All of us in ASP and bar prep face challenges: students with declining credentials, limited staff, budget woes, concerns over bar pass rates, students burdened by debt who juggle academics and work, and more aspects unique to our own positions or law schools. Many of us work hours far beyond a 40-hour week to get everything done to provide the best services to our students. A growing number of ASPers teach ASP or bar courses; some of us teach other law courses. We are active in our professional organizations and write in various formats. In short, it is easy to feel overworked long before the end of the academic year.
Instead of recharging our batteries and finding breathing space regularly, we tend to collapse in exhaustion whenever there is a break in the calendar: Thanksgiving, the few federal holidays we get on the actual dates, the university closure for the holiday period, a week or two vacation in the summer.
Good intentions to carve out space for projects and time for oneself are often quickly forgotten among the daily demands. So, before your calendar gets fully booked with student appointments, classes, meetings, and workshops, take the time to carve out blocks of time that you reserve on your calendar to help you stay excited about your work, to carve out professional development, and to recharge your batteries:
- Schedule one or more blocks for project time each week. These times will allow you to focus on revamping materials and planning new strategies or services. Look at last year's appointment calendar to figure out the best days and times to schedule these blocks – and then protect them.
- Find time at the beginning or end of each day to read the listserv items and blog postings for several sources in our field as well as other sources outside ASP – perhaps The Chronicle of Higher Education or one of the major newspapers that regularly covers legal education topics.
- Allocate time at least once a month for reading longer pieces in the field to stay updated. You want to read the latest books and articles by colleagues. Crossover materials from psychology, education, and other disciplines can broaden our perspectives.
- If you are trying to do scholarship and publish, set aside time on your calendar to focus on those tasks rather than try to grab time here and there. Have a mentor who will keep you accountable for discussing ideas, finishing research, and producing drafts for review.
- Weigh carefully each new commitment that you are asked to take on within your workload and other commitments. Can you realistically be on that new committee or spearhead that new effort? Some tasks are truly unavoidable. But we often have choices that can be made. In those cases of choice, learn to say "yes" selectively. Practice saying "no" or "later but not now."
- Find other ways to protect your time and space: check your emails at work only four times a day (or if you will have withdrawal, just on the hour); use your email functions to have alerts only for important emails (the Dean, your supervisor); unsubscribe from RSS feeds or library publication rotas that you no longer care about; turn off your cell phone every evening after a certain time and during portions of the weekend; stop checking emails constantly in the evenings and on weekends; make commitments with family and friends and keep them sacrosanct.
- Choose one or two weekends during the semester when you can take a three-day weekend. Block it off now and negotiate with your supervisor that you will be gone those days. If you will cave and be in the office unless you have out-of-town plans, then commit to plans now with your relatives, spouse, friends, long-lost cousins, or others who will hold you accountable to that time with them.
Best wishes to all of our colleagues for happy and productive new academic years. (Amy Jarmon)
