Adjunct Instructors' Guide to Organization
Last week I shared with you the issues that I have working as an adjunct instructor for three colleges. Currently, I am under contract with two online universities and a community college. It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep everything straight. I needed to develop methods to keep me organized.
After spending all of these years in health information management, I should be able to figure out a way to organize my professional life.
The first step toward organization is setting up a system to maintain the reference material that I frequently use for each school. I set up binders and labeled them by school. The information in the binders include course syllabi, school calendar, policies and procedures and phone numbers of important contacts. Information that I refer to daily includes the course syllabus. I am always referring back to the syllabus to answer a student's question. I placed the syllabus in a plastic sleeve in the front of the binder. I refer to this document so often that it becomes easily mangled during the course of the term. Although all of this information is available online, it easier for me to pull the appropriate school binder and flip right to the section I need. These binders are my lifeline and are there as a quick reference. Since all the schools have different policies and procedures, this has helped me to keep them as separate entities.
The second step involved me getting one calendar to keep track of tasks and activities associated with all three schools. Instead of having three different calendars, working with one centralized calendar makes it easier to daily glance at what I must accomplish that day. The online schools require me to attend faculty meetings and continuing education workshops. This avoids the embarrassment of forgetting to attend the meeting. Also, I am able to track my continuing education for each school by logging in the number of hours and the type of educational workshop. After I complete each task or activity, I check it off the calendar. I don't have to second guess myself.
The third step is to build in frequent breaks to allow myself some down time. Since I have been working online non-stop this summer, it is not unusual for me not to leave my home for a 2-day stretch. I would wake up in the morning and think about all the papers I have to grade, the discussion boards that need to be facilitated and e-mails that must be answered. I became so caught up in what I was doing that I lost all track of time. This is certainly not healthy for me to continue with this type of behavior. I can easily become emotionally and physically exhausted trying to keep up this pace. Taking time out for myself has made me relax and enjoy the benefits from working from home.
The fourth step involves setting up a schedule to work on the courses for each school. I set aside a block of time each day to work on a particular course at each school. This involves blocking off time for each school and performing those tasks that are a priority for that day. This works better than trying to complete everything single task for each school. The beauty of block time schedules is that it allows me to give equal time to each school. My commitment to each school is distributed equally.
This experience has taught me a lot about managing my time wisely. The most important less learned is that I can only accomplish so much in a given day. After all, Rome was not build in a day!