Readers, please note: In the interest of providing information on this subject, we are posting the raw transcripts from the FCRC CRA-W workshop. This is an unedited transcript, but still should provide you with background information of use. The edited transcripts will be completed by spring 2000.


Panel: Time Management, Family & Quality of Life
5/1/99
2:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m.


Jan Cuny: I'm Jan Cuny. Welcome to the last session here on time management, family and social issues. We've had three panelists and I'll let each one of them kind of introduce themselves because this panel typically has had kind of personal information about how we have managed our careers and so we'll just include that as we along.

I'm Jan Cuny from the University of Oregon. We have Carla Brodley from Purdue University and Judith Klavens from Columbia University who will also be talking. So this is a less formal session than we've had so feel free to interrupt with questions, if you have them.

This is a session that I've done before and when -- the first time I organized it I asked everybody who was on the panel to write down everything they did the day they got the e-mail. And so we had schedules of everybody. And so I've kept the one that I generated assuming this was kind of a random day in my life. And here is what I did that day. If you'll notice -- well, it was around February, Valentine's Day, so that's not typical but it's typical that I end up doing something with my kids. If you notice, I started at 7:00 in the morning and this was because at this point I had a husband was a stay-at-home dad and this was wonderful and I got to go to work real early. So I went to work early and I worked on a mid-term and I finished a lecture, I answered e-mail, and I gave a lecture, and then I had office hours. I have never, after all these years of teaching, been able to convince my students to show up during my office hours. Now there's an eversion. It's like I've announced the hours they should never be in my office. So I always plan on doing something else during my office hours in case they don't show up and in this case I wrote a letter of recommendation for someone.

Annette was a graduate student who actually showed up right after my office hours to talk to me about some crisis. I, again, answered e-mail, I worked an NSF review, I made travel arrangements, I had a quick lunch, and then I taught another class. And the second class was interesting because normally I only teach one class at a time. But six months before some undergraduate women had been in my office and had said, you know, we really need a class in research in computer science that really focuses on women and wouldn't that be great. And I said, yeah, yeah, yeah, and I agreed to do it. I will get to my next slide, which is "learn how to say no." You know, this was a whole class that I was doing just for the fun of it and it was fun, but it took an enormous amount of time. So this was a volunteer class. And then I had a faculty meeting and then it was Valentine's Day and my son, believing I was a computer scientist, had given me a disc with his Valentine's on it I was supposed to print on a color printer, which I was so unsuccessful at that I took it to Kinko's at the end of the day. On the way to the basketball game I dropped the Valentine's off at Kinko's who printed them.

I then got home and I have three kids and they're all involved in sports so after we got home we didn't have dinner until 7:00 and then the kids had various homework, do the Valentine's, and sports practices. So we drove around to all that and got home from that and got the kids in bed around 9:30, and then I worked again from like 10:00 to 11:00 on student evaluations. And the interesting thing about this day is while not every day includes this same stuff, a lot of my days look like this. And there's nothing useful that I've done this day except maybe teaching. But the rest of the work related things are kind of things that you have to do but they don't add up to anything. None of this advanced my career in any way or met any of my long term objections. But I work pretty hard, you know. I worked pretty hard. I worked from 7:00 in the morning until 11:00 at night, pretty much continuously.

So I'll open this with these are the kind of days you want to avoid. You want to really think about what you're doing so that you don't end up doing things like this. I'm not entirely successful at avoiding these. I actually wrote up one of what I did one day this week and it was even worse.

So what I'm going to do is I've been organizing and working on these time management sessions, although I'm not an expert on time management, for a number of years and I've listened to all the other panelists. So I have the collective wisdom. So what I'm about to tell you is kind, do as I say don't do as I do. These are not all things that I do but they're all things that I believe that if I did do them it would be a good thing.

I think that there are three possible strategies. I think those are the only options that you have here. So what I'd like to do is to talk a little bit about each one of these. Do less, I think, is the most important because it's got the biggest impact. Right? If you could just get rid of some of the things you're doing, that would be the biggest help. So my tips for doing less are, first of all, to prioritize. If you look at any book on time management, the first thing you say is you have to have priorities. In order to have priorities you have to know what your long term and short term goals are so you should actually spend some time thinking about this. If you are pre-tenure, you've heard the talks about tenure and what you need to do while those are your long term goals. And what are you going to do towards those this week, this quarter, this year? And you should have those lists in mind and they should help you determine how high a priority anything that you have to do would be. Everyone of you will be asked to do enough to fulfill three lifetimes. You know, you cannot possibly do all of the good things that you would like to do and are interested in doing and think are valuable and worthwhile in the time that you have. So you have to say no and before you can say no you have to have priorities. So I would spend a lot of time thinking about what your priorities are and when you're deciding whether or not to do something or how much time to invest in it or how good a job to do, then make sure that you consider your long term priorities.

The next one is learn how to say no politely and there's a couple of different aspects of that. First, you can't say no to everything, obviously, so you have to say yes to the things that fulfill your long term and short term goals and further your career. Everything else, though, you should say no to as much as possible. You have to be a good departmental citizen. You can't say no to everything but you don't have to do everything the department suggests either. And so I think you really have to pay attention to saying no. And this is something that every person that you have met in any one of these panels is terrible at. Right? The very fact that they're here indicates that they can't say no to things that are good and worthwhile things to do. And so you really have to practice this and become good at it.

Someone this morning talked about being selfish with your time. You need to be selfish with your time. I'm really terrible at it. If you ask me to do something this week, I will certainly say no because I know that this week is really crowded. But if you asked me to do something in six months, I will say yes because it always sounds like you could fit one more thing in in six months, certainly. So be really aware. And some of my tips for saying no are, first of all, never answer right away. Never tell people yes right away. Say, could I think about that and get back to you, and then kind of evaluate it off-line and see whether it makes sense for you to do. Never kind of get guilted into saying yes. If you get a paper to review, for example, if you don't really want to review it or you look at it and it's not really relevant for you to review, then say no but say no in a nice way. That's what I mean by saying no politely. Don't wait two months and then say, no, I don't think I'll get to this. Send the paper back immediately. Say, I can't do it. Here are three or four other people in the field who might be able to help you. And then people are really happy that you've done and given them some other suggestions and some other places to go.

If you are pre-tenure, you can certainly say, I'm really focusing on my research this quarter. I just don't have time to do that. And people will respect you for doing that. So I think you should take advantage of that and say no politely but be careful to say no often and make sure that anything you do decide to do, you do really well. It's much better to do one or two things really well than to try to do 15 things and be way over committed and do a sloppy job.

And then the last tip for doing less is to delegate. I've always had the opinion that it was kind of elitist or tacky to ask somebody to do something for you that you could do for yourself. This is a bad idea. You know, your secretaries are there to help you so ask them to do things. Be incredibly nice to them because they will save you if they want to over and over and over again and do lots of really good stuff for you. So use your secretaries. Have your graduate students help with things. Ask them to review papers for you. Ask them to proofread your grant proposal or help you write the grant proposal. This is all part of training and they should be doing these things anyway. So ask them to help you out with things.

I have undergrad work study students. These people are dirt cheap. I pay them almost nothing. I pay them about a dollar 50 an hour and they work for me and they do anything. And some of them are really competent and have done mailings for me and have done -- designed posters for me and have done some really nice work for me. So take advantage of anything you have.

