Last week, I started an internship at the Scholars’ Lab made possible by the PhD+ Program at UVA. This means that, during the Fall semester, I get to support the student programs, Lab initiatives, and labor of the folks that over the past four years have modeled for me how scholarship can be a liberating personal and professional practice, a genuine exercise at human connection.

The position involves a series of tasks with varying levels of depth that touch on curriculum development, pedagogical practice, documentation development, consultations, and institutional regulations. These topics speak directly to my professional goals to hone in skills and gain experience working in positions that support and develop scholarship within the realm of digital humanities, going beyond the space of academic departments. It is a tailored internship that was collaboratively conceived between my internship supervisor, Brandon Walsh, and me. Brandon is the Head of Student Programs at the Scholars’ Lab, and working closely with him in an official capacity has been a dream for a long time now. I could not ask for a better boss, mentor, and friend to guide and support my professionalization journey as I take steps to position myself as a young working professional about to enter the job market, rather than as a student.¹

Brandon’s ongoing commitment to critical digital pedagogy, as a philosophy and active practice, has profoundly changed my own relationship to learning and teaching. Through mentorship meetings, article discussions, workshop practices, and collaborative writing exercises, our collaborations were a catalyst I desperately needed to begin imagining and theorizing what I want in my personal relationship to pedagogy as well as the shape of the pedagogical spaces I envision fostering.

While this inaugural blog post highlights why this internship is meaningful to me, as a 6th-year PhD candidate, Brandon’s latest blog post reflects on the role of a supervisor and shares details about the main tasks I will tackle over the semester.

My main goals are to strengthen my ties to this community and make new friends, though I also anticipate making plenty of mistakes as I make my way to small wins and achievements. Grappling with failure and process are, after all, essential parts of digital humanities scholarship and labor due to their historical connection to coding, as Quinn Dombrowski has pointed out. I welcome the attention in DH to individual working experiences, especially when it addresses navigating failure and reflecting on labor processes, as a methodological sandbox to practice patience with myself. Within the internship, I plan to exercise this knowledge to continue unlearning the culture surrounding academic hierarchy that is based on degree, tenure, rank, or institutional influence. I want commitment, accountability, labor, skills, and consistent kindness, instead, to guide who I come to respect and whose respect I earn, regardless of ranks. Moreover, I want these to be the values I use to assign my own labor value.

At a time of uncertainty, fear, and massive funding cuts, I envision my PhD+ internship at the Scholars’ Lab to be a nurturing space of experimentation where I can shape the kind of laborer I want to become, post-PhD, in a crumbling social environment that desperately cries for sustainable practices of care.

This semester I’ve got former Praxis fellow Winnie Pérez Martínez working with me in the Scholars’ Lab as an intern through UVA’s PhD Plus Program. These internships are meant to be 10-hour-a-week hands-on gigs that replace a student’s teaching obligations for a semester. At the same time, the internship introduces students to the skills and experiences that they’ll need to pursue a variety of different kinds of careers—in and out of academia. I’ve never had someone report directly to me in this way, assisting with my day-to-day work instead of directly collaborating on research. So I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what it might mean to be a responsible supervisor. I want this internship to be constructed in a way that provides Winnie with a positive and fulfilling experience at the same time that it assists with Lab tasks. Winnie and I developed a plan for the internship together to maximize the impact on her, so here are a few notes about what she’ll be doing with us from my perspective. Stay tuned for more from her on the blog in due time.

Bookend the week with check-ins

We’ve set up a structure that frames each week of the semester around a pair of opening and closing meetings. Each Monday morning, we have a 30-minute scrum in which we’ll discuss the week. During that time, we each share our responses to three questions (one minute max for the lot of them):

• What did I do?
• What’s next for me?
• What do I need from somebody else?

For the remainder of our time, we discuss our plans, upcoming meetings, and any other topics that need conversation. These meetings are brief, but they’re a way for us to practice accountability to each other. They are as much for me as for Winnie. I have a tendency to lean towards flexibility and independence with my students, so we co-created this system to make sure we don’t waste this opportunity to work together.

We end each week with a 30-minute bookend on Friday afternoon. During that time, we will debrief everything that went on the past several days. We’ll plan on a different set of questions for those meetings and have Winnie drive the conversation:

• What did I learn?
• What do I want to discuss?
• What would help me next week?

