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How faculty distribute their time?

In our most recent "how can we help you?" thread, a reader asks:

I'm interested in how faculty distribute their time across different research activities (reading, drafting, writing, and revising) during three periods: the teaching term, academic breaks, and sabbatical.

As a grad student without service responsibilities and limited teaching responsibilities, I'm trying to understand how research productivity is managed alongside other obligations.

This is a good query, and I'm curious to hear from others. Here how I'd estimate my breakdown:

  • Teaching terms –> Teaching = 60-70%, Service = 20-30%, Research = 10%
  • Summer & winter breaks –> Research = 95%, service 5% (and vacation)
  • Sabbatical –> Research = 95-99%, Miscellaneous = 1-5%

What about other readers?

Posted in , , ,

10 responses to “How faculty distribute their time?”

  1. ChastenedAuthor

    In my experience, most of the writing done during the teaching term is editing, whether that’s for an R&R, responding to reviewer reports and sending a paper back out, or working on a rough draft of a paper to get it ready for submission.
    I try to spend 1 hr. a day doing some writing during the teacher term. If I have a R&R, then this writing time becomes non-negotiable.
    During breaks, I do a lot of actual writing for ideas that I have fleshed out and are ready to be written. The breaks give me time to write, and they are short enough that it provides a soft deadline to try and finish a rough draft.
    Most of the research, for me, tends to take place during summer breaks or sabbaticals. During a summer, I try to get four papers lined up that I want to finish for submission the next year (i.e. I would like to have them ready to submit in January after the Christmas holidays).
    By doing this, I usually get two ready for submission by January, one ends up becoming more of a conference paper, and usually one fizzles out on me before January.

    Reply
  2. Bill V.

    I think this varies a lot. Depending on how many courses you have, how many different preps, how many new preps, how many students in each section, and how much teaching experience you have over all, teaching can eat up a lot of time or not that much. The first time I taught my own course, I prepped about six hours for every hour I taught. That was way too much even at that career stage. Now I’ve got new preps down to one or two hours for every hour in class. For classes I’ve taught before, it is almost nothing–usually I just review my slides in office hours before going to class. (For new online preps it is a lot more, with the advantage that you never have to do any prep again for that course if you record your lectures.)
    I’ve found that while I can write intensely for 8-12 hours a day, that is unsustainable. After a few weeks, that ends up being followed by weeks or months of no research productivity. For me, four hours per day is about the most philosophy I can do if I want to keep doing it indefinitely. Even that level is difficult to reach if prepping new classes, and impossible during heavy grading periods. Ebbs and flows.
    My most successful writing periods, including in term breaks and sabbaticals, have been when I set a goal of writing a page, two pages, or (most recently on a book project) 1000 words per day. I stay at my desk until I hit the mark, and get up when I hit it unless I’m really in flow.

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  3. Grant

    I work in a teaching oriented department at a state university with a 3:3 teaching load.
    During the teaching term, I am like 70-80% for teaching (broadly construed, including undergraduate academic advising, honors thesis advising, independent studies, etc.); 15-20% service (mostly administrative, such as various, and endless…, committees meetings); 5-10% research.
    During academic breaks, I do not work “full time”. But for my working time, I use 80% of my time doing research, and maybe 20% for teaching-related reading/prep.
    For sabbatical, I unfortunately am not productive in terms of writing. I spend way more time than I expect to just catch up with the ongoing literature on the topics that I am interested in. For the last sabbatical (a semester), I felt like I spent 1/3 of my time on writing, 1/3 on research-related reading, and 1/3 on reading things I enjoy but not directly related to my research (both academic and non-academic works).

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  4. Trevor Hedberg

    I’ve had 3 different jobs with radically different expectations regarding the workload. In my first appointment (a research postdoc), I think 60-70% of my time was allocated to research even during the fall and spring semesters (although this was curtailed a bit during the time I was on the job market). In my second appointment (also a postdoc), there were more teaching responsibilities, and they were especially demanding during the remote learning shift that happened in 2020. That job on the whole was probably something more like 40% research, 40% teaching, and 20% service.
    In my current post, the official workload expectation is 60% teaching, 20% research, and 20% service. The teaching and service work is definitely greater than my previous appointments, so a lot of my research gets done in the summer. I don’t have enough cognitive bandwidth to do a ton of writing during the months of Feb – April or Oct – Dec, so any research I do during that time is usually limited to light revisions or a conference presentation.

