Poll on professor's productivity when forced to work from home

[Aster]

I was wondering how professors' work life has been impacted from campus closures. Specifically, for universities where one's access to his/her office has been curtailed or restricted because of coronavirus. Productivity can be defined however you like, whether it be research, teaching, service, or what-not.

[pigou]

I think my idea generation process is way down. The random encounters, lunches, and walks that result in novel work just don't translate well into the online domain. On the other hand, my productivity for writing-up papers is way up. I now have days where I basically block out everything, order in food, and can write down a first draft of a paper. No commuting, no encounters that lead to distracting new ideas...

That is, short term very good for productivity, long term probably a negative shock. I know in my field we've started seeing this with an increase in journal submissions: way up after lockdowns started. But there's got to be an associated long-term cost, unless we've all just been doing it completely wrong so far.

[bento]

My choice of option 4 is partly due to our U budget crisis and a dean who is dragging out the process of faculty cuts for F2020.  I carry around a head full of anxiety all day long and in the wee hours of the night. Plus, he is having us do our cuts "collaboratively as a team" which means every department's woes are paraded before every other department in a caravan of misery.  The process has been going on for 2 months.

[mahagonny]

My answer is it's not more time consuming to work from home but I expect slippage in learning outcomes because of the limitations of technology. And putting more into the preparation won't help. Being a freeway flier my office is at home, so all my materials are available, and they get scanned on my laser copier and sent as PDF's. The college saves on copying. I am disappointed that I can't use the library though. But I can add to my materials by buying things on line or downloading for free, with a little luck.

[marshwiggle]

I started another thread related to this, "What things can you only do virtually?"

I mostly do labs, and courses with a heavy lab component, so I'm certainly aware that certain things can only be done in-person. However, there are also things that can only be done online, by taking advantage of that. For instance:

• By having labs asynchronously, all "sections" can happen "at the same time". (If physical lab section would need 3 or 4 days to fit in, a two day window for asynchronous labs ciuld suffice no matter how many students are involved.)
• Simulations, while not able to reflect all of the same details as physical labs, may allow things which would be unsafe (e.g. "blowing things up" virtually) or impractical (e.g. repeating the simulation dozens of times) in-person.

I would challenge anyone forced because of circumstances to adapt to online to make at least one change which benefits from being online. From a professional standpoint, failing to do so is missing a big opportunity.

(I have to adapt labs for several courses to online. It is my intent to have at least a couple of different courses ready to have online labs as a permanent option, with the advantage of making lab enrollment limits almost unnecessary. And for some courses, the lab limit is what produces the course limit.)

[mahagonny]

I would challenge anyone forced because of circumstances to adapt to online to make at least one change which benefits from being online. From a professional standpoint, failing to do so is missing a big opportunity.

I had a student several years ago comment out of the blue 'I can't believe they stuck all of you professors in this tiny room.' Rearranging office space downward (more sharing of space) is not only not an ego boost. It's a workload issue as it takes more time and trouble to get organized. It raises questions in the students' minds about how seriously they should regard you, the professor, and your work together. Especially compared with the extravagant gesture of tenured people having a big office full of only their own stuff that's dark when they don't need it. So everyone  going online at once evens out the game of work, appearance and equitable use of space a little bit.
I could probably have fought it with the union, but I never got around to it.
Other school (no tenure track) that has most of us sharing offices, but provides for us much better in general: students are actually quite interested in whether you have your own office or share one. They ask from time to time. Whether they are just trying to understand what your workday is like, with empathy,  or whether they think you're cool if you have your own office and therefore, they want to study with you again next term is not always clear. Professors are very protective. I was once moved from an office with a window to one without. The chair made of point of apologizing. I guess that means your ability to attract students is not enhanced by the move.
Anyway, all of this is gone for now. Good.

[Parasaurolophus]

I've been more productive, largely because the commute is gone. I did work on the bus and ferry, but it's just not the same.

On the other hand, not being able to change work locations is a drag on productivity. Sometimes you just need to be in a different, distraction-free environment.

[waterboy]

Way, way down. I was only able to grab a few things before they shut us out of campus. And my computing resources at home will make a transition to on-line in the fall much more difficult.

[eigen]

Depends on what we're including in "work". There are some increases (not a lot) in my teaching.... mostly commute time. But lacking the dedicated office space hurts that a lot too.