And the last thing I put here is spouse because I also had this vision that I was supposed to be the perfect mother and I was supposed to do everything; take the kids to the doctors and all this kind of stuff but actually my spouse can take the kids to the doctors too and so, you know, delegating responsibility and letting people do other things for you is a good tip.

In the do-it-faster category, which is your next option. The first thing is be organized. Organization really pays off. And this is definitely a do as I say, not as I do, because anybody who knows me knows that I'm totally disorganized. When I first did the time management panel I did it with Leah Jamieson and she and I are like two extremes of the organizational scale. And I was so impressed, though, by her -- just in awe of the things that she said that she did to be organized. Like she said she had a place in her office for each topic that she was working on and when papers came in she just filed them into those places. My desk is three feet deep and when I try to work on something the first 45 minutes of the project is finding all of the relevant pieces of paper. So I started using Leah's tip. I got a big bookcase and put extra shelves in and it makes an enormous difference.

But originally I thought that this organization was genetic and there was nothing that I was going to be able to do about this and I was just kind of in awe of people like Leah but I didn't think I could do it. And then about two years later when I was in one of these sessions and Mary Vernon was doing it, and she got up and said, last summer I became organized. And this just blew my mind. She became organized. So I decided I, too, could become organized and it's been for me a continuing struggle, I must say. I am not naturally organized but every little bit of organization that I've done has made a big difference.

So I started with looking for, you know, I'm interested in performance evaluation issues so I started with what I decided were bottlenecks or time sinks. Things that were really killing me because they were total wastes of time. Like I would randomly park my car in the morning and couldn't find it in the afternoon. That I could never find my keys. That my life was just total chaos. So I looked at where I lost stupid time. I lost stupid time looking for not only the right space but the right parking lot for my car. So now I have a parking lot. I arrive at a certain time and I follow an *alk rhythm* to park. And I can retrace that alk rhythm and find my car. It saves me 20 minutes a day looking for my car.

So what I did was I just went through my day and looked at totally wasted time and got rid of the totally wasted time by being more organized. And it's really made a big different and some of it has been trivial little things, some of it has been things like -- someone suggested at one of these meetings that you have a folder for each trip that you're going on and when you get hotel reservations and registration and information on how to get to the airport, you just keep it in the folder. Well, this again, was an eye opening experience for me. I actually once got to an airport and had no idea of what town or what hotel I was going to. So this has all been helped now by having this organizational folders. So I would really suggest that you get organized in any way that you can and the more you can get organized, the better.

Another thing I got from Leah was make a schedule. And Leah talks about her schedules and she has daily, weekly, and quarterly schedules. I'm not so hot at that. I have a computer schedule which keeps track of appointments but now every day when I go in -- and this has been the biggest tip I have learned -- every day when I go in I spend 5 or 10 minutes deciding what I'm doing that day. And I write down the list in order and then during the day I march through the list in order. So I've spent this 10 minutes but when I finish the first thing on the list, I don't have to spend another 10 minutes trying to figure out what the next thing I should do is. It's just on the list and I go through the list. And I make sure that the list is kind of marginally doable in a day so at the end of the day I can say, ahh, I did all those things. Those were the important things for today. So that has really made a big difference for me.

When you're scheduling appointments, avoid fragmented time. I mean, don't have 45 minutes between appointments. Back them up one after another. If you end up with fragmented time, make sure there is something you can do. There is some little thing you can around your office or if you're going to be some place else, bring some paper with you or something that you can read. Don't waste fragmented time.

And then build in trade-offs. I hate schedules. I hate showing up in the morning and looking at the computer screen and seeing that I've got appointments all day long. It kind of makes me nauseous. So what I do is I pick every quarter some days where I will not schedule anything. And then I have Tuesdays and Thursdays, or Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays, or every afternoon or every morning, but I have some block of time that I never schedule for anything other than research and thinking and working on what I'm doing, but I don't allow any interruptions. And that really has been helpful.

Stay focused. It's really easy when you're doing a million things to just kind of lose your focus and forget what you're working on. You know, you're working on a paper but you're thinking, ahh, I've got the luxury of a half hour. I really should be looking at that and you're worrying about that. So one thing I have really come to do is to learn how to just focus exactly on what you're doing. When I'm at work I try not to think about what problems the kids are having in school and when I'm at home with the kids, I try not to think about the paper that I haven't quite finished. So be focused and do what you're doing.

Avoid thrashing. Another problem that I have is I'll be working on a paper and I'll be thinking, man, I've got to work on this lecture and I'll stop working on the paper after 10 minutes and work on the lecture and I'll do that for 10 minutes and I think, no, no, I have to do this and go back and forth and back and forth and get nothing done. So avoid doing that. Trade time for money. So trading time for money means that whenever possible I hired somebody to do the things I don't like to do. So I hate to keep house. I hired somebody to take care of the house. There is somebody who takes care of our garden, somebody that takes care of the lawn. A lot of times you can just buy your time by hiring somebody to do things that you don't like to do. Some things I like to do. I do like to garden sometimes so I do that but I try not to spend my time doing things that I don't like to do, that don't further any of my goals, and that I could hire somebody easily to do. And that was kind of hard for me to get used to, too, because I kind of thought I should clean my own house and mow my own lawn and stuff like that. But I don't any more.

Another thing I learned, I moved into -- the people of the female group who heard the female comments -- but the female group gets together a lot for entertaining. They'll just invite you over to the house and they'll do this with 10 minutes warning. Everybody will go over there with their kids and their husbands and everything, and we'll have dinner. Well, the way they do that is they just call out for food. They have Chinese food or they have pizza or something like that. My idea of entertaining was that you took a day and a half and you went shopping and you cooked and cleaned the house, and you had candle light and all this kind of garbage. And so entertaining was this huge time sink, whereas, these people just call out for pizza, you go over, and you have a good time and it's over.

So it's another example of kind of valuing your time and figuring out what is important. It's much more important to have friends over than it is to spend a day and a half cooking.

Beware of e-mail. E-mail is a huge sink. I've turned off all notification that e-mail has arrived. I don't want to know that it's arrived. At certain times of the day I'll look but I don't want to be interrupted. It's kind of like some kind of Pavlov's response. You're sitting there doing something, you get a beep that e-mail has arrived and you're, just wow, I have to stop and see what's come in. So I ignore that. I try and answer e-mail -- I try and read it once so I try and get kid of it as soon as I've read it. Answer it if you can do in a couple of minutes or else file it in some appropriate spot and don't keep reading the same e-mail, the same things. Every once and a while I get overwhelmed. I had 2,500 messages recently at one point and I just took the whole file and moved it somewhere else and I compressed it. If I ever need to look at those e-mail messages, they're there but they're not hounding me every moment.

