Educational Ponderings

A blog by Helen Cramman. Posted: 1st November 2024

I am in charge of my own workload. I strategically consider everything I work on. I am much better than I used to be at saying no to requests. Yet, I am still often overloaded.

So, what is going wrong?

I am sure the scenario above sounds familiar to many of us. In my case, I couldn’t understand why I was so frequently overloaded when I was being so careful about the work I was taking on.

In response to my exclamation of frustration one day, a colleague recommended a book to me called The No Club. As I considered myself good at saying no to things I didn’t really understand why they suggested the book to me, but, trusting their judgement, I got hold of a copy and started reading. I read it cover to cover in a couple of days and it took me by surprise, it didn’t say what I expected it to say.

But before we hear the wisdom of the book, a little reflection.

How did I get into this predicament?

This situation is not new for me, it has been the case for years. But I think it would be useful to reflect back to a year ago. At that point, I had finally achieved promotion after five years of trying and eight years on the same grade. At the same time, I also applied for a 50% secondment role working in a different department. I was fortunate to get the role and a year ago I took on the new 50% role to my job.

When I took on the new role, I didn’t officially drop anything in order to take it on. What I did do, was stop spending as much time on tasks which I had previously been voluntarily choosing to be working on. These were projects that were interesting but not crucial to my job description. For example, creating and trying to bring in substantial funding for a national centre in my research field.

I didn’t wrap up these ongoing tasks and bring them to a close, I just put them on hold in my head whilst I settled into the new role. In some cases, this was because I couldn’t wrap them up as they were waiting on things like decisions back from journals. However, in other cases, I didn’t want them to end, I just put them on hold as I don’t like feeling like I am giving in on something. Some of the tasks I felt were incomplete and I wanted to be able to come back to them at some point in the future. They had got a long way and achieved a lot, but the problem was they weren’t complete and they were lingering.

Lingering

So much of what we do in Higher Education lingers.

It lingers because we submit a paper for review and it comes back four months later in the middle of term time and has to wait until the next small gap in a holiday to be worked on.

It sits there because we develop a bid idea, submit it and wait several months for the outcome.

Things don’t get wrapped up neatly because there are long periods of time when other things have to be the priority…

And in the intervening period, priorities change.

Also, because many of my projects are not always the same level of priority for the people I collaborate with, progressing them can be slow as we each try to juggle working on them around everything else.

The killer for overload for me is that new more relevant, or possibly more interesting, projects come along whilst the others are in their waiting periods. The problem is that those other projects have not gone away, they are still there. And things start to mount up when those lingering projects raise their heads and are finally ready for some attention.

The No Club

So, back to the book. What could this tell me that I didn’t already know?

The book was called “The No Club Putting a Stop to Women’s Dead-End Work“. It hooked me quickly. By the end of the introduction I felt an affinity with the authors and was keen to read on.

The book describes Promotable Tasks (PT) and Non-Promotable Tasks (NPTs). It details how NPTs are tasks that are important for your organisation, but do not help you as an individual when it comes to meeting your promotion criteria. The book takes us through in detail how and why women usually do the majority of NPTs in an organisation. Why we say yes when we are asked, and that we are usually asked more often than men. It also describes how we as women usually volunteer to take on NPTs, even if we are not being directly asked. It then very usefully takes us through how we can tackle this both as a individuals and as organisations.

The book was good at tackling how to say no when you were asked to participate in NPTs. I was pleased to see that I was already doing everything it advised.

I realised my problems lay in a few other particular places though.

• I frequently created my own NPTs, that previously may not have been on the university’s radar.
• I also had the issue that I was not getting rid of old NTPs that were now out of alignment with where I needed to be. In fact, I realised that I had the mentality that I considered stopping doing something to be giving in.

