Where Does the Time Go with Professor Christine Tulley EP 453

00:00:09
Speaker 1: Hi.

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Speaker 2: I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

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Speaker 3: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Term career goals.

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Speaker 2: We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This episode is airing in April of twenty twenty six.

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Speaker 2: I am going to be interviewing Christine Tully, who is a professor at Fendla University.

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Speaker 1: She came across my radar.

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Speaker 2: Because she did a large study of how academic mothers spend their time using time diaries, looking at all one hundred and sixty eight hours of the week. Came to some interesting conclusions about what people who are successfully building their academic careers while raising kids do, perhaps differently than other people. So I talk with her a lot about that fascinating stuff.

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Speaker 3: I am curious in terms of who comes to you asking for time use advice is academics the highest proportion or what would you say, is like the top five industries that people are in.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, I mean a lot of times it's basic corporate stuff and then people in sort of fields known for longer hours, like the legal world or the accounting world. But I have studied quite a few academic time logs over the years, and I think the challenge for academia, like getting tenure in many cases is the goal, and it's very much an upper out kind of thing.

00:01:54
Speaker 1: And then when you get tenure, that's.

00:01:56
Speaker 2: Like you've arrived, I guess in the academic world, but you know, it takes a lot of research and publications to get there that you have to do that's kind of outside the basic requirements of your job, right, Like you're doing teaching, but that is not all you are doing, right, and so you have to make time for highly speculative projects, for always having projects running, and like articles on submission, because then it takes a while for them to get published. And so you very much have to manage this whole extra thing in addition to your job, and that can be challenging when people need childcare for their kids, or kids get sick or there's kid activities or whatever else, like managing all those requirements that are never necessarily urgent but do have to be done. So that's what I really enjoyed about Christine's study is that she looked at that question and yeah, I'm glad to see.

00:02:48
Speaker 4: What she came up with it.

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Speaker 2: You know, if it's a little loud, I hope nobody's hearing the music. We are here at Vero Beach.

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Speaker 3: Again, I don't think it's going to be loud, So it'll be very interesting to know. If people tell us there's a party on the end of the mic, party the interview will not.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: The interview will not have the party on the end of the mic. So really excited to hear from Christine. So let's hear what she has to say. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Christine Tolly to Best of Both Worlds. Christine, welcome to the show.

00:03:15
Speaker 4: Thank you. I appreciate that.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we're glad to have you. Why don't you tell our listeners a little bit about yourself?

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Speaker 5: That sounds great. I'm a professor of English at the University of Finley, and I work a lot on time management and faculty productivity.

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Speaker 2: Awesome, Well, we are all about productivity here. We love that. And so you wrote a whole book, Productivity, Professionalism, and Parenting in Academia about productivity and time use and things like that. Why don't you tell us about the project. How did you become involved in that?

00:03:45
Speaker 5: Well, you were a little bit of the inspiration for that project, Laura. I should say that I've got interested in time news Diaries somewhat because of the book that you had. I think it was called I Know How She Does It? Hopefully I got the title right. And I was really thinking about how academic mothers like myself are able to balance the teaching, the research, the publication service, and all those sorts of things with children at home. And one of the reasons I chose the project is because not many people are at full professor, which is the highest rank you can get as a professor. It's after you achieve tenure, and it usually requires quite a bit of publication and disciplinary service, including travel to conferences and being a journal editor and all these other things.

00:04:29
Speaker 4: And as you.

00:04:29
Speaker 5: Get higher in the ranks, there are fewer and fewer mothers in that group. And so one of the reasons I wanted to do. The project was to find out, specifically, in these little blocks, how are these women who do have children and have these very high profile, high achieving professor careers, how are they making time to do scholarship because that's the currency that moves everybody in the discipline.

00:04:50
Speaker 2: Well, maybe you could explain to this that people who are not in academia. I mean, there's this stuff you basically have to do. I mean there's the teaching. That's what people sort of know from college and their professors. But that's not just what people get tenure based on.

00:05:04
Speaker 5: True, So what happens in a tenure scenario. So it seems like professor is sort of like being a high school teacher, except maybe older kids, and it doesn't really lay out like that for a.

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Speaker 4: Lot of reasons.

