To track my work I created a number of categories for types of work that I conducted. Table 1 gives a summary of these. For every working day I then noted down how many hours I had spent on each. Note: these are approximate estimates, i.e., I don't have the time to account for everything to the exact minute. I have then investigated my working week and the types of work conducted (continues below Table 1).
Disclaimer: these are my personal experiences and may not represent workload/experiences at other universities or even different departments in the same university.
Category/Abbreviation |
Description |
Adm |
Emails and administration |
App |
All kinds of application: grant, fellowships, jobs. |
Bre |
Time spent not working during working hours. Time between coming home and starting work again in the evening also counted as a break. |
Coll |
Research collaboration, internally and externally |
Conf |
Conference attendance and preparation. This includes professional development, i.e., non-research conferences/workshops. |
Fiel |
Fieldwork actual and preparation |
Mark |
Marking |
Meet |
Meetings, skype calls |
Out |
Outreach, open days, presentations, and blogging |
Pap |
Paper writing |
Res |
Actual research (that not conducted during fieldwork). |
T Del |
Teaching delivery in whatever guise it takes |
T Prep |
Preparation for teaching, e.g., writing lectures. |
UG S |
Undergraduate supervision, including personal tutees, dissertations, office hours. |
PG S |
Same as above but for postgraduate |
Oth |
Anything else which isn't described above but may be expected as an academic, such as paper reviews |
- Total hours worked: 669 hours
- Average hours worked per week: 41.8 hours
- Average hours worked per day: 8.3 hours
- Longest duration worked in a week: 59 hours
- Longest duration worked in a day: 16 hours
I can then take a look at how this was distributed throughout the term, see Figure 1. In general, student presence, which was mainly between the weeks 5 and 14, was accompanied by an increasing workload week on week. There was a large range in my hours worked per week, peaking at almost 60 hours in Week 13, which was mostly associated with marking. On average I worked 6.8 hours per week more than my contracted hours.
- Teaching preparation: 34%
- Marking: 19%
- Teaching delivery: 10%
- Undergraduate supervision: 8%
- Administration: 7%
- Hours allocated using workload model: 336 hours
- Actual time spent: 481 hours.
- There doesn't appear to be any differentiation between writing new lectures and delivering existing lectures.
- A lecture may take an early career academic longer to write than a tenured professor who has been doing it for >20 years.
- An underestimation in allocated time means that your workforce may be busier than you realise.
So there we go, a snapshot look at life as a University Teaching Associate.