This weekly structure will offer a framework for our time together such that we consistently check in and adjust as we’re going.

The tasks

Winnie and I co-developed a series of different tasks for her to work on. When we first sat down to discuss the internship, I distinguished among a range of task categories:

• Things that are specifically useful for me and the Scholars’ Lab.
• Things that are enriching and fulfilling for Winnie.
• The broad area of overlap between the first two categories.

I told Winnie I was very uninterested in having her work on tasks that were solely of use to the Lab and not fulfilling at all for her. Instead, I wanted to prioritize the other two areas. We took to the whiteboard and drew up a range of jobs before we categorized them according to whom they helped.

We decided on a mix of different kinds of labor, some of which I’ll talk about in a later blog post. But I wanted to offer some broad buckets for the kind of work that Winnie will be doing.

Shadowing

Winnie will be sitting in on some meetings as appropriate. Most of my consultations tend to be with students interested in pursuing new research in DH or who want to learn more about the fellowships. I want Winnie to get a taste for that work, so she will be joining a conversation here and there and contributing her thoughts.

Blogging

Winnie will be writing for the site as a way to fill out her professional profile. Topics will be of her choosing, and she will decide how to shape the writing in a way that compliments the other work she does.

Curricular design

Winnie will be joining planning meetings for our fellowships to see how we go about putting together our programs from the backend. For example, I introduced her to my process for how I set things up for the new Praxis cohort every year. We started from basics, copying everything over and modifying dates. Then we discussed changes to make, why, and I went over how I communicate with staff and students about the new year. She will also run a few brainstorming sessions for us on redesigning our fellowships’ structures. Students always have unique perspectives on their experiences, and I don’t want to waste Winnie’s expertise.

Projects

And then there are the actual projects that I’m going to have Winnie work on. I have three in mind, and she’ll talk a little bit more about those in future blog posts. But here is a taste.

Project 1 - fellowship documentation

Winnie will be updating my “hit by a bus” documentation for our fellowship application committees. Two years ago, when I was on paternity leave, I put together an extensive document for Laura Miller that told her everything she needed to know to run one of our fellowship application committees in my absence. I shared everything from “the CFP goes out on this date to these people” to “if you get questions of this nature you should write to these contacts in the Graduate School.” I also shared a lot of template emails and gave suggestions for how to run meetings. Winnie is going to update this documentation and make parallel materials for our other fellowship committee. These documents are useful for others who might run a committee in my absence, but they’re also helpful for me. No matter how many times I’ve done this work, I always forget the sequence of communication for certain elements of the process.

Project 2 - alumni data

Our current set of data on alumni outcomes was started by Rennie Mapp and her RA years back. That spreadsheet collects information about all the different students that have come through our programs and where they wound up. We did some good work updating those materials, but that data hasn’t been touched in several years. Winnie is going to do a pass over the data to update it with our most recent students.

Project 3 - update development packet

In conjunction with her work on our alumni data, Winnie is going to be updating the packet that we give to our development office as they pursue long term stable funding for our fellowships. We have had several versions of this packet over the years, some directed for specific audiences. These materials typically describe our programs, discuss demographics and alumni data, offer sample projects and project links, and more. The packet is about five years out of date. I want Winnie to read through it, highlight everything that needs attention, and then work with me to update things.

So that’s where we’re going to start. You’ll be hearing more from us over the coming semester as we work together. My hope is that this post outlines a partnership in the spirit of the Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Student Collaborators Bill of Rights, the Postdoctoral Laborers Bill of Rights, and more. I want to make sure that we’re designing a program, first and foremost, based around the values that we want to bring to the collaboration. This internship should be useful for her—not just for the Lab. Ultimately the Scholars’ Lab will benefit as well, but we will lead with experiences that serve both of us.

Job ads in higher education are confusing. This is especially true of digital humanities positions that can combine multiple positions—faculty, staff, student—into one. Students might have a particularly hard time decoding these job ads. I often find that the fellows I work with need some help learning to read and decipher these postings so they can feel confident seeking out and applying for their first DH job. The Association for Computers in the Humanities sometimes runs panels designed to discuss these skills. I thought I would share my own professional development activity that I often run with students to build this literacy.