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Speaker 5: One of the things that's nice about being a professor sort of a double edged sword, is that there is time flexibility, meaning you don't teach a high school schedule from say nine am to two pm or something like that. But one of the things that comes with that is that while you're going to classes for say a couple of hours a day or maybe a total of twelve hours a week in addition to that, you're required to serve on university committees, and then the publication part of that comes is part of your way to get tenure, which would be considered sort of lifetime employment unless your university closes. And why universities want you to publish and present your work is that universities are competitive. It's just like any other business. You want to be the best one out there. And the more professors they have publishing and putting workout and getting noted for their research, it's better for these universities. It attracts students for one thing, but it's also great for them just in general for pr and make sure they have sort of the best and brightest minds. But that work, that mental work takes a lot of focus. It takes a lot of quiet time, and if you're an active parent, it's really difficult to sort of juggle things like other professors without children can work forty fifty sixty hours a week. If you're a mom, you still have a school pickup at two thirty like I do today.

00:06:34
Speaker 2: So yeah, and the challenge here is that a lot of the scholarship is not straightforward, like you put eight hours into this and you get X out right. It's that you're coming up with an idea of something you want to research and coming up with a way to do that, and then writing it up and sending it around to various places, some of which may or may not want it.

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Speaker 1: I mean, there's a lot of uncertainty to it, right.

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Speaker 2: This is one of the things the challenge is finding space for uncertain work.

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Speaker 5: That's absolutely true. And it's also the fact that you never know project to projects. So one of the things that I do on the side is I run a writing coaching company called Defend, Publish and Lead for professors that want to publish books and articles. And I'm all of my work now as in faculty productivity and finding out ways to do that. But the number one part of that is that it's a way to deal with that uncertainty. So when we talk with different clients, I have several other professors working with me, and one of the things that we'll do is we say, what are your time realities this semester? What are the time realities of that particular project. Because it's very easy to fall into the trap that just because I've been a professor lass semester it means I have the same time this semester as I did last semester, but that's not true because professor's schedules move around all the time. Like last semester, I might have had a nine am class Monday Wednesday Friday, but now I have a class at eleven Monday, Wednesday Friday. And one of the things with writing and trying to do a lot of that mental work and the very uncertain timeline of how long is it going to take me to do this article, is that you have to have new writing habits every semester. And that's one of the things that I built my company on is just acknowledging that's how it is, that that's the reality. You might have some things that are portable. So for example, you might have a ritual to get yourself in the mood to write. You might have like a special way that you like listen to a say a playlist on Spotify. That's something that I know I do. I just kind of do that as sort of a queue to say, hey, time to sit down and now we're going to work on this article. But I still don't really know at the end of the day, is it going to take me a total of fifty hours to write this article. Is it going to be twenty two? I just don't know. And that's even with wanting to write, being motivated to write, etc. So like for faculty members and especially really busy moms having to write on demand when sometimes you don't feel like it, or you stayed up with a baby all night or something like that, it's a challenge.

00:08:56
Speaker 1: Really absolutely.

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Speaker 2: So tell me about the time diarys you collect, what was sort of the format, and how did you recruit people for this project?

00:09:03
Speaker 4: So they did.

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Speaker 5: They tracked one week and one of the things that I did with them is I opened the project up for eighteen months because busy academic moms, who are my target market, I might get them in the wrong week. I just honestly might get them in the wrong week They've got sick kids, or they just aren't able to pull off completing it. And it really did model the one that you had in your book with the half hour slots in one week. They were allowed to do them. They were open ended diaries, meaning I let them record whatever they wanted in those little blocks. They could write as much as they wanted in the block or as little as they wanted to and then along with the time youse diary, there was a very short questionnaire just about writing habits in general, just some patterns that they might have about writing, and just kind of maybe a look at what I'm not seeing in the diary about how they operated with completing bigger tasks like career advancement type things. How much time do you put in a week working on a CE or applying for a new job or something like that. And of course I'm only getting one week, so I'm not looking at a whole year or how all these hours added up. But I did not put any kind of restrictions on them about what kind of week it was. Almost everybody, though, did fill one out during the academic year. I got very few in the summer, so maybe two out of one hundred, So it just wasn't really, it wasn't that many.

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Speaker 4: It's because everybody has children at home.