I also identified that I had a “Trigger” that probably needed to be forefronted:

• I had a tendency to be able to see most things as having a PT element if I just put in “a bit of extra work”. I maybe needed a reality check on how many of these did subsequently turn out to be useful for promotion, or alternatively, how many of a particular task were needed for promotion.

If I was doing these things, the book very rightly asks you to question “what are you therefore implicitly saying no to doing instead?”

Taking stock

So, looking at what I was working on, I had:

1. PTs that were still PTs,
2. NTPs that were useful NPTs,
3. PTs that had become unuseful NPTs over time,
4. NPTs that had become unuseful NPTs over time,
5. NPTs that I took on because they had potential to become PTs, but that required additional effort beyond the end of the project.

Three, four and five needed addressing. 

Part of the issue I was feeling was that I now needed to say no to projects that I had been part of for some time, several of which I had initiated, grown and I considered to be my babies. I needed a way to let these go, either to have a new look life without me leading them, or for them to be wound up if they no longer had a useful purpose to anyone.

As a separate issue, I had PTs that were an absolute drain on my energy and motivation, but they would have to be tackled on a different occasion.

What does an NPT that could be a PT look like?

As an example, I formed a collaborative project with colleagues across two universities to create a skills audit for students transitioning to university and to understand their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. We created the skills audit, collected data from all the students in induction week, analysed and discussed the data to help inform how to work with the new students, wrote a paper and submitted it to a journal plus published it on a pre-print archive.

For me, that was satisfaction achieved from a successful collaboration which had meaningful impact on the students and made the findings accessible for anyone that wanted to look at them.

The PT was not completed though as the paper was rejected by the first journal and needed rewriting for a new submission.

Cue the long wait until I had time to pick it up again, then repeat the final part of the cycle re-drafting the paper.

Three years down the line, I was still trying to find two to three days every six months or so to work on it. I very much felt those 2-3 days could be being spent on something else, but I also felt a sense of guilt that the paper cycle wasn’t finished. Others were relying on me to get the paper published for them, and ideally, I needed the paper for promotion. However, there was no satisfaction left in the project for me and it was an element of my job that I didn’t enjoy because I find paper writing really hard for little perceivable gain.

A cycle that never finishes

After a particularly enlightening coaching session, I realised that my NPTs that had the potential to become PTs had a particular characteristic that could be unpicked in terms of a Gestalt Cycle.

Gestalt cycles consider when satisfaction has been achieved. As human beings, we want to close this cycle to feel that we have completed something so that it has given us satisfaction. My problem comes when the satisfaction element of the cycle is not the the point that the PT is achieved.

For category five projects above, an NPT was the aim at the outset. The team worked towards the NPT and felt satisfaction when it was achieved. Cycle closed. The problem was that the bonus PT was still something I needed out of them, but these became lingering tasks where term started and the team dispersed. My motivation disappeared and we entered the cycle of seemingly never ending submissions and rewrites for different journals or funders.

For me, I realised that my motivation for taking part is the enjoyment I get from the NPT, but the PT is what I often use to justify taking part. The No Club would call this a “Trigger”, that I use to justify saying yes to an NPT.

I need to recognise when I am planning projects that if the PT isn’t planned to be achieved at the same time as the NPT, the momentum consistently runs out and everyone starts to go their own way. I end up with another lingering task on the to do list.

So what is holding me back from rationalising my workload?

After reading The No Club, I realised two things are holding me back from getting rid of my NPTs that are collaborative and that I initiated, but which are now no longer strategically beneficial to me:

1. Guilt that I am leaving something unfinished.
2. Diva moments. These projects are my babies that I created and I have an assumption that if I leave, someone else will get the credit if they “succeed”.

I think I can solve these in four ways.

1. List and collectively celebrate the successes we have already had.
2. Acknowledge what my part was in getting things to where they are now.
3. Create a plan for succession and instil a sense of excitement for moving forward. i.e. end my time on a high, not a whimper.
4. Embrace that if someone takes it on and it is successful, then we all win as we will have achieved a collective vision.