You will need:

• Three printed DH job ads
  • This can be tricky, as most job ads disappear once they are filled. You can still find some evidence of a posting here or there from organizations that crosspost them outside of the institutional HR site. H-net has a series of job listings, for example, and Code4Lib does not seem to take down their copies of old jobs. I think it works well to have different kinds of jobs in the mix - one faculty, one administrator, and one programer position, for example.
• A space for conversation
  • If it’s just you and one other person you could go for coffee. Otherwise I could imagine this working in small groups.
• 60 minutes for the activity

From there, I have students spend roughly 10 minutes looking at a job and 10 minutes discussing it before repeating twice more for the other two positions. As they move through, I ask students what they notice about each job:

• What seems consistent?
• What is different about each position?
• What is confusing?
• What would make them confident applying to it?

As I go, I balance the students’ reflections with my own, and I try to guide the conversation around a specific set of topics that students are most likely to need help understanding: qualifications, responsibilities, the institutional history, and the ethics of the job. Below I share some of the things I try to point out in those conversations.

Qualifications

While qualifications often aren’t the first part of a job posting, they’re frequently the thing that students gravitate towards when seeing an ad for the first time. I think this comes from a position of anxiety. Students often are insecure in their own qualifications, and so they see a list of skills and methods and immediately feel like they don’t qualify. So some familiarity in how to understand lists of qualifications might be helpful. To begin, I often tell students to look for specific words like “and” or “or.” Does the job ask for Python, R, and JavaScript? Or does the job ask for just one of the three? Sometimes, this might even be worded as “the ability to solve technical problems with a programming language of your choice.” These distinctions might seem small, but they are often an indicator of whether or not a job is looking for a unicorn—a position that wants you to be expert in everything under the sun. In a list that asks for one or two skills out of a list you can often take them at their word. Pay attention to whether the job gives you opportunity to not know everything.

I often describe a DH job as consisting of many different kinds of buckets where each category corresponds to specific topics or methods. Some examples of these might include critical making, text analysis, 3D modeling, GIS, programming, database design, digital archives, or more. Together, in some combination, these buckets make up a job. A person. No one will actually have expertise in every single one of these things. But most professional DHers are familiar some arrangement of them and expert in a smaller subset. I often encourage students to think of themselves in these terms when starting out: identify one specific area of expertise and and then several more for familiarity.¹ I encourage the students to see the big buckets. What are they familiar with? What do they have expertise in? Sometimes a job posting will list “preferred qualifications,” a handy way to directly map the job needs to your own hierarchy of familiarity and expertise. I encourage students not to be dismayed if the position in front of them does not match up to their own profile. Instead, think about how they can develop a plan to grow the timeframe that they have. They might not fit this job, but they can have the right buckets next time.

Responsibilities

The responsibilities for a position are often where you can find out what the job will actually be doing, so it can be helpful to read these in conversation with the listed skills and qualifications. Sometimes they will give you a sense of what skills are actually likely to be key and which are more icing on the cake. If the qualifications don’t seem to line up to the responsibilities that’s probably an indication that the job might be an untenable one, or that it might be pulled in too many directions. Approach these gigs with caution.

Digital Humanities positions can be a whole broad range of things. Sometimes the job titles aren’t very descriptive. You might see something like a DH specialist, a DH coordinator, a DH librarian, and those words don’t necessarily tell you a lot about the specific institutional needs for that position. The same job title can mean very different things at different places. The responsibilities are where you were more typically find more about what would actually be asked of you. Sometimes the descriptions of responsibilities are not especially helpful. They might list things like “responsible for collaborating with faculty,” “teaches a variety of workshops,” or other kinds of generic descriptors that might only give you a general indication of what the job is. Sometimes, you’ll be luckier. An ad might list the specific projects that you would be directly involved in overseeing and implementing, as in “responsible for the development and maintenance of a digital archive of XYZ.” Those are things to note and to speak to in a cover letter and interview. But even if they aren’t explicitly listed in the position description you can often do some research on the institutional history to fill out what is left unsaid. More below.