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Speaker 5: They're not going to even though it sounds like there's a lot of time in the summer, because we're not in the semester, we're at home with children. So yeah, and then they were able to when they completed the time use diary, they could give it back to me, and they could also make comments. They could do whatever they wanted to in addition to the diary. So I got those, and then I also got emails that would explain things to me, like you'll see that I'm missing two hours on Wednesday. That's because I completely had you know, I had no idea what I did on Wednesday. I really could not remember when I got to the end of the day what I did. So I did see like some of those holes in there. And the other thing that was really interesting is that people will call work different types of things. So I would look and I would see somebody was writing, but I didn't know if they were writing for publication or they were doing some say like bullet journaling in the morning about something. So one of the things I did have to go back to do was to clarify a few of the diaries I wasn't sure about. But most people wrote a lot of things in the entries, and there was a very high level of multitasking in many of those entries.

00:11:31
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to hear a little bit more about your findings after we take our first ad break.

00:11:48
Speaker 1: Well, I am back.

00:11:49
Speaker 2: I'm talking with Christine Tully, who's a professor of English and director of Writing at the University of Finley. She did a massive project looking at academic mothers and how they spent their time. So what did you find to like, what were some of your key findings coming out of this project.

00:12:03
Speaker 5: One of the things that I paid attention to, and I probably got a little bit of pushback on this, is I was really interested in the pocket of mothers that I identified as those that had integrating or integrated scholarly writing habits, meaning they were integrated in the rest of their real life. They made room for scholarly writing, They made room for things like career advancements, They made room for things like reading and research, and they had to do it in creative ways. So I really focused in on this population, which was around a little over a third of the participants. One of the things I wanted to do is really pay attention to the people that weren't doing it, just to see, like, what are some factors that maybe caused them not to have the time. And I do know some things about that population as well, But the way that the book is written is that it says, this is what it took for these women to do this. If they were considered highly productive and completing this. These were the patterns they had. And one of the things I did find is that the majority of them did block out time to write, read research. And this is not maybe something like new or groundbreaking, but how they did it I thought was somewhat groundbreaking. And so how they might do this is that they had a very good time awareness and ability to plan. So I could see evidence of planning all through the week, but also troubleshooting. So in some of the diaries, I would see things like this time that I had to write got interrupted because my husband's car broke down and I had to go drive them to the dealership or something like that. That was an example that was in there, and I would see that the person in the box, maybe two days later would say something like this was time I was supposed to spend grading papers, but I decided that I'm just going to push back my grading timeline so I can make sure I still get my writing completed. And there was a lot of evidence of just that awareness that if I give up my ten hours I have to write per week, then I don't get them back. So they're going to go to like making kids lunches or I'm going to spend extra time scrolling on Instagram. And for the record, there was a very little messing around on phones or anything like that. There really was not. There wasn't that because most of these women were especially in that highly productive category. They were really trying to make sure that they worked on writing at least seven hours a week. And I chose that because there are a couple of books on there that say that faculty should write an hour a day to be productive. So I kind of use that as a baseline, like as any any academic mom actually hitting that seven or above.

00:14:40
Speaker 1: So yeah, and they are.

00:14:41
Speaker 2: It turns out that by being creative and then by defending the time right that they're making it a priority.

00:14:48
Speaker 4: Yes.

00:14:48
Speaker 5: And also the other major SEP finding was that when they were getting it done, almost always it was child free time. So one of the things that happens, I think with a narrative with academic moms is that in this this is something that I would say we're sort of doing to each other, is that there is definitely a population of academic bombs that are like, well, you should be able to write in front of your kids and let them see that you're doing that.

00:15:10
Speaker 4: Kind of work and all that, and I agree with that.

00:15:12
Speaker 5: I mean, I had school aged children, and I've been writing in front of my kids the whole time I've had the career that I've had, but that is not my primary slot to get it done. So one of the things that I really paid attention to is we might think about it like A time is your best time and B time is not. It's okay if you can pull some stuff off, great. The highly productive group always had some child free hours and they were protected and they would do things, like I said, to make sure that nobody interrupted it. So one other thing I saw in there were some evidence of a lot of these women writing early before they started classes, So as soon as they got rid of children after a school drop off, they wrote in those child free hours until they had to be somewhere else. So if they taught immediately, I sort of saw that the flip side of that happened in the afternoon, so it would be as soon as they finished a class and then they had like a block of time. They might have some kind of a reset strategy, which was something that I thought was really great. They might take a quick walk across campus or go get a cup of coffee or something just to reset their brain from teaching mode to writing mode and then they could get into that deep work.

00:16:18
Speaker 1: Excellent. Well, here's another thing.