The next two are really together. They're really the same thing. There's nothing that I can tell you that's going to help you. There's nothing the other people are going to tell that's going to help you. You're going to have to kind of develop your own strategies. But I would really spend a lot of time thinking about time management as an issue in your career. So I would actually try and continuously -- even after you've been in the career for 10, 15 years, look over your use of your time and try and identify what is productive and what is unproductive and try and get rid of it. You know, you have to know yourself. I think that the really productive times of my day where I'm really good at working on research and thinking hard, and there are times where I'm totally wasted and there's no reason for me to be trying to do anything. It used to be that my best research was done between 11 p.m. and 2 a.m. And now, forget it. I'm asleep or comatose during those times. The time when I work best now is really early in the morning. So I protect that time. My really early in the morning time is research time and I don't do other things during that time because that's the time I'm most productive and I should spend on the hardest thinking.

The last tip that I have for the do-it-faster category is don't confuse hard work with hard thinking. So if you look at that day that I put up there, I work from 7 to 11. It was a pretty full day. I was pretty busy the whole time. There wasn't a whole lot of socializing and having a good time anywhere there, but I didn't get anything done. So it's not just enough to work hard. Nobody's going to reward you for working hard. People don't care at the end how many hours you put in. They care about the quality of your research and the quality of your teaching in some ratio. So you really have to know what is important and put your effort into that and it's not a matter of how many hours you put in that matters.

The last thing that I mentioned there was the enjoy-it-more. This is not a career to do if you're not having a good time. There are much easier ways to make a living than being a faculty member or being a researcher. This is a pretty consuming career that interferes with the rest of your life. So you have to enjoy it. I'd be careful to maintain a balance. You are not your job. You are much broader than your job and make sure that you keep things in balance. Keep a healthy perspective. Take breaks, do things for yourself. I find that if I exercise I actually get that time back. If I exercise for an hour during the day, I'm much more energetic, much more awake at night, and actually get more done than if I don't exercise. So take care of yourself. Maintain a balance and stuff like that.

All right. So then I wanted to say -- those are kind of general tips and I'm sure the other panelists will have other tips and kind of what we wanted to do with the rest of this was to look at more personal issues and say how things worked. So what I want to do is just briefly go through kind of -- what I did to make this work with kids. I have three kids. I adopted them all as older kids. They were 18 months, 4 years, and 7 years when I adopted them so I didn't do the real infant stuff at all. There have been times where both my husband and I were trying to get tenure at New Mass. and that was a pretty hectic time to have three kids. And then my husband decided to be a stay-at-home dad for five years so this was really wonderful. And I kept my career going and then he went back to work and one of my sons was in a lot of trouble and I took a family leave to stay home, so I was a stay-at-home mom for a while. Then I went back to work and my husband is working now so we're both back to working. So I've kind of done all the different things. Having a stay-at-home dad was good. That was by far the nicest.

But these are things that were hard for me. Accept that parenting takes time. You look at your colleagues who have no kids or have stay-at-home spouses or partners and they'll be working 19 hours a day and you kind of have to say, well, that's not going to happen. That's not the way I'm going to live. Parenting does take time.

On the other hand, you also look at the stay-at-home moms who are doing a zillion things with their kids and you have to realize that you're not a stay-at-home mom. My greatest example of this was one year my mother sent my kids these plastic shrink wrap things for Easter eggs so they're really hideous cartoon characters and junk. You put the egg in the plastic, you drop it into water and, presto, it shrink wraps and you're done. So my kids have these eggs they're really proud of. They go over to my neighbors. Her kids have gone out through the woods collecting roots and have made homemade dyes for their Easter eggs. And then they've gotten little flowers that they've put on the eggs and dyed them so the flower patterns come out. It was really hard for me to not feel like a total failure with these shrink wrap cartoon things.

So you have to be aware that you are neither a totally committed, totally focused computer scientist, nor are you a stay-at-home mom. You're something in the middle here.

Use your time for the important fun parts. If I step back -- my kids were delighted with the shrink wrapped eggs. So I really didn't have to get too crazed about that. One of the things that I was really into was I would make cupcakes for the kids for their birthdays for school. These wouldn't be just cupcakes. These would have like snowmen with scarves and hats and they'd be productions. One year in about third grade, my daughter said she wasn't going to do anything for her birthday. Over a couple of days we kind of tried to find out why this was and it turned out that none of the other kids had to bring in these homemade things, was how she put it. So this was a total waste of my time because I didn't enjoy doing it and she didn't like doing it. So think about -- try and figure out what's important to your kids and what's fun to do with them. I love making Halloween costumes. So whether they like it or not, I do Halloween costumes. Other things, I try and focus on the things that they think are important and that I think are important for them to do, and kind of forget some of the other stuff like the dyed eggs.

Get great day care. When the kids were little we had a day care that they were bummed out that they would have to come home. I mean it was such a creative wonderful place and it was so nice for me because when I went to work I never had to worry about whether the kids were safe, whether they were happy, whether they were doing intellectually interesting things. It was just all taken care of. So really spend the time to find good day care and work on that and I think it will pay off for you quite a bit.

Get lots of help. Get your spouse involved. It's really quite nice. I've had lots of help from stay-at-home moms. Actually, a number of my friends were stay-at-home moms and were delighted to help out with the kids every once in a while and that worked out really well.

Reduce teaching loads when you need. There are extensions to the tenure clock. I took a family leave for a period of time. So I think you can't -- there will be interruptions in your job. Your family will demand more attention or less attention at various times and you should get leaves when you need. You should find out what the culture of your university is. In some cases it's not considered good form to extend tenure for pregnancies or for children, and other places it's fine. But if it is fine, it's an option that you should take advantage of if you can.

The other thing is realize that the best laid plans are not going to work out. In your professional life you can probably plan things pretty well and they usually work out but with your kids, forget it. We lived in Massachusetts for a long time and I'd send the kids off to school and 10 minutes later they'd walk back in and say, snow day. What do you do as you're rushing out the door with three kids on a snow day? And so there are a lot of little things like that. There's kind of major things. My son started having a lot of these problems and I needed to take a huge amount of time off but whatever you plan will not work out and you just kind of have to deal with that and realize that that's going to happen and it's okay.

The last thing is, maintain a sense of humor because these things that really appear to be a crisis now, will make great stories five or ten years from now and it will be quite entertaining at least.

So those are kind of my tips. Now Carla was going to give her tips and I didn't get any questions, but be sure to ask questions at the end.

Carla Brodley: So when Jan asked me to do this, she wanted us to give some history so you'd know sort of what our personal situations were and we came to be doing what we're doing. I started the university in 1981 as an English major because I like to read books and through a process of realizing that although I like to read books, I really didn't like to write papers we had to write and I really like to do math. Well, I had better grades in math so maybe I would change. Then I worked for three years in the Boston area trying to math related jobs and realized I didn't want to be an actuary. And I started by Ph.D. in computer science and got a Master's at New Mass. Amherst. I studied job hunting in 1993, 1994, and I was also pregnant with my first child so I interviewed about like this at various universities. It started out smaller and got bigger. By the time I hit Purdue, though, I thought it was obvious that I was pregnant but some of the faculty when I told them during my interview appears surprised.