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  5. SAD

    For a non-sabbatical term, here is the breakdown I adopt for myself –> Teaching = 40%, Service = 15%, Research = 45%.
    Here is how my time actually tends to break down, in the end: teaching 50%, Service, 10 %, Research, 10%, dealing with others (colleagues near and far, students, former students, etc.) who need, want or expect something from me urgently, 30%. Call this category Soft Academic Duties (SAD).
    Why isn’t this last category teaching or service? Because it’s outside the duties attaching to my official job: it’s stuff like giving feedback to a colleague who has done the same, or who would; closely, carefully reading papers others are workshopping; having “lunch” with a colleague working on something similar; writing letters of recommendation; dealing with incomplete or outstanding issues from ex-students or guidance to future or would-be students; departmental politics; mediation; doing favors; arguments with far-flung academics that are crucial to the development and correct portrayal of one’s own work, etc. And this is just a sample. It’s a large category, and it’s not f**king around because it’s all stuff I kind of need to do whether I feel like it or not.
    As you enter the profession, you’ll need to budget for this amorphous category, too, especially if you’re at a place that highly values research.

    Reply
  6. Daniel Weltman

    I am absolutely terrible at keeping track of time so these are extremely rough estimates:
    Teaching terms –> Teaching = 60%, Service = 5-15%, Research = 25-35%
    Breaks –> Teaching = 25%, Research = 70%, Service 5%
    Sabbatical –> Research = 85%, Teaching 15%
    I do a lot of “teaching” during breaks because I do a lot of prep for my courses. This is how I keep my teaching relatively low during the term. During sabbatical I have “teaching” because I basically always have thesis students I’m supervising and independent studies I’m leading.

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  7. 3/2

    My teaching load is 3/2. I probably work 30-35 hours a week and my division of labor is probably in the neighborhood of 60% research, 35% teaching, 5% service.

    Reply
  8. Prepper

    Thanks for the helpful comments. I’m interested to pick up on what Marcus and Bill said about teaching prep.
    Marcus: It’s encouraging to hear that you have so much time for teaching in the breaks. I’m curious what teaching prep looks like for you, and when you find time to do this? (Apologies if this is off-topic!)
    Bill: It’s also encouraging to hear that you’re able to prep for one / two hours for every class hour. I’m curious what your approach is to reading the assigned readings? Do you read them in depth, skim them, or just assign readings you already know?
    (I ask of all this as a junior philosopher who spends far too much time prepping and can’t figure out how to stop!)

    Reply
  9. spreadsheet haver

    I suspect much depends not just on job type but on on career stage. Here are my average numbers in two years as a VAP with a 3/3.
    – During semesters: 46 hours/week with 64% teaching, 13% job market stuff, 7% service, 6% research, 6% conference stuff, 4% miscellaneous.
    – During breaks: 28 hours/week with 36% research, 22% teaching, 17% conference stuff, 13% job market stuff, 12% miscellaneous.
    (Obviously it matters what counts in what category, e.g., by ‘conference stuff’ I mean both organizing, which I do annually, and attending sessions, workshops, etc. that I am not speaking at. Miscellaneous is a lot of personal admin type stuff and whatever else doesn’t neatly fit into a category).

    Reply
  10. Bill V.

    Prepper, thanks for the question. I used to prep far too many hours. I made a change to something more reasonable by realizing a couple of things about learning:
    First, the point isn’t to “cover” the material (i.e., exhaustively explain every part of a reading) but rather to highlight some key points, make connections to other material in the course, and explain one or three especially tricky or interesting arguments. Humans simply cannot hang on to more than a bit of info in each class period, so going whole hog on all the details is a waste of their time as well as yours.
    Second, in-class reading quizzes, Q&A, group and whole class discussion, think-pair-share, and other forms of active learning are useful for motivating students (not so great for info transfer, but good for other things) and having at least some part of the period when the students are talking instead of me, means I don’t have to prep as much. (This becomes increasingly true with each subsequent time you teach a course, of course.) Add to this in-class writing assignments to combat the use of AI and that’s even less time you have to be pontificating.
    I haven’t tried the “flipped classroom” approach in awhile, and I wonder whether it could work in this era when students typically don’t read anything at all let alone the assigned readings for the class. But the idea is that you really become a “guide on the side”: Students are supposed to be fully responsible for knowing the material before they come to class, and in-class activities are mostly discussion-based ways of checking, reinforcing, applying and extending what they learned in the readings and the other pre-class activities (like watching online videos or recorded lectures–not necessarily your own).

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