Institutional History

Now we’re getting into a place where humanities research skills can really shine. While the institutional history of a position often isn’t technically a specific part of the job description, it can teach you an awful lot. You can learn a lot by by exploring a series of questions:

• Is this job a new job?
• Is it re-hiring someone who left?
• Is it for a grant?

You can often find some of this information by looking back at an organization’s website, on their blog, event pages, and more. Did someone seem to be in this role before that you can identify? While position re-hires are often opportunities to rethink what a particular job does, you can get a lot of valuable information by trying to flag exactly what the previous person in this position was doing. What kind of projects and events did they seem to be talking about? Those were likely their direct work responsibilities, and you can sometimes map those directly onto what the new job is asking of you. While you might not want to speak with full confidence in a cover letter, you could reference the history of the work this role seemed to do in a way that shows your familiarity with the institution. Similarly, if the job appears new, that would seem to suggest that the institution is committing to a new kind of work. Does the job correspond to specific initiatives or efforts? Sometimes this information will be in the job description directly. If the position is grant-funded you can often find that information either in the job description itself or in a grant announcement. If the grant was specifically awarded for a digital archiving project, you can assume that digital archiving skills are likely to be essential for it. Whereas if they are hiring for a DH generalist and list digital archives as just one of many responsibilities, you can assume that such work will just be one of many things you would take on. This kind of information can help you to assess how qualified you are, how to talk about specific elements from your background, and whether or not the job is for you.

On Job Ethics

Given my own convictions about labor transparency and ethics, I like to point out any potential issues with the jobs we are looking at. Are we looking at a job with a fixed term? Is it renewable? Is the salary livable? Does it seem to be doing too much? Is this a job that has been posted many times and never filled? Is the institution known to be toxic? Some of this will only come with experience in the field, but you can also give the students a bit of literacy in how to perform a smell test of a particular job ad. Of course, each individual will have their own set of circumstances to weigh when applying to any given position. And a one-year, fixed position might make a lot of sense for someone who is local. But I always want to make sure that students know the issues with jobs like these and how untenable they can be. We often don’t locally advertise jobs to our students in the Lab if they don’t pass the smell test unless we know of people whose specific goals and geographic limitations match up with a particular opportunity. At the very least, we want to make sure that students enter into the job search with eyes open.

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There is much more to say, of course, but hopefully this quick writeup gives someone out there the tools they need to run this activity for themselves. I find that it helps to demystify the DH job market for students and helps them feel empowered to take that next step themselves. Perhaps most importantly, it starts to peel back obscuring layers of HR-ness and starts to make DH as a professional field a bit more transparent. That’s often the first step towards students feeling more invited into the professional community, and it can help them make a plan for developing the kind of institutional profile that they will need to apply successfully in the future.

(Part 3 of a 3-part series: see also the 1st post on email practices and some caveats about my particular academic job context, and the 2nd post on Slack, task management, meeting notes.)

My previous two blog posts shared some of the ways I approach “work chores” (email, Slack, tasks) to keep them more sustainable. In this third post, I wanted to share a bit about how I try to do things as a manager/director re:similar expectations-impacted work-chore practices, so that my colleagues in the lab can also try or use the approaches to work that work best for them.

Not just asking about work sustainability; offering to act

As a manager, I try to regularly check in: Do you have time blocked out for focus, work-chores, time off? But I try to not only ask “are you doing these theoretically useful approaches”; I also want to discuss if the person needs those or wants something different; what is making it difficult to use these or other work-management approaches; what can we do to make this all more sustainable. Do you need actions from me/other colleagues to support that, e.g. changing deadlines, moving or cancelling meetings, changing communication formats (emails, Slack, meetings), notes from a meeting you can’t make? If you’re going to ask if people have time blocked out for needed things like focus and time off, being prepared with possible ways to help if they don’t makes sense.

Where expectations are needed, make them as loose as possible

As a manager, I try to make space for others to figure out the what, when, how of the practices that work best for them. To do this, I try to communally discuss and set agreements on what outcomes are critical (e.g. impact colleagues and people we support) and which are nice to have; and to let folks know they can question and advocate for something different these expectations, which are often ultimately somewhat arbitrary (e.g. why answer most emails within 2 workdays rather than 3 or 4?). I try to keep expectations as high-level and brief as possible—setting these as what’s fine for us to generally at least meet, rather than what’s ideal (but not required to happen all the time—or at all, if doing so impedes other work/focus/non-work time). And I try to talk about my reasoning for expectations, since that can often be useful context (e.g. something that isn’t a big issue if 1 person does it, but I ask for because I have not 1 but 10 full-time staff reporting through me, so effect of approach x multiple people may be a big issue) or allow my colleague to suggest alternatives that still meet my goals while also meeting theirs.