So then I *defended* my Ph.D. and had my first child two weeks later. One thing I should say from that is that I really like to push things, deadlines, push things up to the deadline. And then I took maternity leave. We couldn't start jobs because medical care wasn't covered to start Purdue, and plus, I really wanted to have a couple of months just to hang out with my first child and figure out how I was going to do this new thing. So I arrived at Purdue in December 1994 to start my job as an assistant professor and if you think about where I came from, English major to professor in electrical computer engineering department, I was fairly intimidated. I had been there for a while. I had a second child in February 1998, Matthew, and I took maternity leave and I didn't teach that semester and I actually did try to time things so it would be dead on in the middle of the semester so I wouldn't have to teach. That was actually a time management strategy and thank goodness it worked. I'm actually up for tenure in fall 1999. So soon.

So then I decided to do a typical day and I chose the day after Jan asked me to do this and one of my -- probably my most disorganized thing is is that I refused to wake up to the sound of an alarm clock and I prefer the randomness of whenever one of my children wakes up. On this morning, my first-born woke up at 6:30 so that was when I got up. I had about two hours to feed the kids. I usually unload the dishwasher or my husband unloads the dishwasher, get the kids dressed, get myself dressed, run around the house, maybe try and get it cleaned up if it's the day that the woman that cleans the house is coming. That's a horrible day. Then I drop off my older child at preschool. I have a nanny who is responsible from being there from 8:30 until 5:30 and she picks up my older child from preschool. So I don't have any problems when my kids are sick but when my nanny is sick, my husband and I have this horrible negotiation process of who has to cancel which meetings. And that's not so much fun. But she doesn't get sick very frequently, thank goodness.

Then I stop and I get a great cup of coffee because e-mail and coffee just seem to go really well together. And then I open my e-mail and look at the day's *bombs* and what is it that I have to do that I forgot that I had to do. That day I was very organized and my secretary like me that day because I got my class materials ready for photocopying more than an hour before class. I looked at a student's conference paper. It was the second draft so it wasn't going to take me all day to try and edit it. So I was able to do that in an hour. We were having a faculty candidate come by that day so I spent half an hour talking with them. This was the day I decided to eat lunch by myself and I like to play with my e-mail all day, contrary to what other people say. Then I worked on an NSF annual report and figured out how fast lane works. Then I had a faculty meeting. Then it was a lecture that was going to need a little bit of work. I needed to really review what it was because I hadn't done it in a while and it was difficult material so I needed half an hour to prepare my lecture.

Then I did class. Then I had office hours and I finished up my e-mail. Then I went home and I made dinner and I played outside, bathes, bedtime stories, and what not, and my children go to bed every night exactly at 8, period. They are in bed, the lights are off. I'm very strict about that. And that's because I often need that hour and a half or two hours to work at night if I budgeted that time. So I finished up the NSF annual report and then I didn't want to sit in a really messy family room and watch TV so I cleaned it up for 15 minutes and then I watched TV.

Any single day for me has this hour where I'm either reading a book or watching TV for an hour before I go to bed. I need that. I'll trade sleep for that. So that's an important part. The quality of my life is actually to read novels and watch TV.

So here's some basic principles of how I actually schedule my time. I try to make meetings for less time than I think they're really going to take hoping that will make me and the other members more efficient. And I always make sure there's an end point, particularly if it's a meeting with people that like to go on and on and on. I really don't want to meet with people in the morning. I'm more productive then and I'm also more grouchy.

All my meetings I scheduled for Tuesday through Thursday and that leaves me Fridays and Mondays to do research and to really be left alone. I really try to stick with that unless the department makes me have to have something on one of those days. But even then, I still keep those two days.

I try to have all my meetings go back to back but one thing that's very important for me is not to see all my graduate students on one day. A lot of people do that. I can't do it because each meeting with a graduate student for me requires some work out of me. Like I might have to read a conference paper or a draft on their proposal and that creates a huge time crunch the day before because I never do things until the last minute. So I need to have my graduate students spread out and I usually try to keep only one senior graduate student on each day. The junior ones don't take as much work as the senior ones do. And I never schedule anything after 4:30 in the afternoon because I want to be home.

Another thing Jan asked me to do was talk about what does an assistant professor do, so I'm going to give you year one and year four.

The first year -- actually the first two years I did course preparation because I had a new course every single semester. And I'm at a university that doesn't have a high teaching load. The load for the first two years is just one course a semester. But I had a new course. I was writing grants. My first year I did not write four but I did that in subsequent years. I was not very successful in the very beginning of writing my grants. I have a drawer to show it. And then one year everything worked and now I have too many. I finished publishing papers out of my thesis. I started some new research and I did my own programming because I didn't have any graduate students to work with. Unfortunately, I really don't feel I have the luxury to do my own programming any more, although I'm feeling more and more like I might be able to in the near future.

That year I gave, I think, two conference and one workshop talks and I went around and gave some *, particularly at places -- like I gave one at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory because I was trying to set up a collaboration to get funding and it worked. So I tried to pick places where maybe I could do some collaboration. I spent time looking for who did I want to collaborate with, both in students in the department and other faculty in the department and other faculty at other institutions. And I spent the majority of my time saying, what. The amount of orientation I got when I showed up was, here's your office key. Here's your secretary. And that was it. And so I really didn't know what I was doing and I spent a lot of time just trying to figure out who do you talk to if something is wrong with your computer? And how come when you ask them to do something, they don't do it right away? And things like this. So that took quite a bit of time.

Now my time is a little different. I have a fairly large research group. I have funding from a lot of different agencies. I'm on a couple of program committees a year but I turn them down, I can't do more than two a year because they're very time consuming. I typically go to about three conferences but now my graduate students are giving the talks more than I am, which actually requires more work on my part trying to get them to give a really good talk. I still try to go around and give talks, particularly since I'm up for tenure I kind of go around and hit up people for letters. I'm on two editorial boards. These came in years three and four and I think this is unusual to be on them so young but my field is very nice to young faculty and really tries to bring them into program committees and editorial boards. I'm not sure that's true of all fields in computer science.

I teach two classes and only one per semester. Now I'm in the luxury of having them be repeats except for, of course, my research course is quite dynamic and changes. My committee work I have to do the graduate committee and I decided to be chair of the faculty search committee because I was curious, also because no one else would volunteer and it irritated me. That's something you need to stop. Don't do that. That was a bad time management tip.

So here are some things that I would have liked to have known. How many hours a week does someone really work if they're an assistant professor? And so I started sort of trying to think about it and I realized I really only work 40 to 45 hours a week most weeks. There are probably about four weeks that are outlyers where I work 60 to even more because there is a deadline of something I really want to do. But I usually only work two or three nights a week. I have time to do things like volunteer at my son's school teaching phonics for one morning a couple of hours a week. And I go swimming once a week. I'm not as good at exercising as Jan is. And I try to walk to work as my exercise.

I don't have social lunches. On days when I go swimming or I volunteer, I decide that was my social hour. And so I'm not going to have lunch with my colleagues. I try real hard not to chat in the hallway. I try to keep my meetings short and something that is really important for me is I need at least 7 to 7-1/2 hours of sleep and work is not worth feeling yucky so I always try to get enough sleep.

Another thing I started thinking about was, how long does it really take to prepare a good lecture? And if I taught it twice before, it doesn't take me very long and that's because of the preparation that went into the first time. I have slides like this and behind them I have notes to tell myself what I was thinking about when I was doing that or to explain the little bits of math that I don't think I can recreate on my own. I'm not very good on the fly, I need to really have everything spelled out.

