Balancing Time: Managing Priorities While Teaching and Learning – Teach@CUNY 2020 Online Summer Institute

Developed by Mei Ling Chua

This workshop considers the complexities of juggling time and priorities across multiple responsibilities as graduate students and instructors. This asynchronous workshop will utilize a pdf workbook to guide attendees through a series of activities that they can do at their own pace. Attendees will learn strategies for balancing their time between teaching, coursework, research, and other aspects of their lives.

Learning Goals

Consider a range of time management strategies and tactics
Gain a sense of how you are currently spending time

Introduction

As graduate students and instructors, it can often be challenging to figure out how to fit in multiple, sometimes conflicting responsibilities and priorities into the finite hours of a day. While this is often already challenging, trying to do all the things in the midst of the global pandemic along with current widespread protests against police brutality and systemic racism generates additional dimensions.

On top of the added mental and emotional load that can come with widespread uncertainty and heightened calls to action, there are also shifts material factors and resources, including the loss of workspace and access to materials (books, library, computer labs), to the complications of sharing space and childcare all in the same space of “working from home.”

It is important to acknowledge that planning and preparing for distance education online requires a different preparation and cadence, often require more preparation before class sessions to get various materials and platforms ready.

For instance, this workshop is presented as a PDF workbook while also having a digital space for the reflection questions. (https://padlet.com/chuameilingchua/BalancingTime). The rationale for the pdf was to be digitally accessible and allow you to work at your own pace, while also providing the option for printing and writing by hand in case you are tired of screens or prefer it. Padlet was selected to provide a space for sharing and thinking with others asynchronously.

The shifting to different forms of media, asks us to shift our attention in different ways, and that is something that we need to account for when protecting our time, attuning to how we spend our energy and structure our priorities.