For example, when responding to our lab’s consult listserv, we want people to feel welcomed and know they’ve contacted folks who will get them to the right place, even if that isn’t ultimately the lab. We do also balance a lot of consultations against longer projects, teaching, fieldwork, events, etc., and try to set public expectations of our availability for consultations as usually 2-3 weeks out from original email date (though we can meet faster when there’s an urgent need). So our expectation is that we try to have someone on staff reply to any initial message requesting a consultation with us, to us within two workdays if possible; but that reply can simply be “thanks for your message; we’re discussing internally, and will get back you with more by [DATE]” if needed. This is useful when an ask requires us to talk to colleagues in different units about a project’s history, ID whether anyone has some specific software experience, and/or when multiple relevant staff across units might all be available to attend a consultation together.

This meets our goals of making sure the person contacting us feels welcomed and knows we’ll be helping them, but also does not require staff to constantly check or reply to email. As with my post on personal email/etc. approaches, we often reply to folks within the same day! But setting the minimum bar higher is good for making sure folks can set boundaries on email management, and also get non-email work done.

I try to emphasize communication over conformance: it’s okay if you need more time, need to change plans, etc. But the way you make this not adversely impact colleagues is by communicating as early as possible when you need a change and why. (E.g. if you’re repeatedly asking for extensions after deadlines pass instead of well before, it could be a sign that deadlines are being set too soon, you have too much work, or something else we should work on making more sustainable.)

Look for ways to support others’ needs

We know other Library colleagues sometimes have in-person, or urgent questions from visitors for us. While protecting time to do the kinds of focused work we’re tasked with (and acknowledging we’re not staffed to have someone guaranteed available and able to drop their work at any time for unscheduled non-emergency drop-ins), we’ve got several approaches to staying available to other Library staff, including:

• Our consult listserv goes to our whole team of 12 people, so even if each person is only checking email once a day (not the norm), when that happens would vary enough we’re getting someone seeing incoming emails who can usually note if something’s urgent.
• We use Slack a bunch, and its notification settings make it easy for us to find each other and ask for a quicker reply, when one’s actually needed.
• We’ve set “core staff hours” when it’s most likely you can find a free staffer somewhere in the lab, and shared these with library circulation desks; as well as non-public, broader core times when at least several of us are physically in the lab and findable if needed.

Ultimately, we are privileged to encounter few work-related emergencies (e.g. site is down before a conference talk about it; water is leaking into the makerspace; short-notice funding possibility). We try to make our availability and response practices clear, so folks know how and when they can find us.

Part 2 of a 3-part series: notes on what works for me, when managing alt-academic job work-chores. This one covers Slack, tasks, and meeting notes. The 1st post covers my email practices, as well as some caveats about my particular context relevant to why I can and do things this way. The 3rd post on supporting work practices like these as a manager will be linked here, once it’s published (assuming I remember…).

Slack

I have a daily “Slack catchup” time, like I do for email. This works best when I do it at a time there aren’t many folks actively chatting, so that I do eventually get to all waiting messages; on the downside.

• As with email, I do in practice check Slack elsewhen, but having the daily catchup time lets me close Slack (and Outlook) when I’ve scheduled myself to focus on getting a specific thing done. I could easily spend all day answering email and Slack if I just kept them open and checked them throughout the day.

Slack has a couple helpers I like, both superior to “mark unread” (as it’s easy to accidentally open a channel, and have it auto-mark something as read when you didn’t actually look at it):

• Bookmark icon/”save for later” holds messages in a “later area => stuff I want to remember or look at again during my weekly Brain Day time or after, but zero urgency
• Message menu > remind me about this => for messages I want to be reminded of at a specific time (e.g. something I skimmed but need to respond to by the end of the day, but not now because I’m leaving for a meeting; something I want to remember at the end of term).