If I've taught it once before, then it depends how good a job I did the first time and sometimes it can take me three or four hours to revise a lecture, and if I haven't taught it before at all, if it's an undergraduate course it's probably okay, but if it's in my research area and I thought to myself, I really want to know how hidden mark-off models work this year so I'm going to put on the syllabus to force myself to do it. That could take me 20 or more hours to really get that lecture going because I have no clue what they're doing and I have to learn all of it.

(Inaudible question)

Carla Brodley: That's for a one-hour lecture. Per each lecture. So for a new lecture it's going to take me 2 to 4 hours, all the way up to 20, depending on how difficult the material is.

So the thing that I decided to do now was give very practical tips as opposed to more general principles. Exactly things that you can do to try and save yourself time as an assistant professor. The first one is, when you go to teach a course, get lecture notes in the medium that you use from a friend. So I use *Latech*. I got Latech from a friend of mine, Claire *Cardy* who I actually think had gotten them from Adelle Howell and I passed them on to several other people as well. So now there is this AI course that sort of proliferated starting with Adelle and that really, really helped me a lot. This was not true when I started but go to other people's web pages. The class materials that are waiting for you there to be able to use and be able to get inspiration is really valuable.

You know, don't expect to get it perfect the first time. It's probably good enough and if you spend that extra amount of time to get that last 10%, you could double your time without that much of a double in quality.

This is a really important one for me. I either want to teach first thing in the morning or I want to teach at lunch. And there's different reasons for those. Teaching first thing in the morning forces me to be efficient because I'll prepare the night before and I don't want to trade sleep. If I teach at lunch time it stops me from social lunches because I am inherently social. But that stops me because I can't go to lunch because I have to teach. If you haven't gotten there yet, ask -- when you're an assistant professor starting your first job, ask for when your class is but that's done the semester before so you need to do it when you're interviewing, as soon as you get your job offer.

One thing that helps is let's say you're teaching a totally new course. Maybe teach it on the board the first time because it takes less material the first time and you're not exactly sure how you're going to teach it yet and making slides requires a lot of overhead.

Finally, you should give yourself a *fair* amount of time to prepare so I do it the night before. This almost always works for me but it can backfire brutally and it backfired twice in two different ways. One, I stayed up until 3 in the morning doing the lecture and managed -- it was an 8:30 lecture and did it. And the other time was far worse and I asked Judith if I should actually tell this story because it doesn't make me look very good but I'm going to anyway. It was so bad. I so didn't have a lecture that once in the last 4-1/2 years I called in sick. So I figured once wasn't too bad and maybe it was a mental health day. It had been a very difficult semester.

So here's some other time management tips and trips, if you're still with me after that admission. I always schedule office hours after a lecture because you can't do anything anyway and they're going to come with you and talk to you. So you might as well make that part of your official office hours, particularly if the university has requirements about how much office hours you should have. Ours does not. I happened to see the TA first for anything I consider boring which is coding problems, regrade requests which I make them do in writing because it discourages them. I want to see them for conceptual interesting problems about the material, however, I only want to see them if they really want to see me so I only schedule one additional official office hour and I do it at a time to discourage drop-bys that just to sort of chat and take up your time. I want them to really have a problem.

Now, I always tell them I'm available by appointment through e-mail and I honor that. I always do see them. But I tell them, do not drop by, and I'm very serious about it and nobody drops by without an e-mail appointment. But I do really well in the course evaluations in terms of availability. So I think you can be pretty strict about your time as long as they send you e-mail and you know when it's going to be. You can schedule it around another meeting so doesn't fragment your time. So I really don't allow drop-by questions from students in my classes.

One thing that took me a while to figure out is what your TA can do for you and basically if they're going to be doing a Ph.D., maybe they want to go into teaching so you should try to help them learn about teaching so I have them do drafts of homework projects and exams with some guidance. We talk about what we're going to do but I let them be creative. I let them have some creativity in the process and don't tell them exactly what to do. That's been great because sometimes they think of projects I would never have thought of for my classes. And sometimes I have a really clear idea of what I'd like to do and so then they just implement that. I have them handle all regrade requests and any -- assuming I can trust my TA that semester and usually I can. I have them have office hours almost every day so that the students always have someone to talk to. So that's part of their 20 hours a week. At Purdue we're lucky that we get to hire graders in addition to our TAs and I have them manage the grader with the solutions that we've agreed upon.

So what can you do in order to make your time more effective with your graduate student? First of all, it doesn't interest me too much to have to figure out how to do equipment purchases, especially with the red tape in our university. There's a lot of forms and it's not very much fun, so I have them do that. I have them very quickly learn the text so if we co-author a paper together, they're the one that has to get all the forms and make the camera-ready copy and I don't have to worry about it. The first time I usually have to teach them how to do it a bit.

I don't necessarily have a weekly meeting with each of them. We have a policy that if they have nothing to say because they're involved in some programming task that's taking a while, they can just -- we'll just cancel our weekly meeting and if they think that's true, I'll send them e-mail that day and say, do we really need to meet, and so I'll cancel it. On the other hand, as they come further along we will definitely have weekly meetings and some of them need a weekly meeting in order to force them to do anything. But that sort of depends on what the style of the person is that you're working with.

And then I have something that my students call calendar torcher where we've agreed that they need to do something like write the first chapter of their thesis or finish a conference paper, and so I pull out my calendar and I say, well, when do you think you could have that done by? And I let them pick a date and they know that once they've picked that date, it has to be done then. And then I usually try to move them back a little in terms of the date and make them -- is it really going to take you three weeks to write that? How about two? And they'll usually agree and they usually get it done on time then. I have them make prioritized lists, also, in order to keep them more efficient because the more efficient your graduate students are, the better your time goes. So it's really important to translate this time management over to your graduate students so that they know how to keep deadlines.

I think the biggest one for me in terms of time management is in making all the decisions. One thing that floored me when I started this job was how many decisions I had to make every day, big and small. And how much time I could spend deterring on whether I should do this or not. Should I be on this program committee? Was it going to be fun? Was this other program committee going to ask me to be on that one? Should I wait for that one? You know, stupid things like that and you really just need to make your decisions as quickly as possible. The point behind this quote is that the decision that seems --

SIDE B

Judith Klavens: Okay. I'm going to do something I've never done before in my presentation. This is a difficult room. Hello back there.

When we put together -- when Jan put together the panel and sent around messages, we kind of discussed who was going to talk about what and who was going cover what and Jan said that she would be talking about time management tips and Carla said that she would be covering the life of an assistant professor and some of the time management issues that she's dealt with. And I'm going to be talking about family, work, and career from a different perspective. Jan's put together the panel with a fairly junior person, that's Carla; and I'm your senior person representative.

Now the thing that I'm doing that's different is I'm presenting some slides that have a format that I've never used before, so we'll see how this works.

Let's see. I'm going to talk a little bit about current and past so let me start with current. I am currently a Columbia University, the Director of the Sector for Research on Information Access. It is an interdisciplinary research center that is associated with the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, and the Information Services Division of the University. And the goals of the Center are to build interdepartmental research in the area of information technologies and information management.

I'm going to start at the very beginning for just a minute or two and give you an introduction to one aspect of several of the research projects that I'm involved in and I'll come back to some of the principles of this research project as I go through the talk.