00:16:20
Speaker 2: I'm the child free hours is important here and one of the issues I've discovered. I've seen this on a couple of academic timelogs. And you just mentioned that you were picking your kids up at two thirty pm. And I'm wondering why. And I've seen this a lot of timelogs, right, that women who have flexible jobs, and in many cases academia, is they can do certain things with childcare. Oh yes, and I have, and so they do for a variety of reasons. I'm sure it's like cultural narratives. It saves money if you don't hire other people, right, Like there's all these things.

00:16:52
Speaker 5: Yeah, No, I would love to say something about this because I will see this. So when I first had child, I had my children late because I was a prof so I did not have my first daughter until I was thirty five years old. So I waited a very long time to do it. And I really at that point, I had just received tenure and I knew I was waiting until I had it, So I was kind of a little bit of a gamble there, but I did. And one of the best pieces of advice I got was from another academic mom. Because I knew I was not going to be able, especially with like a baby, I had to have childcare of some sort. So best piece of advice I received from somebody that is doing this career just said, get the best childcare that you can afford.

00:17:30
Speaker 4: You know, something that you know best you can do.

00:17:32
Speaker 5: You'll probably have to make sacrifices somewhere else to afford it, but she said, but then you know they're in good hands, and then you can do your work and think about it. And she also said it's okay to kind of think about your child when you drive out of the daycare parking lot, but she said, do something before you get to work to kind of remind yourself that now I'm going to work, the reason my child is in daycare is because I'm doing this job. They are great And one of the things that I did I found the best daycare I could.

00:17:59
Speaker 4: I loved it.

00:17:59
Speaker 5: I loved it everything about it. Both my children were in full time daycare the whole time they were of that age before they went to school, and when they went to school, they went to aftercare programs always, so I always had till six o'clock. But what a lot of people don't talk about, even if you can afford daycare and childcare, is that kids age out of it and you still have to get them somewhere. So, for example, as soon as both of my children hit twelve years old, I didn't have a driver, like somebody had to go get them from school. My husband was a dean at the time, still is a dean, so it's just one of those things that it was not practical. I had the flexible afternoon, and so I did try to think about how not to I don't want to say, waste those afternoon hours. And one of the best things that I did once I got into that position where I was out of a childcare option except maybe hiring a babysitter, which didn't really solve necessarily my after school problem. But I would pick up my children and then both of my children were in the kind of in the mode to do homework after school, and that's when I did things like creating my papers, setting up my classes, like things that I didn't necessarily need my highest power brain work, so I always use my child free hours when I wasn't teaching at work to write, but then all the teaching support tasks, we'd have a snack together after school, we'd work for a while, and at that point they were at least twelve, and I have a fifteen year old. We still are in that habit now, so it's at least for now, I think it's a workable strategy.

00:19:27
Speaker 2: It's about matching the right work with the right time so that the child free hours when you're not teaching are blocked out for writing and research, and then those little tasks that everyone has to do get the time when you have more distractions.

00:19:41
Speaker 5: Right, definitely, And that's the same with things like just a dentist appointment. I can't believe the home because everybody's children are going to the orthodontis that requires a ton of appointments and things like that. And so one thing I did see in a lot of these time news diaries is that there was some strategic time news there where they would make sure if they had to have an orthodonist appointment, they still in the afternoon so they could stay with their writing in the morning. And that was something that people would say deliberately. Any other kinds of appointments, they would say, Yeah, I know the Orthodoxic closes at three, but isn't it way better to take the one thirty appointment than the one at nine thirty when I have a big block of time in the morning, because it's just difficult to reach that if you pull a kid out of school and you'd better drive them back and it's just extra commuting time that again is eating those little time blocks.

00:20:26
Speaker 2: Yeah, so we want to be good about defending that time. Well, We're gonna take one more quick ad break and I'll be back with more from Christine Tully. Well, I am back talking with Christine Tully, a professor of English and Director of Writing at the University of Finley. She is the author of a book, Productivity, Professionalism, and Parenting in Academia that looks at time diaries of women in academia, also women in all different stages, but looking particularly at the ones who were making time for that speculative work that is career advancing in academia. Now, you said something earlier that you waited until you got tenure to have your children. Now I'm curious you're thinking on this? Is this what you would advise other women to do, or do you think there's a way that you can still move up while you are in the little kid years. This is a personal choice, so I just want to put that out there. I was comfortable with my choice because I knew that with my partner and I we had already talked about it and we were kind of let's just see what happens. And also he was completing a PhD just a year or two behind me, so that was still in the mix. There was just a lot of things and for a lot of reasons, that was the reasons I chose it. But also because an academic career does require quite a bit of conference travel, I wasn't totally sure which academic position I was going to be in. There's a lot of uncertainty and a lot of moving around. So at least for me, I just I received the PhD at thirty. It takes a long time to get one of those. You're in school for a very long time, so we wanted to have a couple of child free years to just be able to do some of the things that we wanted to do. But I will say this, even after having children, it is still possible to do those high profile things. So, for example, I've had small children the rest of my career because obviously there were younger when I had them.

