The problem with that strategy is that it’s not even part of my job. It’s all on top of my job. The reminders in my calendar and the storage of files for reference and the checking in on my various projects is all internal work. It has no value if I don’t do the underlying work that I’m organizing. I would love to be able to come into my office and work on research for the whole day. If I did that, I’d be spending the entire next day doing all the metawork I didn’t do today.
I have cobbled together a system that lets me get through the day. If AI is ever to be worth anything, it will provide us with a cheap, accessible solution for the incredible amount of metawork we have to do. It will know how to store documents and organize meetings and do all that other crap that I don’t want to do.