One of the research projects that is actually funded by the National Science Foundation is on domain independent summarization. The task here is to create tax-base summaries of the full content of documents to highlight the similarities and differences between a range of documents. The PIs are Kathy McKewen who is our department chair in computer science, and myself, and to present briefings. So you present to users based on pre-defined templates multimedia summaries of selected content of interest to the users. These are two different projects. One is domain dependent, one is domain independent, but the point is that there are many, many documents and you want to point out similarities and differences.

So if you do a regular query on the web or anywhere else, your querying and you get lots and lots of documents, and never mind that you can't read the headers. We all know what this is like. And what you want to be able to do is collect the similarities between documents that are related and present back to the user a paragraph that summarizes not individual documents in isolation, but puts them together in a cohesive way.

Now, the principles behind this project are that we are providing information to reduce reading, determining relevance, giving you a balance summary. This is not a research talk. I'm doing this for a reason. Don't worry. You're not in the wrong room. We want to present concise and fluent summaries using language generation and the key thing here is we identify the similarities and differences across documents.

(Applause)

That's one of the new things. I never did that before. I wouldn't have the nerve to do that in a technical talk.

That's the end of the technical -- the research presentation and I'll come back to that, as I said, in a minute.

It all started -- how did all this start? Well, 1964 I graduated from high school and in 1968 I graduated from college and in 1980 I got my Ph.D. and then I started a post-doc at M.I.T. and then in 1983 I went to the TJ Watson Research Center and in 1992 Columbia University. So this research program, as well as other areas of research, has built up over the years through education and experience, and working with some wonderful colleagues. However, this is only part of the picture. So what do I mean by that?

Well, it all started really, 1972, I became a wife. I got married. This is the real biography. This is the one you don't put on your resume but this is the real story. In 1975 I was a married mom. I gave birth to my first child, my son, Ivan, and in 1977 I was a married mom and I gave birth to my daughter, Lisa. Then in 1980 I became a single mom so all these wonderful comments that you hear about asking your spouse to take over and your partner to take over, that was a bit tough. There wasn't one. And many people had children outside of a relationship so that brings a particular challenge, shall we say. And then in 1997, notice I've skipped 17 years and for 13 of those years I've been involved in a wonderful relationship, and I was very lucky to become now a married dad to daughter Elia. My partner gave birth to our first child in my second life.

So Caroline Wardle asked me to be on this panel and the reason that she did is because I've been very lucky. I've been very lucky to have lots of different lives. Single, partner, childless, now I have children, straight, lesbian, none, or all of the above. And many of us in this room have had different phases of life, different time periods where we participate in one or another of these categories, and I've been very fortunate. Sometimes in between it's not so fortunate. Similarities and differences. The project highlights, this slide is from my technical talk and it pulls the two things together. Multi-phase summarization. We extract the similarities and differences over time. We point out new information, things change, and we provide only the relevant information and that's why I'm pulling back the research to what I presented in personal lives.

Now, the final part of my talk is in color and it starts with a metaphor that I think is very important. So let me get serious for a minute here about choices and life decisions. Career and family and eye exams. I imagine that many of the people in this room have had had the pleasure of having an eye exam every year and when you have an eye exam the eye doctor takes these two shapes and makes them go like this and you say when they're lined up. And it's a way of telling your focal length and your focal ability and so on. And I feel that balancing career and family is a little bit like an eye exam because what you want to do is try and get it as best as you can. So this is not quite lined up but it's getting closer and your goal is reaching a state where things are really lined up and you know it and you can say yes. So sometimes they're like this and sometimes they're like that, and our goals are to try and harmonize and bring these two parts of our lives together as much as possible.

Here's some observations that I've made from my personal experience over time and just my personal observations. For better, for worse everyone of us has our own personal story and that personal story is exactly that, very personal. Don't assume that the external lines up with the internal. So when you meet people and when you present yourself to people, they don't have to know that your external and your internal may be completely different. Usually they are. We have very private lives and we have public lives. However, there's a tension and the tension that I've come across in my work life, and this is not -- there are many different kinds of tensions. People are naturally curious. They like to know about your personal life. They like to know what you do for work. They like to know what you think about. And people at the same time are often uncomfortable with too much information. And so it's very difficult to find a balance.

Now, this is a time management workshop and I'm going to talk about why that matters but first let me give you some examples. In 1985, when I was at TJ Watson, I was a closeted mother. What do I mean by that? Well, when I -- Caroline Wardle suggested to Jan that it would be interesting for me to be on this panel and I reviewed my slides with Caroline, who has abandoned the group here early. She was to be my friend in the audience. And she said, what do you mean by that you were a closeted mother? I don't get it. And here's what I mean. At that time in the work environment there were very few women, scientists, and there was only 1 out of about 20 of us out of the 900 research scientists at IBM at the time, 900, 20 women, only 1 other woman had children. And, therefore, when I left for dentist appointments and doctor's appointments, and when I went to gymnastic demos in the fourth grade and when I went and played soccer, etc., I was always closeted. I never ever revealed where I was going. It wasn't accepted. So this has fortunately changed somewhat. More men have become involved in parenting and, therefore, I think it's become more accepted to be openly apparent. But this was a piece of balance that I needed to strike in the work place and it's a very difficult decision.

The next example, which you've probably already read by now, it happened to me very recently and I was really stunned. You know, as you go to meetings and you meet people professionally, there are some people who you just kind of like and you interact with their colleagues, acquaintances, friends, and one of these colleagues, acquaintances, friends is a closeted daughter. What do I mean? She is devoted to living with her mother. She's not married and she doesn't tell people that she lives with her mother. She doesn't tell them because people in her work place are perplexed. You're still living with your mother? So that's what I mean. What you tell and what you don't tell.

So the question is, should you tell? Yes. No. I don't know. I can't tell you. But what we search for is harmony and that's what I really wanted to emphasize. Why? Time management issues are minimized when you can see well. So finding that balance for yourself minimizes your time management issues. Seeking situations. It's important to seek situations where you're comfortable with the values around you. Really important if you're out on the job market, when you're looking for a job, or if you're an undergraduate looking for graduate school, or if you're thinking of moving work spaces, seeking situations where you're comfortable with the values around you. And both Jan and Carla brought that up in a really important way. How much do you tell the people around you? It depends on your work situation. Only you can make that decision.

Making sure that you're true to yourself about that decision. I have found in my own experience, and this is just my personal experience that I'm giving you, nothing more. If anything that I'm saying is politically incorrect, I truly apologize, it's just my personal experience. There have been times when I've not been so true to myself and everything falls apart. Time management, stress, tension, I don't exercise, etc. The truer you are able to be for yourself, and it's not always easy, then other things fall into place. And I've really found that over time. And you can't listen to anyone else about what you should and should not tell or do. It's very, very personal what you say and don't say. Some people are very private about things and that's the way it is.

