You did not get a PhD to copy grades into Canvas

It is 9pm on a Sunday. You have 62 papers left to grade. Your research draft is due Friday. You promised yourself you would not spend another weekend doing data entry — and yet here you are, copying scores from a rubric spreadsheet into Canvas, one student at a time.

You did not get a PhD for this.

I am Professor P, and I started this newsletter because I got tired of watching brilliant academics — people who can decode 18th-century manuscripts or model protein structures — lose their evenings to tasks that a free app could handle for them.

I run Human First Automations, and my focus right now is on one group of people: professors who are drowning in admin work that has nothing to do with teaching or research.

Every Tuesday, I am going to send you one specific automation. Step by step. No coding. No jargon. Just a setup you can do in 30 minutes or less that gives you actual hours back.

But first, let me name the problem — because I think you will recognize yourself in at least one of these.

After talking with dozens of faculty members and living this myself, the same four categories come up every single time:

The rubric scoring, the comment writing, the grade calculations, the manual entry into your LMS. If you teach two sections of 40 students, a single assignment cycle can consume an entire weekend. The grading itself requires your expertise — but the data entry, the score math, and the repetitive feedback phrases do not.

"What are your office hours?" "Is the midterm cumulative?" "Can I submit late?" You answer the same 10-15 student questions every semester. Multiply that by 3 sections and a committee inbox, and email becomes a second job that never clocks out.

Uploading syllabi, creating assignment shells, copying content between sections, configuring due dates, publishing announcements. Canvas, Blackboard, Moodle — they are all powerful tools that somehow still require you to click 47 buttons to do something that should take one.

Assessment reports, accreditation documentation, committee summaries, annual reviews. These are the tasks that pile up at the end of the semester — right when you are also grading finals and submitting research. Most of the data already exists somewhere. The report is just reformatting it.

Add those together and you are looking at 15-25 hours per week — conservatively — spent on tasks that do not require your expertise.

Over a 30-year career, that is roughly 12,000 hours of busywork. At a professor's effective hourly rate, that is a mid-six-figure number spent on tasks a system could handle.

That is not a productivity problem. That is a structural one. And the fix is not "work harder" or "manage your time better." The fix is building systems that handle the mechanical parts so you can spend your hours on the parts that actually require a PhD.

Over the coming weeks, I am going to take each of those four categories apart, one by one, and show you exactly how to automate the worst parts.

Next Tuesday: The 47 identical student emails you answer every semester — and the 10-minute system that handles them for you.

No coding. No expensive software. Just email filters, templates, and a setup you can finish before your next office hours.

But first, I want to hear from you.

Hit reply and tell me: What is the one task that eats the most of your week?

I read every response. And the answers will shape what I cover in future issues — your biggest pain points get addressed first.

— Professor P

P.S. If you already know you want this handled — not taught, but built — I do that too. I build custom automation systems for professors and academic departments. Book a free 30-minute Discovery Call and I will map your semester's biggest time drains: https://calendly.com/jerry-pender-humanfirstautomations/new-meeting