If no one has the time to take it on, then I shouldn’t feel guilty about it falling by the wayside as it has demonstrated it wasn’t the right time for it to be a priority.

So that solves 3 and 4.

What about 5?

I have all these uncompleted cycles from currently NPT projects that have the potential to be PTs if more work is put into them.

The question now really is whether any of my lingering tasks are actually valuable enough as a PT for there to be worthwhile minimum level of effort to put in to get them completed. If having it as a completed PT is important, then I need to create a plan and find the time to work on it.

Lingering PTs are really hard

Lingering PTs can be really hard, sometimes feeling insurmountable. I think it is important to acknowledge that this lingering stage for PTs is hard for many reasons:

• it is difficult to create a plan for the lingering stage of many PT tasks because the timescale and requirements are frequently changing based on what comes back from reviewers.
• there is no way to know how our efforts will be received by a journal or grant review committee.
• this uncertainty makes this stage stressful as so much of it is outside our control.
• and to top it all off there is a significant level of repeated rejection to cope with at this stage.

Is there any wonder I hate this lingering stage of PTs!

So where does this leave me now?

So, knowing what I now know, I need to review my work and identify which category all my outstanding projects fall into.

• For projects and activities I decide are category 3 and 4, I need to say no to them, crafting my yes, no, yes responses as explained in The No Club (see below).
• For those in 5. I need to identify whether the PT can be realistically achieved and whether is worth keeping on the list. If it is, then a plan is needed to get it over the line.

If category 5 tasks need to become no’s, then I need to create my slightly different yes, no, yes for now turning down the collaborative projects that I have led until now, and I need to not beat myself up over it. I need to recognise that:

• I will first need to justify to myself that it is ok for me to say no and acknowledge the value I have already taken from the project.
• Then, I need to collectively celebrate our successes as a team and hand on an alternative plan for succession, thus closing the lingering phase and feeling a renewed sense of satisfaction from the project in order to close the Gestalt cycle and draw the project to a satisfactory close.

As the book suggests, all of this is more easily achieved with a supportive set of colleagues with whom you can discuss those difficult decisions.

So, with all this in mind, I am off to try to slim down my to do list and then to hopefully join some amazing like-minded colleagues to be part of a No Club to keep ourselves on track.

If any of this sounds familiar, then I highly recommend getting a copy of the No Club and discussing your thoughts on it with colleagues. Take time to take stock and I hope it can help you as it has helped me.

Notes: Useful advice from The No Club

Find out more at https://www.thenoclub.com/

Whether to choose a Non-Promotable Task (NPT)

• Does it fulfil me?
• Does it leverage my expertise? (Is there no one else that has the skills to do it?)
• Does it provide a good return on my time spent?
• Does it give me a mental break?
• Does it fit with my current assignments?

If trying to decide why to take it on

• Find out as much about it as possible
• Find out why they asked me – does it need to be me doing it?
• Who is requesting

Avoid traps leading to yes

• Don’t underestimate the time
• Ask yourself, “What am I saying no to if I say yes?”
• Remember future me (the calendar might be empty now, but the future will be full)
• Beware my triggers (the reasons why I usually say yes)
• Ignore the diva moment (“Woohoo, they wanted me!” Remember, they wanted you even if you say no)
• Don’t get cornered into saying yes

Get outside help to evaluate (and help decline) the request

Saying no

Yes, no, yes

• Yes to myself: Recognise and express my needs and values.
• No: say no and provide a brief explanation why.
• Yes: offer something that says yes to their request e.g. suggest someone else.
  • Thank you ever so much for thinking of me. <Reason I am declining>. <A suggested alternative solution>.

If I have to say yes.

Saying yes, whilst saying no:

• Offer an alternative way of doing it
• Put conditions on the yes
• Ask for additional resources
• Set a time limit
• Do a B+ rather than A+ job
• Turn the request into a negotiation