00:22:25
Speaker 5: So I'm very lucky that my spouse was able to cover me for a week when I was at a conference.

00:22:30
Speaker 4: I would do the same for him. We're both academics.

00:22:33
Speaker 5: I spent a month in London, and I did a lot of travel to London pretty regularly up until the pandemic, where I would be gone, say two three times a year for like two weeks at a time, So even with small children at home, it's definitely doable. It was just one of those things where I'm lucky that my partner was able to We kind of traded back and forth and that was the way to do it. But I do see younger moms able to navigate this career, and partially this is because many academic disciplines have become way more supportive of this. So I am in writing studies, and it's always been okay for moms if they want to bring children to academic conferences. So for example, I just got back from one and there is childcare there, so you have to pay for it, but you can do that. So, for example, if you want to bring your children and then drop them off for a couple hours while you go present a paper and hear some other papers, you could do that, And that is becoming more of the norm, and many of the disciplines that I see, I just for me personally, I would never want to take any of my children into an academic conference because I just.

00:23:37
Speaker 1: I was gonna say, I'm gonna throw out here.

00:23:39
Speaker 4: I wouldn't want to that.

00:23:40
Speaker 2: Leaving the kid with your partner or a grandparent or something might be a better way to I mean, I get if they're like little in nursing and you want to be able to go every three hours and feed them, but like when they're not in that stage anymore, there's no superpower points for having done this, Like they can also enjoy the other adults in their life for a week.

00:23:58
Speaker 5: Oh definitely, sleeping in and having a hotel breakfast. Things like that you never get to do. But the other thing that I noticed, just because I just finished a conference, I was gone for three days presenting, and one thing that still holds true, which I saw I don't know fifteen years ago, is right around that school time when school ends two thirty people come out of the conference rooms and they're all standing in the hallway and it is a lot of academic moms on the phone checking to see what homwerk needs to be done. So there's still parenting tasks happening at these academic conferences. So we're still carrying the mental load. I definitely I don't have to do it as much as I used to have a freshman in high school now, but yeah, I definitely had to do it.

00:24:39
Speaker 2: But it tricks me that it's not even so much the conferences because again we're talking a couple times a year, like we were gone four weeks a year, like for a week long conference each time, which maybe even more than a lot of people would do. It's more the week to weeks stuff that you have to have the discipline, even when you have very little kids, of protecting that time for writing. And that means that all the things that can go wrong, you decide that the scholarship and the writing still has to happen. I mean, if you are a young mom who has kids and you are on the tenure track, that is just what you have to do.

00:25:11
Speaker 4: Definitely.

00:25:12
Speaker 5: And the other thing that I do a lot with the writing coaching that I do at Defend, Publish and Lead. One of the very first questions I will ask when people want to start working with us is I will ask them how many hours they are able to block out realistically, not saying oh, I can have all these hours and they take awayle their sleep hours or something crazy like that. But one thing the first thing I'll say is where's your backup slot? Because everybody's week is going to get interrupted, so I know for me, I always try to write between eight and twelve hours a week. And the reason it's a range is that I know I have to at least clock in eight. If I get to twelve, I can quit. Usually it lands somewhere. And then that also say what your sort of your writing range that you want to do. And in addition to making sure that I get in a least eight, I always have a two hour backup slot somewhere. It might not be two hours together because that's not realistic in some weeks, but I might have say a random hour on Tuesday, a random hour on Friday. I purposely do not block anything in there. I block them out, and I'll sometimes have like just a name like backup in my in my calendar, so nobody else can put a meeting in there. But you know, it's one of those things. That's just the reality that I think a lot of people when they think about time, they don't think, well, I need a backup. And it's just because life does what life does. Cars don't start, kids get sick at school. There's just always something.

00:26:26
Speaker 1: There's always something.

