Academic Productivity

Matthew Cornell at Matt’s idea blog has just posted a piece on a pilot study he is running that seems very relevant:

I recently completed a small pilot funded by the office of new faculty development at a large university. I approached the director to see if there was interest, and to figure out a way to test the effectiveness of the Getting Things Done methodology for new faculty. We came up with an informal program in which I would work with three self-selected early faculty members, coach them in the method, and hopefully give the director enough information to decide if the results merited a larger follow-on effort.

The faculty were professors from three very different departments - Nursing, Japanese, and Communication Disorders - and each had different styles in how they managed themselves at their work. One thing they all shared, however, were the common challenges facing new faculty, who essentially act as entrepreneurs. For example, they have to:

• Obtain grants for research,
• Plan and perform original research,
• Advise and guide students,
• Teach classes (prep, grading, etc),
• Provide service to the community, etc.
• all the while working to get tenure (there’s a reason it’s called the “tenure track“)

About the author: Jose Quesada wanted to be a matador, an acrobatic pilot, or a painter, but found those activities not demanding enough, so he chose an academic career. He secretly hopes to orchestrate a system that produces papers without any human intervention (particularly, his).

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This entry was posted on Sunday, December 17th, 2006 at 6:34 am and is filed under Blog, Resources, Time management, Writing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.