by Josh Bedford

It was a fairly clear night. I peered out the window of row 20, seat C on the Southwest Airlines flight back to Indiana. I could see our 737-jet plane lightly glide across the scattered clouds in the night sky. As I gazed across the nocturnal landscape of Middle America, I could see the brightly lit city centers surrounded by the quiet dimness of the outer suburbs. I found myself enamored by the ability to peek into the end of people’s days as they turned down for rest.

A thought crept into my mind: “Damn, I have a lot of essays to grade.” Then panic set in. “I have to prepare for comps; they begin in just two weeks!” Suddenly, the serenity and peacefulness of the night vanished, ruined by impending deadlines and pressures of academic life.

How many of us have had these thoughts in recent weeks? Where can I find the time to complete all of my duties as a graduate student and a WIP TA? I wonder if my students will appreciate all the time I put into their assignments? What sacrifices do I need to make with family, friends, and other social outlets to complete this work? (It’s only fitting that as I type this, the plane descends into the emptiness of a cloud, rendering the view I once had invisible.) Some of these questions might be a bit melodramatic, but we all encounter them in one form or the other throughout our lives as graduate teaching assistants. It is easy to let these thoughts overwhelm you. But if you become overwhelmed, what does that do for you as a writing coach? How can we compartmentalize these thoughts in such a way that they will not interfere with our ability to be effective writing coaches?

My thoughts seem to come out of our earlier discussions about millennials and their want/need for a work-life balance. You can find quite a few articles and blogs about “work-life balance” in academia using Google, but work always gets lumped into one giant category that contains multiple meanings for different individuals. However in our situations, it seems that what we are after is a work-work-life balance. We have our work (as WIP TAs), our other work (as graduate students), and life (family, partners, exercise, fun, etc.). Instead of looking at this balance in a binary system of opposing forces vying for time, I think it is more beneficial to observe this in a tripartite way. By dividing work into two separate categories, it forces us to think about how our division of time can affect all of those around us, including the students we wish to help.

The biggest part of balancing work and life starts with time management. Throughout my time as a TA, and especially as a WIP TA, this has been the most difficult (full disclosure: this blog post was due in October—it’s November now). It’s easy to figure out how time management affects our own lives (both work and play), but how does it affect your students (the other part of your work)? I think the main effect of poor time management on your students is a lack of trust or reliability. Poor time management can result in missed meetings, poor workshops, unhelpful conferences, or even disengagement with their work. Each of these can instill feelings of discontent in your student and can discourage them overall to work hard for you if it seems that you won’t work hard for them.

As writing coaches, we should be concerned about this effect of poor time management because students might not want to improve writing if you don’t show interest in them through your time management. But this is not to say that our time management must result in a complete shift in focus from our own work and life to just the students. Nor does this mean that all of the responsibility for student motivation falls completely on our time management.

What might be a positive outcome for your students from your time management? An obvious short answer would be the opposite of the negative consequences of poor time management. But in order to fit within the scope of a work-work-life balance, there is the potential for learning to take place. This is only accomplished if you attempt to put restrictions on the time you elect to spend working on your students’ assignments (this includes conferences and other one-on-one meeting types). Don’t try to go the extra mile for the students (unless there are extraordinary circumstances involved), because you’ll compromise the other work and life components of your overall work-work-life balance. Furthermore, you’ll perpetuate a system of poor time management for your students. They might assume that you’ll be willing to bend on your deadlines, allowing them an opportunity to misappropriate their own time and put off their assignments. Perhaps good time management can also raise your expectations for the students to be responsible for their own assignments and the timely manner in which they complete them.

As coaches, we can also try to use examples of personal time management to encourage good writing strategies. One of the main tenants of our pedagogical philosophy is to create a process of writing. The term process already indicates a time-consuming activity due to the implication that it takes multiple steps to complete. Thus, our strategy of draft/ revise/final (or other variants of this model) bears resemblance to our own personal work-work-life model in which time must be distributed to create an effective balance between the three pieces. Exhibiting good time management in our personal lives has the potential to transfer into our students’ writing by providing concrete examples of time management outside of the writing process.