00:26:27
Speaker 2: And I think also the exercise of actually forcing people to find eight to twelve hours in their calendar, I bet a lot of people are, well, the time's there somewhere, or I have a little bit here and a little bit there. It's the act of actually finding eight hours in a schedule where there are other things happening is I'm sure eye opening for many people of just how much time that is.

00:26:48
Speaker 5: And sometimes they don't have it. So that's one of the things that we also work with. I mean, I do this in my own research a lot, but also with the clients that I have.

00:26:54
Speaker 4: Is just to say that's what I.

00:26:57
Speaker 5: Do because writing is the thing I like best about my job. It's always my number one priority. I'd rather give it more time because that's the thing I want to do. Some jobs don't require quite as much writing. Like it's fine if people put out, say an article a year and presented a conference a year, but it's kind of slow going because they don't have that much time in a week. They might have four hours, but there's definitely some productivity experts and there's other podcasts and stuff that say, oh, well, you just devote two hours a week and your writing's going to be amazing. Probably not. It probably won't, Like, so that's sometimes hard. News that I will say is that you want to put out some stuff, I think you probably need at least between four and six hours a week, because it's just the ramping into mental work. And this is true of anybody, like in any other like high profile for Gilbert, you need to think about things and problems solve and like do that kind of mental work. It's difficult to do it on the fly, and especially difficult if you say, well, I have forty five minutes to think about this thing, Probably twenty of those forty five you're just sitting. They're wondering, like what was I doing. So the other thing that I do a lot of in my own work, but also what I'm recommending in a lot of the research that I'm doing is saying to people that you need to touch that writing four times a week, because if you're doing any less than that, every time, you're ramping up again. If you go Monday and then you don't come back to like Friday afternoon, a whole life has happened to you by the time you get to Friday afternoon, So you're giving up again even more time to just ramp back in. And it doesn't matter how good the notes are that you took, because I'm just like, oh, just write a note and you'll know exactly what to do. You're thinking, could have changed, you could have taught a class, you could have talked to a student that changed your mind about something, you read something. So yeah, so it doesn't have to be every day. I think that's unrealistic for a lot of people.

00:28:45
Speaker 2: But hey, three or four times a week, right, three times a week is a habit, as we say around here.

00:28:49
Speaker 1: There you go well and have the backup slots.

00:28:51
Speaker 2: We can see all these tranquility by Tuesday rules are coming into the productive of academia. I love it. But yeah, good thinking and good right does take time. And among the things that I think you got from as long as people who are careful about having enough time, and part of that is of course having enough childcare and not thinking that you are universally flexible. That a job that is flexible, you still need to have some boundaries about it.

00:29:17
Speaker 5: I also got one last piece of advice that'd be really great, I think for other moms that are doing this that I have sort of this weird. I don't want to call it wasted time, because no time is wasted, but just say what we talked about. The kid pick up a lot, and for me, our kid pick up is kind of a mess at our high school and it really requires me to leave work. I live very close. I'm like within ten minutes of the school, so I'm very close, but it really requires me to leave about forty minutes early. The way it's configured, the way it's kind of a mess, the after school practice, there's just a lot of things I've got to get there early to have like something that's not going to mess up the rest of my day. And I actually learned something off these time these diaries, because I was looking at a couple of them, and one of the things I saw is that a lot of these people they do get there early, they get their spot, they shut their car off, and then they do something. So some people are using that time for like a hobby, or they're catching up with family or elderly parents or something. But what I ended up sticking in that slot once I started looking at these academic diaries is I'm actually using that time now for academic reading to set me up for new writing projects. So I've seen some reading on like a subject I know I want to do an article on, say next year, in two years, I'm already doing that reading now because it's sort of the perfect spot.

00:30:32
Speaker 4: I could just shut my car.

00:30:33
Speaker 5: Off, and obviously I'm not so into it that I can't inch my car up in the line if somebody moves, but getting there early enough, I just kind of sit there and it gives me about twenty two minutes a day that I'm knocking out a future projects. So for me, I would not have thought of that. A lot of times I just would sit there and sort of stew the Ugh, this is such a waste of time, you know, I might have like texted some people on my phone or something. But now I'm really happy I'm using it for that, and to me, some times, I'm even more like eager to leave work, so I'm like, ooh, I could actually get twenty five minutes on this thing I want to read, So yeah, excellent.

00:31:08
Speaker 2: And just so people know, if you don't have to be the person picking up the kids every day, you do not have to, right, So yes.