Task management app

I use a task management app that allows setting recurring reminders:

• There are many good, free options; it’s worth playing with a couple to see which is comfortable and matches your particular way of handling tasks (also look for: syncing to phone/between computers; ability to export/backup in readable format). I use Things3 for Mac.
• I keep a “Brain Day” area on my task app that fills with recurring tasks on my Friday “Brain Day”s, in the order I want to do them in (stuff I can’t miss doing weekly or it’s a problem, e.g. email catchup, first).
  • I add a weekly reminder to check Slack’s “later” area for messages I should respond to, that I do once I’m on top of email.
  • This approach also helps with non-weekly reminders, like “add your consult stats to LibInsight bimonthly” and “bimonthly block out any leave days on my calendar for the next two months” (so I remember to mark stuff so people know when they can’t schedule me).
• I have task app areas for various categories of things, including
  • “flagged” (do this first when you start work on x day)
  • sets of tasks I only want to look at/work through in priority order at specific times (e.g. my ACH volunteer work, during the ACH meeting’s work time)
  • tasks I can’t/shouldn’t do until a specific date (so I don’t need to see them until then)
  • things I asked of others (as a manager; reminder of when to check in, if don’t hear back)
  • “errands” (zero-urgency things I get to in priority order, just as time allows)

Meeting notes

I use a Remarkable 2 tablet (e-ink tablet) to take notes during meetings:

• I use a different notebook for each meeting kind: 1 notebook per
  • recurring 1:1,
  • recurring groups like our all-staff meeting,
  • related aggregators of ad hoc meetings, such as external consultations, SLab website sprint discussions
• Each new meeting date starts on a new page of the notebook, with the date and meeting title at the top.
• I keep a small lined paper pad and pen next to the Remarkable. If a task for me comes up during the meeting (something I need to do or say), I write it on the paper tablet:
  • Things that must be done before my next “Brain Day” get a star, and I try to remember to do them or add them to my task app that day. I used to use symbols in my meeting notes to mark things that were tasks, but that means I need to look back through my meeting notes to find tasks from the past week, and I repeatedly did not and let those build up.
  • Keeping tasks on their own paper list means I can just see all incoming tasks there; paper vs. directly into task app means that the “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and “I can do this in 30 seconds after meeting ends” don’t clog the task app (I used to struggle with putting way too many “wouldn’t it be cool if” ideas into my task app, making it hard to see what’s actually urgent and look like I’m behind on working though tasks).

I’m sharing some approaches to work chores (email, Slack, etc.) that are currently working for me. This is another “my SLab colleague told me I should write a post about this” post—thanks to Brandon Walsh for suggesting I make some of my more personally-successful work-chore practices (which I periodically have shared with various staff, when asked) into a public post. I’ve found it most useful to try out small changes at a time, not huge swerves among different systems of task management.

Short version, pls

tl;dr of the hacks detailed below and on subsequent posts in this series:

1. Have a daily email/message triage time, putting those messages that can wait for reading/reply until a weekly email catchup time, into a folder to attend to then.
2. Block that weekly catchup time on your calendar, preferably the same time each week, at a time you won’t struggle to put aside other work to finish going through those emails (e.g. I do it first thing Friday mornings).
3. Use: Outlook rules to divert low-priority emails and highlight high-priority emails; Slack “save for later” and “remind me about this” (not “mark unread”); a task manager that supports recurring tasks.

Some caveats

This is a very “your mileage might vary” post; this doctor is not saying whether these approaches are right for you. Directing a library-based DH research center means my workday involves a variety of communications (e.g. Workday notifications, budget reports, sending many recurring meeting invites to various groups) that make it more useful to have a more formal system for balancing them against focused work time, as do my own particular work habits and neurodivergence. (FWIW, I am very much an Always Inbox Zero, Task App: Too-Many person.)

I also recognize my privilege in having the job type, security, supervision level, accessibility accommodations, and more that mean I get to make these choices. Some workplaces have invasive policies about when, how, how often; some jobs actually need you to be checking or replying to communications as they come in; some teams would be negatively impacted by someone not checking messages as often as the group truly needs. Different jobs have different needs and/or culture regarding what goes into email, Slack, recurring meetings, or ad hoc conversations.

