Invisible work

I have been on strike for much of the past four weeks – at least notionally. The truth is more nuanced than that, because I don't actually want my students and other junior colleagues to be disadvantaged by this action. I am, after all, fighting for the future of university education: their future. Yet I do want senior management and the powerful people who make decisions about our work and our pensions to be aware of the strength of feeling, as well as the rational arguments, around the pensions issue.

There have been some excellent analyses of the problem, by academic experts from a range of disciplines. Here are some of my favorites (in no particular order):

• Dennis Leech is an Emeritus Professor of Economics at Warwick, who questions and analyses the basis for the argument that the superannuation scheme is in crisis. More recently, he has argued that it is not in crisis and there isn't even an argument for increasing contributions.
• The same point is made by Ewan McGaughey, who addresses the same issue, but more from a governance angle.
• Mary Margaret McCabe argues against the commodification of education. 
• Jason Hickel echoes this, observing that this is no longer just about pensions (if it ever was), and highlighting broader discontent about the "uberisation of lecturers": if UK academics are meant to be world-leading researchers and educators, with correspondingly awesome professional staff enabling that, working with excellent students who value real education, how come we all now feel so undervalued and dispensible? Whatever one's views of the proposals he makes, they reflect huge discontent and disillusionment with the system of higher education in the UK.
• An anonymous academic reflects on students' responses to the action: so many students see that they are participants in an educational process, not just passive consumers of teaching from plug-and-play teachers.
• John Foot, a Professor from Bristol, notes how little "the university" seems to care about its staff or students. 

As well as standing on picket lines, marching, discussing the issues around the strike, and not doing work that involves crossing said picket lines, I have continued to do a substantial amount of work. It has made me think more about the nature of invisible work. Bonnie Nardi and Yrjo Engestrom identify four kinds of invisible work:

1. work done in invisible places, such as the highly skilled behind-the-scenes work of reference librarians; to this I would add most of the invisible work done by university staff, out of sight and out of hours.
2. work defined as routine or manual that actually requires considerable problem solving and knowledge, such as the work of telephone operators; don't forget completing a ResearchFish submission or grappling with the Virtual Learning Environment or many other enterprise software systems.
3. work done by invisible people such as domestics, (and sometimes Athena SWAN teams!)
4. informal work processes that are not part of anybody’s job description but which are crucial for the collective functioning of the workplace, such as regular but open-ended meetings without a specific agenda, informal conversations, gossip, humor, storytelling.

The time for (4) has been sadly eroded over the years as demands and expectations have risen without corresponding rises in resourcing.

To these, I would add the invisible work that is invisible because it is apparently ineffectual. E.g., I wrote to our Provost about 12 days ago, but I have no evidence that it was read; it certainly hasn't been responded to in any visible way (reproduced below for the record).

The double-think required to simultaneously be on strike while also delivering on time-limited commitments to colleagues and students has forced me to also develop new approaches to revealing and hiding work. For example, 

• I have started logging my own work hours so that the accumulated time is visible to me, and although I've been working way more than the hours set out in the Working Time Directive, I'm going to try to bring the time worked down to comply with that directive. This should help me say "no" more assertively in future. That's the theory, at least...
• I have started saving emails as drafts so as not to send them "out of hours". There are 21 items in my email outbox as I type this; I'll look incredibly productive first thing on Monday morning!

And finally, I will make visible the letter I wrote to the Provost:

Thank you for this encouraging message last week. You are right that none of us takes strike action lightly. We all want to be doing and supporting excellent teaching, research and knowledge transfer, but we are extremely concerned about the proposed pension changes, and we have found no other way to be heard.

I’ve worked in universities since 1981 and this is the first time I have taken strike action. The decision to strike has been one of the harder decisions I have taken in my professional career, but I think the impact of the proposed pension changes on our junior colleagues (and hence on the future of universities) is unacceptable, and I am not persuaded that a DB scheme is unaffordable.

Please continue to work with the other university leaders to find an early resolution to this dispute. UCL isn’t just estates and financial surplus: as you say, it’s a community of world-leading, committed people who work really hard, and who merit an overall remuneration package that is reflective of that. That includes pensions that aren’t a stock market lottery for each individual.

I’d like to be in my office meeting PhD students and post-docs next Monday morning, and in a lecture theatre with my MSc students on Monday afternoon. Please do everything in your power to bring this dispute to a quick resolution so that there’s a real possibility that “normal service” can be resumed next week.

Give me a little more time...

A few weeks ago, one of our PhD students, Amir Kamsin, was awarded 3rd prize in the student research competition  at CHI for his research on how we manage our time, and tools to support time management. Congratulations to Amir! The fact that it has taken until now to comment shows how difficult I am finding it to do things in a timely way. Many books and blogs (e.g. ProfSerious') have been written on how we should manage our time; it's difficult to even find the time to read them!

Some years ago, Thomas Green and I did a study of time management, and concluded that "what you get is not what you need". In that paper, we were focusing mainly on diary / calendar management and highlighted important limitations of online diaries, most of which are still true today (e.g. ways of marking meetings as provisional; including travelling time as well as meeting time; and making entries appropriately interpretable by others). In contrast, Amir is focusing on "to do" management. There are many aspects to his findings, of course. Two of them particularly resonate for me...

The first is how much of our time management is governed by emotional factors. It has long been a standing joke in my research group that you can tell when someone is avoiding doing a particular (usually big) job because they suddenly get ultra-productive on other tasks. The guilt about the big job is a great motivator! But I've become increasingly aware that there are even very small tasks that I avoid, either because I don't know where to start or because the first step is daunting. I've started to mentally label these as "little black clouds", and I'm gradually learning to prioritise them before they turn into big black clouds -- not necessarily by doing them immediately, but by committing to a time to do them. No "to-do" management systems that I'm aware of makes emotional factors explicit. Even their implementations of "importance" and "urgency" don't capture the fluidity of these ideas in practice. There's much more to managing tasks and projects than importance and urgency.

The second is how much "to do" information is tied up in email. Not just simple "hit reply" to-dos, but also complex discussions and decisions about projects. There are tools that integrate email, calendars and address books, and there are to-do management systems with or without calendars. But I really want a project management tool that integrates completely seamlessly with both my email and my calendar. And is quick and easy to learn. And requires minimal extra effort to manage. Anyone know of one?