THE CAMPUS MOMENT
Dr. Renata Voss teaches four sections of introductory history at a regional university in the Midwest. Last spring she tracked her time for one week — not to be productive, just to see. She was spending 14 hours on tasks that had nothing to do with teaching or research. Grading entry. Email triage. LMS updates. Committee report formatting.
Fourteen hours. That is more than a third of a standard work week spent on administrative labor that her PhD did not prepare her for and that her institution does not count toward anything.
By the following semester, that number was two hours.
Here is exactly what changed.
THE BEFORE: What 14 Hours of Admin Actually Looks Like
Dr. Voss broke her weekly admin time into four categories after that first audit:
Grading and feedback: 6 hours She taught four sections with an average of 28 students each. Short response papers were due every two weeks. She was writing individual feedback comments from scratch for 112 students — averaging 3 minutes per student — and then manually entering grades into Canvas afterward.
Student email: 4 hours She checked email three times a day and responded to each message as it arrived. The same questions appeared every semester: What is the late policy? Can I get an extension? Where do I submit the assignment? I missed class — what did I miss?
LMS maintenance: 2.5 hours At the start of each module, she updated due dates, reuploaded revised readings, and posted a new announcement. She did this manually, every week, for four separate course shells.
Administrative reporting: 1.5 hours Monthly: one department report summarizing course progress. Semesterly: one assessment report for accreditation. She was writing these from scratch each time, pulling data from three different places.
Total: 14 hours. Every week.
THE AFTER: What She Actually Changed
She did not hire anyone. She did not buy expensive software. She made four changes — one per category — over the course of two weeks.
Change 1: Brisk Teaching for grading feedback She set up Brisk Teaching (free Chrome extension) with her existing rubric for the response papers. Instead of writing each feedback comment from scratch, she reviewed and edited AI-generated drafts. Time per student dropped from 3 minutes to under 1 minute.
Result: 6 hours of grading became 2 hours. 112 feedback comments, reviewed and personalized, in an afternoon instead of a week of evenings.
Change 2: The 3-Layer Email Defense System She created a Google Doc with answers to her 12 most common student questions, linked it in her syllabus and her Canvas homepage, and set up Gmail templates for the questions that still came in. She stopped checking email three times a day and moved to a single 30-minute window each morning.
Result: 4 hours of reactive email became 30 minutes of intentional triage.
Change 3: Canvas course copy with date adjustment She rebuilt her course shells once — cleanly, with the correct copy settings — and scheduled four weeks of announcements at the start of each semester instead of writing them weekly.
Result: 2.5 hours of weekly LMS maintenance became 1 hour of semester-start setup spread across one afternoon.
Change 4: A report template with placeholder data fields She built one Google Doc template for each recurring report — with sections pre-labeled and placeholder text marking where data goes. She set up a shared folder where she drops relevant data throughout the semester. At reporting time, she fills in the placeholders instead of reconstructing from scratch.
Result: Reports that took 90 minutes to write now take 20.
THE MATH
Category | Before | After |
|---|---|---|
Grading & feedback | 6 hrs | 2 hrs |
Student email | 4 hrs | 0.5 hrs |
LMS maintenance | 2.5 hrs | 0.25 hrs |
Admin reporting | 1.5 hrs | 0.5 hrs |
Total | 14 hrs | 3.25 hrs |
Time reclaimed per week: 10.75 hours.
Over a 15-week semester, that is 161 hours. In an academic year, that is more than four full work weeks returned to research, writing, course development, and rest.
She did not change what she was doing. She changed how much of it she was doing manually.
A NOTE ON THIS CASE STUDY
Dr. Voss is a demonstration case — a composite built from real patterns I see repeatedly across professors I work with. The numbers are representative, not from a single individual. The tools and methods are real, the time savings are real, and the sequence of changes is the same one I recommend to every professor who comes to me with a time audit that looks like hers.
If you want to run your own audit and find out what your number actually is, reply to this email and I will send you the exact tracking sheet I use with clients.
TOOL OF THE WEEK: Toggl Track
Toggl Track is a free time-tracking app that runs on your phone, desktop, and browser. It is the fastest way to run a personal time audit — start a timer when you begin a task, stop it when you finish, and review the breakdown at the end of the week. The free tier handles everything a professor needs. Use it for one week and you will know exactly where your time is going. Download at toggl.com or search "Toggl Track" in the App Store or Google Play.
THIS WEEK'S ACTION
Run a one-day time audit this week. Not a full week — just one day. Every time you switch tasks, write down what you just finished and how long it took. Do not track teaching time or research time. Track everything else. Add it up at the end of the day.
That number is your starting point. Reply and tell me what you find — I read every response.
READY TO BUILD YOUR OWN VERSION OF THIS?
If you want to map out which of these four changes would have the biggest impact in your specific situation — and get a plan for implementing them before the end of the semester — that is exactly what a discovery call is for.
Want to work through it alongside other professors doing the same?
Automate Academia | Professor P (Jerry Pender) | Human First Automations Reclaiming time for the work that actually matters — every Tuesday at 10 AM ET. automate-academia.beehiiv.com | Unsubscribe anytime.
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