And I guess my final point here is not to be afraid of change. If it's not right, try to do something about it. Do something about, take a risk, make a change. It's truly worth it. There are times, though, that there are instances and situations that really are beyond your control. But I have a question mark there. Notice that. So maybe you can't make a change. You have children to think of, maybe they're in schools. Maybe you have a child with a problem that needs to be in a particular school. You have parents to take care, like my closeted daughter friend. Maybe you're lucky enough to have a two-body problem. I love that expression, a two-body problem. When I was alone for seven years I would have loved the two-body problem. Three-body problem. The job, itself, financial matters, there are all kinds of reasons that you can't make changes. So in that case, the compromises involved in staying or the compromises involved in leaving are the things to measure. And, again, when you're making these kinds of decisions, what I have found is putting time aside to think about these decisions in a focused way. And if you think that preparing a lecture is difficult or writing a paper is difficult, we all know that these kind of decisions, you want to work on them for three minutes and then you absolutely have to read e-mail. So I have found that putting time aside to think about those changes -- when you know you're facing them is really an important thing to do.

So what your goal is, what all of our goals -- each of us seeks personal harmony and that's the most important thing. I think that this is a very, very important conference and a very important particular session in this conference. I am really honored to be the final speaker in this whole workshop because no matter how great your career is, if your work and your personal and your whole family situation, and family can be just you by yourself, it can be however you define it, if it's not in harmony then it doesn't work. How close is good enough? Is that good enough? That's the question. And only each of us can decide inside ourselves. We really have to decide. The goal is harmony. How close is good enough is only something that we can each answer for ourselves.

So I'm going to wrap up this session with that message for you to take away that visual message of lining up and lining up both your internal and your external world, your work situation, and your internal values and being true to yourself to line up as best you can at each stage in your life. So those are some words from the senior representative on the panel.

Thank you.

(Applause)

??: Do we have any questions? You need to use the mike if you have a question so that it's picked up by our tapes.

??: I'd like to ask Carla what it was like interviewing while pregnant and what kinds of -- whether she faced a lot of resistance from departments or whether it was a good thing to have it all in the open.

??: That's why you can tell.

Carla Brodley: Absolutely. So there was the pre-showing where I felt sick all the time and I used to bring little snacks with me and I used to eat them when I was in the bathroom so no one would see me eating a banana every two hours. And I'm sure that that was a little bit bizarre. But then I couldn't hide it any more. I thought I'd be able to hide it because I'm tall but I was not able to. No. Actually I had some interesting reactions and I told two faculty members at Purdue and one person -- and Leah, I wish I could tell you who this was and I'll tell you afterwards -- one person was walking me up -- pardon me?

(Inaudible)

Carla Brodley: Okay. One person was walking me up and down the stairs really quickly and I said, I don't know if you know this but I'm pregnant and I can't breathe very well going up and down the stairs. And he says, can I carry your briefcase? And then I had a department head, who shall remain nameless, during my interview ask me whether I was planning on coming back to work after I had the baby, at which point I counted to ten and said that's why I'm interviewing. In general, I thought it made absolutely no difference in the places I interviewed and, in particular, at getting a job at Purdue and I'm the kind of person that likes to sort of go like this anyway and so I was really happy that they -- it wasn't even an issue.

??: Could you please tell about vacation time. How you plan it, how long you have -- can you take, what do you do, with kids especially.

??: I'll answer that because when I first started working I believe that if you were serious about your job, you never took vacations. And I didn't for quite a while. And then my husband and I came to realize that the last two weeks in August the day care centers all shut down. So what we would do is we would trade children. You'd have them for two hours and then they'd go to your husband's office and it was just a disaster and we realized that nobody was getting any work done the last two weeks of August of anyway and so why don't we just go on vacation. And we discovered, much to my surprise, that if you go on vacation you actually get rejuvenated, you come back, you're rested, you work better. And by the end of September you've done much more than you would have done if you didn't go on vacation. So I have incorporated this much more -- the older I get, the more serious I am about vacations. And I think it's really worth doing.

The other thing is unless you actually plan a vacation that's a serious plan, it never happens. You know, you'll say, oh we'll take some time off in the summer and then it's the end of the summer and you haven't taken any time off. Or you'll say, maybe we'll do something this weekend and then Friday night there's something else that you need to do Saturday morning and you never do it. So my recommendation is that you plan vacations, commit yourself by buying plane tickets. I mean, do whatever you have to do to make sure that they actually happen in some specified time.

??: I'd just like to say that from the very beginning of my career, I believed in vacations and tend to take probably about three weeks in the summer all together. On the other hand, I work some weekends in the summer to make up for that for work. But my husband is also Australian so you can't exactly go for a week. So we end up taking long vacations.

Valerie Summers: I'm Valerie Summers, University of British Columbia. You've offered a lot of techniques such as scheduling meetings with less time and things like that. What would you suggest for graduate students with disorganized supervisors whereby the meetings never start on time, for the content involved there would be excessive time because it's difficult for graduate students to pressure those people.

??: I had an adviser who was not terribly organized but he was incredibly busy. Ken Kennedy was my adviser and Kathryn McKinley from the University of Massachusetts, and I went into my meetings and I had a list. I spent an hour, at least, preparing for every meeting. Even if it was only half an hour. If I wanted a technical -- if I needed technical advice, I outlined the problem and then I asked them a specific question.

??: It doesn't work. I've e-mailed agendas (Inaudible, no microphone).

??: No, I never showed him my agenda. He never knew I was managing him. Right? I went in there and I said my thing and then he had to answer. Right? He didn't have to -- and he could say, I don't know, or he could pick up the phone because someone interrupted so that would happen sometimes. But the only thing you can do is manage that person and you can -- if you show them what you want them to do, then they can find a reason not to do it. If you just go in there and do one thing at a time, that worked for me.

Judith Klavens: I like what you said about managing your supervisor, your adviser. When I first got to Columbia, one of my colleagues told me an anecdote about a graduate student who said, I'd like to come work for you, and he said, you don't work for me, I work for you. I think that it's hard to really appreciate that without our graduate students we are really -- I mean Carla really said it all. Year one she had no graduate students and she did all her own programming and all her system building, and she had nobody to delegate, which is what Jan mentioned to, and as part of the training. The truth is is that we need each other and that we need our graduate students perhaps even more than our graduate -- you can change advisers. It's a very big investment in time to work with a graduate student and it doesn't work.

So I would suggest two very concrete things. The first thing actually relates to what -- what was the name of the person who commented -- Kathryn commented on. Don't mail your agenda in advance. Make it up and go there and wait at 4:00. Now he'll appear at a quarter to 5. You have a meeting at 5:00. This is the specific question you needed to answer. If that happens five times in a row, believe me, either he will start coming at 4:00 or 4:30, is all the time you'll get, but you make sure that you plan, as Carla said, something that is something that helps him right afterwards. If you're TAing for him, then at 5:00 you have a meeting with one of his students to help him so that he'll begin to see that your time matters also. It's awfully difficult, however, particularly a proposal time, to plan your time. So that's just caveat on that. But you can manage your supervisors, believe me.

Leah Jamieson: Leah Jamieson of Purdue. This is payback time. Jan was nice enough to credit some of her ideas to me and I heard Carla say that in her end-of-day slot she would finish with her e-mail and I heard Jan say that she handled her e-mail in a half hour a day. I want to know how.

Jan Cuny: I don't handle it in a half hour a day. There was a half hour that one particular day but, yeah, e-mail --

(Inaudible)

Jan Cuny: No. E-mail will take over your life. I mean, it's really a very insidious thing.