00:31:16
Speaker 5: For temporarily, with my fifteen year old about ready to drive, I'm almost out of that time, almost yeah, And at this point then I would resume more of what I would consider a more normal academic day, where you know, maybe I don't come home to like four thirty.

00:31:29
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:31:30
Speaker 2: Well, and I would say for all listeners here, my kids take the bus. Yes, yes, it's started the bus for a while. Yes, yeah, we haven't done it since COVID, but yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, it's an option. I mean, not everybody, it is an option. Not everybody has to do it that way.

00:31:43
Speaker 1: But yeah, yeah, exactly. Well the bus could be someone's time management friend. All right.

00:31:48
Speaker 2: Well, so Christine, we always end each episode with a love of the week, something that we are enjoying. I will say, after I'm recording this, I'm actually headed to the airport. And there is now a great website for the Philadelphia Airport. That lets you know the TSA times for each gate. It's amazing, which information transparency is just a wonderful thing for managing time because if you don't know, like is it going to be two minutes? Is it going to be twenty minutes? Like this applies different times of like getting.

00:32:17
Speaker 4: To the airport right definitely.

00:32:20
Speaker 2: So knowing that the TSA pre check at Gate A is only three minutes makes me very happy. I mean it's amazing, Like, yeah, how about you, what are you loving this week?

00:32:33
Speaker 5: I was just talking to somebody about this. I like this free online notebook. It's called pen Zu. It's spelled pe n zu. It's just an online notebook. It looks like an old school composition notebook. I think there's like paid bells and whistles if you want to do anything like that. But why I like it. It looks just like a notebook, and it's very clean to record things. And one of the ways that I'm trying to remember, like what are some cool ideas I have for the future, or how do I want to think through through rewording that paragraph. I use that for a lot of just a spot to hold things. I can get it off my phone. I can get it online, but it doesn't have all the extras because it's not a big learning curve to learn anything. I see a picture that maybe I want to use in an article, I just drop it in a little note and I can label it. It's tagged, it's searchable, And sometimes I think just kind of a very simple to use technology tool that does not add a lot of extra time to my life to like manage this tool. I just leave the tab open all the time. Anything I want to do, I read a quick note in there, drop it in there. And for me it's a little bit better than my bad habit of writing everything on post. It's because half the time I can't either read my handwriting or I don't know what that was. For Penza is just easier. And I've actually found a really great way to remember like things about projects. So that's another thing when we think about time or track time, it's really great to see, well, how did I do that last time? Like I've been successful before, how did I do that? I can go back and look at like a lot of these Penzu notes and say, oh, okay, well here's thing that I did with this other project that I could do with this new one.

00:34:03
Speaker 1: So yeah, IX love the week Penzu p E n zu p E m zu.

00:34:07
Speaker 4: It is totally free.

00:34:09
Speaker 5: If you want to buy all the extra things like have a fancy cover on your notebook and all that, you can do that. I have not ben anything, and I've had it probably for six or maybe eight years, a long time, and I've never paid for it.

00:34:20
Speaker 4: So it's a great app.

00:34:21
Speaker 1: Excellent, excellent, Oh Christine, Where can people find you?

00:34:25
Speaker 5: If they want to check me out, they can find me at the University of Finley. They can look me up there, but also they can look at Defend, Publish and Lead and they can find us at that. We also have a weekly podcast so they can listen to writing tips if you're interested in writing tips there. It's also called Defend, Publish and Lead.

00:34:40
Speaker 1: Awesome, Oh Christine, thank you so much for joining us.

00:34:43
Speaker 4: You're welcome.

00:34:44
Speaker 1: Well we are back.

00:34:45
Speaker 3: That was a great interview. And our question comes from a listener interested in how you handle sick kids, especially if there are multiple kids and kids tend to pass their illnesses back and forth. And this person will say struggle specifically handling canceling plans and how many plans to cancel and how far in advance to cancel the plans, So she is interested on how we handle that. Laura, what would you say?

00:35:11
Speaker 1: Yeah?

00:35:11
Speaker 2: I mean I think that obviously, if you need to cancel something because somebody is contagious or something, fever, vomiting, whatever, that's probably something you just you cancel the day of and then maybe give somebody a heads up for.

00:35:25
Speaker 1: The next day if you might need to do something.

00:35:29
Speaker 2: We're talking kid plans here, right, So if you had a playdate scheduled on a Saturday and your kid wakes up with a big fever, you'd probably call the other parents say that we're not going to be able to make it. Let's say you have something for Sunday evenings. Should you cancel that too?

