Evaluating Personal Productivity in Academic Pharmacy
The Idea
Recently I have seen alot of designers laying out their output and work over time. The concept of a chronodex was discussed on several blogs, and I took the opportunity to track my work since the beginning of the year. That being the case I tried to summarize the work done in simple infographic since January. The data encapsulates 1,176 hours, based on 7 weeks and including weekends. While most of it is accurate, probably around 20 hours are off, which can be attributed to driving and other odds and end activities that I feel we never really take into account we divest so much time into.
As a background of reference for those that do not know what I do, my main work as an Assistant Professor of Pharmacy Practice boils down into several areas:
- Clinic - A majority of my time is spent focused on doing work at a Heart Failure Clinic, where I take students on rotation, and serve as a pharmacist for clinical services and activities. Much of this work focusses on reviewing patient data, education, and other services required.
- Student Precepting - I take at least 3-4 students per rotation block (6 weeks in length). These students will be engaged at the clinic, and off site doing discussions and other projects, which I oversee. Other students are part of my elective research rotation, and that takes a different amount of work.
- Teaching & Facilitating - Probably the one area that makes the most sense, but in reality is probably the most influx depending on the time of year. I struggled when making this infographic was do I include odds and end teaching activities such as grading or email and further one on one interaction with students? I elected not to in this case. The time period encapsulated in this example is a relatively moderate teaching period for me, and only has 4 lectures, 5 laboratory sessions, and about 4 other classroom activities. It does not include lecture prep time which I think I will track and record in the future.
- Meetings and Committee Work - Odd and end activities such as monthly faculty and department meetings and other responsibilities.
- Writing & Research - Publish or die, as the saying goes.
Infographic of Work Productivity
Highlights of Infographic
There were several things I learned about my activities over the course of creating this infographic.
- The amount of sleep and free time I have dramatically goes down when I am teaching int he classroom or have multiple deadlines approaching
- Meetings suck up alot of time
- I spend alot of my personal time writing for different agencies and for research and scholarship activities
- It is difficult for me to tell if I am on task compared to others in my field or how my time invested differs.
I welcome anyones thoughts or opinions!