??: I wanted to offer a different perspective to read it once. I don't read it once. I try to let it flood up the cue because it's probably not important if I can't see it in the buffer and if it doesn't bother me sort of thinking about it above that buffer, it probably wasn't too important. So if I don't do it right away, sometimes things just sort of disappear.

??: Yeah. A lot of things disappear. At one point I had a scheme where I did not read any internal e-mail from the department because my view was that it's a lot of e-mail and these people see me in the hall if it's important anyway. So when I got really -- not all the time, of course, but when I got really busy I would just stop reading internal e-mail at all. Never even look at it.

Another thing that I do is I have a very elaborate e-mail directory where I can file everything. And so lots of mail, I don't even read it or I just glance at it to make sure it's not some crisis and I file it in the appropriate thing so I have a *craw* e-mail which has about eight different categories underneath and all the e-mail that comes in I just put it there and then when I'm going to deal with a particular category I can get it all back. A lot of conversations that you'll have, you'll have e-mail that's copied to 50 people and there will be an ongoing conversation. Just wait until it's over and read the bottom line. So there's a bunch of things that you can do but if you don't do it, e-mail really takes over.

Marsha *Duhr*: Hi. I'm Marsha Duhr from U.S. West Advanced Technologies and I just wanted to offer a variation on the trade, money for time, and that's to reduce work hours. I recently did it in December. Just cut down one day a week and it actually doesn't give me more time with my son, but it gives me just more time for other things that intrude on life like doctor's appointments and taking snow tires off the car, etc., etc. And the other -- it's sort of a combination common question. One of you talked about avoiding social lunches. This is something I struggle with because I generally eat my lunch at my desk reading e-mail or something. Or I try to exercise but I realize that I may be missing out on some of the networking that happens with my colleagues -- I'm in an industrial lab. So I'm kind of torn by that decision and I'm just wondering if any of you can comment on that?

??: I go once a week at least but everyday with the same people doesn't appear to me to be too beneficial unless they're really fun.

??: Yeah. I actually think some social lunches are important so I have networks of people around the university that I kind of once a week or once every other week go out to lunch with. I have colleagues that I work with, we have working lunches quite frequently which have some social, some work aspects to them. So I very rarely take time out to eat lunch by myself or -- and I don't go to any of these regular groups of faculty who always leave at 12:00 and go out to lunch together or stuff like that, but I do use the kind of social networking aspects of it once or twice a week maybe.

??: So it occurred to me that you might actually enjoy the following comment. One of the things that I find hard about, and maybe many of you do too, is I think as a faculty member you do a lot of things but you don't really get much time for professional development. So when you learn new things and when you catch up on your reading and really kind of keep yourself abreast of things. It shocked me last week when my husband came home -- actually it was a Friday so my husband and I do the following time management tip which is, we have two children and one of us takes the first part of the day and takes them to day care, to school, or whatever, and the other one of us takes the other part of the day and that way we can kind of have a half open day in there. It works well for us and it works well for the kids so they're not in day care like a 100 hours a day.

So one of the things is, it was like a Friday and he was kind of relaxed and I said, well, what are you doing today? And he said, this is my professional development day. And he had decided every other Friday to -- he's a research chemist at Monsantos, that's what he does, and he had decided every other Friday to take that time for professional development and read and do whatever he needed to do to make sure that professionally he was doing well and as a researcher he was growing. And I thought that was such a great idea. So I'm actually trying to figure out how to plot this to my life but I think it was really a neat idea.

Susan *Simm*: Susan Simm, University of Toronto. I have a question about reminders for meetings. Now, I know some people who love sending reminders for meetings, like three or four or five and it goes on and on. And they'll remind you the day before, two hours before, half an hour before. Now I really hate these. My personal philosophy is that we agree on the time. I'll send out one e-mail -- this is for group meetings and everybody knows the time and it's your responsibility to show up. Now, I'm getting the impression that some people could really use reminders and things like that. I'm just wondering how people feel with that.

??: I really hate it when people miss or are late for meetings, and most of my graduate students only make the mistake once. And then they remember when it is just because it's something -- and I tell them, this really bothers me and I don't send reminders because I don't want to have to remember to remind them.

??: I don't send reminders for meetings either, although I must confess that I have missed an occasional meeting and been late for a meeting and that my graduate students know this and they save me. So my graduate students do frequently remind me of things that I should be doing. Just kind of every once in a while they'll stop by and say, still here. I thought you were talking to the Provost at 2. And this is actually quite useful. It's quite useful. So while I don't send reminders, and I really don't like more than one reminder, I frequently do like one.

Robin *Kravitz*: Hi, I'm Robin Kravitz from Georgia Tech. Now, you guys have all been talking about having to deal with the two-body problem where you're both in the same place. I'm actually facing the problem where I'm going to be a two-body problem with two people in two separate places for probably about two years. I was just wondering if anybody had any comments on how to deal with that. I mean --

??: I did that.

Robin Kravitz: Oh, you did.

??: Yeah. We've done many different variations. Like Judith, I think as you go on you try all different things. My first job was at Purdue. I was on the faculty there for three years and my husband was at the University of Chicago for those three years. We didn't have any kids which I think made it much simpler. Our original plan was that we were going to alternate weeks and go back and forth but this didn't work out very well for a variety of reasons and so I ended up going to Chicago most of the time. My husband did a lot of lab science and couldn't leave experiments for a couple of days. You had to go in every once in a while to change the temperature or do something so I ended up going to Chicago. And we did this for three years and it was -- there were many really wonderful aspects of it so when I was at Purdue I really worked hard. I just focused on work and I worked very hard. And then we had these weekends that were like vacations because we knew that we only had 2-1/2 days together this weekend and we went to the movies and we went out to eat and it was really kind of nice. After a while, though, it became like not real life and it got old. So it was doable for three years and then we were really tired of it and haven't done it since then.

??: So is that about it? Well, I'd like to thank you all for coming and I would really like to thank Fran *Berman* for arranging this terrific meeting. And I need a couple pictures so if you see me rushing around with a camera, just smile. Well, we wouldn't feel like we had really ended the workshop if we didn't make announcements so this seems to be my current role.

First of all, I would like to give really heartfelt thanks to all of you for coming and for really making this workshop so great. To our panelists, to our moderators, to everybody involved, to the FCRC folks, etc. We have a box by the door for these and so thank you very much in advance for filling out the evaluations and as you leave I would actually like to charge you with two things. So the first thing I'd like to charge you with is to bring this workshop out to your home. Bring it back to your home. Go home and do something for women. You know, find somebody, take them out to lunch, give them some encouragement. If you're in a program committee encourage them to get another woman in your area on that program committee. Start something. Do something for the rest of our community.

The second thing that I would like to charge you with as you go home is to do something for yourself. You're all really amazing people to be here and you've all done really challenging things and really, really hard things. So go do something for yourself. Promote yourself in some environment you've never promoted yourself in before. Leverage the relationships you've made here to make something happen in your career that you wanted to happen. Take swimming lessons. Do what you need to do to make sure that your health and wellbeing is fostered and encouraged and improved. We're hoping to have another workshop three years from now at the next FCRC, if not before then. So we hope to see you back. Thank you very, very much.