00:35:43
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:35:43
Speaker 2: I think you might send a tax saying hey, just so you know, we're playing it by ear here. Certain things, probably the kid, they don't want vomiting kids around them, or kids who have been vomiting recently. So obviously that if you would definitely cancel within twenty four to forty eight hours, other than are often feeling much better after that.

00:36:02
Speaker 3: Yeah, I think you have to think through all the possibilities, but try not to like get married to any of them, because you just never know. She even mentioned that, like, yeah, sometimes one kid will get sick and then they'll all get sick in a cascade, and other times it's just the one. I have started tracking this and am am puzzled by why some illnesses will hit like three out of five of us or just one kid, or maybe I'll be the only one not to get something. It's like, hmm, very interesting, but it's hard to predict.

00:36:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, Now that said, if we're talking about you do cancel work related plans like this is a different sort of question. And while obviously, if your child is really really sick and needs you, that is one thing, and you would cancel that day and sort of play it by ear for time after that.

00:36:48
Speaker 1: But if we're talking sort of normal.

00:36:50
Speaker 2: Childhood illness, like the kid wakes up with a fever and can't go to daycare that day because I need to be twenty four hours fever free, you probably want to have a system in place where you don't have to that much.

00:37:00
Speaker 1: Work like that.

00:37:01
Speaker 2: You could if the kid needed to be seen somewhere, maybe get them in that morning of urgent care. Get them on antibiotics, and then have somebody who could come take care of them in the afternoon that you could go to work, or then hopefully the next day that person could work, or later in the day they could go to daycare if their fever was gone for twenty four hours.

00:37:22
Speaker 1: Or however that might work.

00:37:24
Speaker 2: But you generally don't want to be in a situation where you are uncertainly going to be missing I mean you're going to be missing uncertain amount of work, like what could be days and days and days as illnesses cycle through your family. Which again we're talking normal illnesses. If somebody is like very very ill, that's a different manner.

00:37:40
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think.

00:37:40
Speaker 3: I mean the mindset is you have to assume this is going to happen and have already kind of thought through like what your backups might be like. And then that can also involve trading off with a partner as well, of course.

00:37:50
Speaker 2: Yeah, but I know one reason both of us wound up with nanny's as our main form of childcare instead of daycare is because there was more ability to again take care of a kid with a low grade fever or a kid who was sick on Sunday throwing up, but like Monday, they're feeling better, And then obviously you might not have sent them to daycare, but nanny could stay with them because she's probably following good hygiene practices and washing her hands and all that are maybe masking or whatever.

00:38:21
Speaker 1: But it just is more reliable in many cases, and.

00:38:26
Speaker 2: There's only so much work you can miss suddenly without winding up.

00:38:32
Speaker 1: With an issue.

00:38:33
Speaker 3: Yes, especially since sounds like there's a bunch, not just one kid, not just one kid, a lot of kids.

00:38:37
Speaker 2: So one of our top advice for people who are in the young kid years and who do want to continue with their careers is to make sure that the near constant childhood illnesses are being treated as.

00:38:50
Speaker 1: A known unknown.

00:38:51
Speaker 2: You know what will happen, and you know what will happen for like, could be like six weeks over the course of the winter. So what is your plan for you not missing six weeks of work?

00:39:00
Speaker 3: And it might not be I get it because for everybody who listened to this, well Mike, it only was sick once a year when they were a little But on average it is pretty normal to get a viral illness like every other month in that age range, which is a lot of time.

00:39:13
Speaker 1: It's a lot of time. Yeah, so that's something to think about.

00:39:16
Speaker 2: If you are using daycare, which we I mean, we love daycare, it's absolutely wonderful. You need a very good backup system. Or if your partner can split the days with you, that's great, but still both of you missing three weeks of work could be a lot, so you might want to have another backup system in place as well.

00:39:33
Speaker 3: Awesome. Well, hopefully that helps, and hopefully this will just be theoretical because you have a very healthy next few months.

00:39:39
Speaker 4: Exactly.

00:39:40
Speaker 1: Well, this has been best of both worlds.

00:39:42
Speaker 2: I've been interviewing Christine Tully of the University of Finley, who is a professor there who's also studied academic time use. Lots of fascinating conclusions about how people make time for the writing and research that is a big part of that jop. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:40:01
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can.

00:40:09
Speaker 2: Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both Worlds Podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.