But my scholarship? It's been moving backwards since March. I'm a bench scientist, and between sudden shutdowns killing experiments in progress, losing trained students to graduation, and losing a summer of productive research time... My research agenda will probably be set back by a year.

[AmLitHist]

My productivity is way, way better at home. Not only do I not have the 45-minute one-way commute, I also don't have the odd gaps between classes. 

If I'm F2F, I much prefer going back-to-back-to-back and getting it over with.  Having a class at 8, then nothing until, say, 11, messes me up:  that time between ending at 9:15 and leaving the office around 10:50 to get the room set up in the next class is just wasted for me, no matter how much I try to get something done. It's too long to sit and waste, but it's also not enough to get any serious grading done (and most of my preps are done at the beginning of each semester, with just a few minutes to look over and add in daily updates as needed). I get little things, like recording attendance, done, but between "coming down" after teaching and then getting ready to go again--which really is a thing for introverts like me--and then running into a colleague in the hall, etc., I just don't get a lot done.

At home, when papers come in at Sunday midnight, I can sit down and blast through a lot of work on Monday from about 6:30-3 p.m.; I pick up the rest and finish up by noon/early afternoon Tuesday.  When I'm F2F, it generally takes me a week (or sometimes a day or two more) to get all the grading done.

I find I'm also better and faster about answering emails when I'm at home.  Even on my "off"/non-office hour days, I check messages every morning and take care of them right then, rather than flagging them to look at later.

Of course, I've taught online a lot every semester for 15+ years, and I don't have kids at home (though I did all through the same commute, grad school, and adjuncting).  My household productivity is better too--I can throw in a load of laundry and then flip it to the dryer and then fold it, or load and empty the dishwasher, or water my flowers, during short breaks between papers.  When I have to teach F2F, I'm usually too wiped out to feel like doing much when I finally get home.  YMMV.

[polly_mer]

I'm in the opposite situation as pigou: short-term productivity is way down because "everyone" had to set up everything to work from home in the slowest, most painful way, but long-term productivity is likely to be up since we now can work from home effectively instead of limiting ourselves to the time in the office.

I'm definitely feeling the problems from lack of the random encounters or even just the efficiency of swinging by someone's office or picking up the phone and knowing they are likely available during normal work hours.  We're finding a new normal as various teams, but it's been a painful process.

[mamselle]

This article just showed up in my news feed:

    https://boston.cbslocal.com/2020/06/22/work-from-home-burnout-cbs-news-cambridge-massachusetts/amp/

Mostly seems to tie to family interactions, so less broadly applicable for those not so affected.

M.

[traductio]

I'm not teaching this summer, although I'm prepping my classes for fall (all online -- our administration at least had the good sense just to make a decision, plus we're in Canada where these decisions are somewhat less overtly political as in the States). I'm writing more, but that's because when I'm stressed out, I write. But my kids have been off of school as long as I have, and juggling competing virtual schedules has made it harder to get things done. On the other hand, we're all sleeping in longer, which means we're all staying up later, which means I get most of my productive work done from midnight until 2am.

[spork]

No change so far, since technically I'm off contract for the summer. But I expect a huge increase for the fall semester -- I will not have a commute or home child care responsibilities. I'm designing my courses that are usually F2F as online, which means I get to place even more responsibility for students' learning on the students. No more of that "I went to every single class and he didn't teach anything" crap on end-of-semester evaluations.

[onthefringe]

Service/committee meetings are more efficient because I don't have to get to and from them, and people are (so far) much less likely to take the floor in a virtual meeting to explain that they agree with personX for 9 reasons which they will now enumerate in full.

Teaching is probably not much more difficult, but definitely less effective (clearly if I were committed to online, it would get better as far as effectiveness, but be more work up front)

My molecular biology lab-based research is in the toilet. Even now, when the lab is getting up and running again, the inability to have spontaneous face to face meetings with my lab staff is a huge problem.

The university pandemic practice of "Drop everything and fill out 4 critical spreadsheets in the next 48 hours that chart the course of your department for the next two years" followed 72 hours later by "Maybe that wasn't what we wanted, how about these different spreadsheets" is consuming all the commute time I'm saving +400%.

I used to get most of my exercise by deliberately parking 0.8 miles from my office (it's a big campus) amd now my fitbit thinks I died.