In particular, the part about how often I check my email felt a bit fraught to share, especially without sharing more context about accessibility. But it’s made a significant improvement in how well I can focus, make progress, maintain work boundaries and sustainability, as well as do well by my colleagues—so I wanted to share it, even if it isn’t necessarily something everyone else can implement as described. (Part two of this blog post will discuss how I try to accommodate similar practices for my colleagues, as a manager/director).

Ultimately, I try to balance two things:

• being able to get to the kinds of focused work that are part of my job, without interruption (unless something is truly an emergency)
• responding to messages within a reasonable timeframe, and having a triage system keeping my inbox manageable so I can more easily see if a colleague sends an urgent-response-needed message

Some approaches that work for me, right now

Email management

I use a daily triage practice, plus a weekly block for catching up on reading/replying to things that can wait until then:

• I have a daily time when I’m always free (5-30min?), that I block for managing email (Outlook is what UVA uses for staff). I put this daily email time as a recurring hold on my calendar until it became habit, and now I just do it first thing, before any meetings.
• I have a “process today” email folder; when this daily email time happens, I dump everything currently in my inbox into “process today”. I don’t require myself to look at my inbox again until the following day, unless* I’m done with all my other work and feel like it.
  • This helps me not get caught up answering constantly incoming stuff, which can usually wait a bit, and get to older reading/replies first.
  • * In practice, I do actually check my work email several times per workday. I try not to do so until I’ve both done that initial transfer to the “process today” folder, and until I’ve processed that “process today” folder (as described below). This means that any other emails I get to are a bonus, so they don’t carry the same feeling of “I’m behind until I clear this from my inbox”.
• Emails that can wait until my weekly “catch up on work chores” block (Friday mornings) get moved to a “Brain Day” folder.
  • This keeps my inbox more manageable, so I can more easily visually skim it between meetings to notice if someone does have an urgent and/or easy-to-answer question
• I try to reply to everything else in the “process today” folder during that daily time, even if it’s just to say “I received this, but it’ll be [a couple days] before I will have a more substantive response”. I send that kind of message if I’m not sure I’ll get to something (better to followup up sooner than promised, than to forget to respond).

“Brain Day” for weekly work chores

I use a weekly, scheduled catchup block (“Brain Day”):

• During “Brain Day”, I catch up on all emails I moved to the “Brain Day” folder during the week—the ones that could wait to be read (including non-urgent FYI things, newsletters), and emails I told people I’d need more time to reply to.
• If I can’t finish working through all my email then, I block time to do so the following week (rare/ugh).

After completing email catchup, I also use that “Brain Day” block to do other weekly or monthly recurring work chores, like updating our budget, planning what tasks I’m doing the following week, and prepping for the next week’s meetings.

Other email hacks

I use Outlook rules to:

• route stuff that I mostly only need to skim or can wait to read until my weekly “Brain Day” (e.g. from our “general announcements to all Library staff” listserv, which tends to more “here’s an interesting webinar” and less “urgent info to read today”) into the “Brain Day” folder, so I don’t have to look at it nor manually sort it until Fridays
• route stuff I need to get to sooner (e.g. emails to the SLab consult listserv; emails from SLab staff, supervisors) into a place I’ll see them easily
• Move some sent emails to a “Waiting to hear” folder, if I need to make sure I do hear back a response (vs. assuming someone will definitely write back); I check this during weekly “Brain Day” to see if I need to ping anyone about a non-response (when enough time has gone by)

I don’t currently need this, but if staying out of your inbox is hard because you need to notice specific things: I used to use USB LEDs called Blink(1)s to alert me to things I wanted to notice. For me, that was during my dissertation’s Infinite Ulysses open beta, when I wanted to know when someone created a new account on my digital edition, or posted an annotation. But you could hook these up to IFTTT or Zapier and have specific combinations of person and text on Slack or Outlook trigger the light turning on, or blinking in a pattern. (I can’t use sound notifications—if you can, you can of course set up Slack/Outlook to make a noise for certain things, though I think this isn’t granular down to e.g. “make this sound if x person pings me”?)

The next two posts will deal with Slack, task management, and meeting notes; and handling expectations vs. healthy work practices, as a manager.