Category: productivity

Show Notes

• Talbert, R., & Bergmann, J. (2017). Flipped learning: A guide for higher education faculty. Routledge
• Clark, D., & Talbert, R. (2023). Grading for growth: A guide to alternative grading practices that promote authentic learning and student engagement in higher education. Routledge.
• Robert Talbert’s Intentional Academia substack
• Talbert, Robert (2025). “Putting email in its place (and it’s not the Inbox).” Intentional Academia substack. March 6.
• Allen, D. (2015). Getting things done: The art of stress-free productivity. Penguin.
• Newport, C. (2021). A world without email: Reimagining work in an age of communication overload. Penguin.
• Robert Talbert’s website

Transcript

John: One of the challenges facing faculty, staff, and administrators is keeping up with the continuous flow of email. In this episode, we explore strategies to efficiently handle email so we can allocate time to other essential tasks.

[MUSIC]

John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

[MUSIC]

Rebecca: Our guest today is Robert Talbert. Robert is a Professor of Mathematics at Grand Valley State University and the author of Flipped Learning: A Guide for Higher Education Faculty and a co-author of Grading for Growth: A Guide to Alternative Grading Practices that Promote Authentic Learning and Student Engagement in Higher Education. Welcome back, Robert.

Robert: Hey, thank you, Rebecca, it’s great to be back with y’all.

John: Today’s teas are:… Robert, are you drinking tea?

Robert: I know this is called Tea for Teaching, but I’m definitely a coffee guy. I like tea, but I’m more on my coffee, especially on a cold, blustery day like today. So I have a good, solid Pete’s Major Dickinson’s blend, black, just like I like it.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have a London Strand Breakfast today

John: …and I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: So Robert, we’ve invited you here today to discuss a March 6 blog post in your Intentional Academia substack entitled “Putting email in its place (and it’s not the Inbox).” And you begin this post noting that when you first used email in the late 1980s it seemed like a useful and fun tool. I don’t know that I remember ever having those kinds of feelings about email, but do you still have these feelings? [LAUGHTER]

Robert: Well, so that was in late 1980s first of all, and email and the internet were relatively new. So I think email is still useful, it still can be useful as far as fun goes, I think it’s been a long time since email has ever been remotely like fun, unless I have just a really low standard for what fun is. And back in those days, I was basically fresh out of high school, and it was kind of like when people would leave notes in your locker, like little stuff from your crush or whatever during the day, and I discovered email, and I would just can’t wait to get over to the engineering building to click open my email and see what else might be there. And it’s strange to think about that ever having been something I look forward to. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: …kind of like the run to the mailbox when you might have actual, real physical mail that’s not junk mail.

Robert: …that is not political mailings or otherwise junk. Yeah, human contact is fun, you know? And sometimes email can be fun. I think in an email out of the blue from a student you haven’t seen in several years, just writing to let you know what they’re up to, that’s fun. And so sometimes it has these little unexpected moments of joy that happen in email, but that’s definitely the exception that seems to prove the rule. It seems like we’re more bullied and pushed around by email these days than anything remotely resembling fun.

Rebecca: I give in to the idea that there are glimpses of hope on a very, very rare basis, I retract my earlier statement.

Robert: ,,,not quite enough to keep you running back to your inbox every day…

RBECCA: No.

Robert: …hoping for more. But it’s nice when it happens, but it’s a little rare, isn’t it?

John: When I first started using email, I think it was in 1983 and that was back in the days of the long UUCP addresses, where you had to put the pathways in to get from one place to another, and then the email was relatively special. It didn’t always get transmitted right away to its destination, but it was rare and valuable, generally.

Rebecca: Was it fun?

John: It was sometimes fun, [LAUGHTER] and it was nice to be able to reach people in other places, because again, you reached out when it was something important, especially with those really long addresses, and you needed to know who you were contacting and if there wasn’t any spam back then, and that’s changed a little bit. One of the things you talk about in your substack is how frequently people check email. Could you talk a little bit about the frequency with which people check email each day?

Robert: Sure. I mean, it’s a lot. We all know it’s a lot, but there has been some studies on this, actually. It’s a little difficult to quantify, because some people check email more than others. The same person will check email more often at certain times of the year, like we faculty, check email much more often, probably, during final exam season, than any other time. If you’re teaching an online class, you’re going to check in more often. But some studies have been done in the private sector with quote, unquote, knowledge workers, of which I would include faculty, certainly are knowledge workers, although we’re not in the private sector. And one of these studies was done in 2016 and there was a study to project what people would be doing in several years time. And so they projected that by 2019 the average knowledge worker would send or receive 126 emails per day, with about an 80-20 split between receiving and sending. And my experience is that that’s right on the money. And certainly here in 2025 it seems like Moore’s law. We just keep doubling that every single year, it feels like. But another study in 2016, it was also in the private sector. I believe it’s in a financial services company actually tracked people on their computers with a time tracker and found that the workers were checking email 77 times a day on average. So we joke about or check my email for the 20th time today. That’s actually kind of normal, 77 times per day, if you assume an eight-hour day is once every six minutes, just to check your email, not even necessarily to do anything with your email. That doesn’t count, the time actually spent manipulating email, sending, receiving, reading, replying, it’s just checking the email. So it’s quite often, and most of the self-reports from academia, specifically, in a few studies that have been done, and just certainly my own personal knowledge here, it seems to be around two hours a day that rank and file faculty will spend just simply dealing with email. Now, when you start going into the administrative layers, it becomes significantly higher than that, but two hours a day seems to be average, and that’s an enormous chunk of the average faculty member’s working day.

John: Is the only time loss the time actually spent once people are in email, or does it have some other efficiency costs?

Robert: Oh, there’s definitely an efficiency cost. I think we’re all aware, just intuitively, that when you’re trying to focus on a task, and faculty work is entirely focused driven tasks, whether it’s grading or prepping or researching or whatever. When you’re trying to focus on a task and you get interrupted by anything, whether it’s an email or just the ping from the email, or if you happen to have Slack, which is like even 100 times worse than email or the cat jumping on your lap, or whatever the case may be, it takes time to recover, and there’s been plenty of studies about this in the psychological and physiological literature, and some studies, it seems like most studies I’ve seen, say it takes an average of about 64 seconds to recover from any interruption to regain full focus, and sometimes that can take up to 25 minutes to recover full focus from a single interruption, even if you happen to have the notifications set on your phone to pop up or ping you, which is even worse, that one thing will get you off track for potentially up to half an hour and so 64 seconds every email times 126 emails per day. This is losing minutes and hours and hours of time, not even with the email itself, but simply getting yourself back on track from having been interrupted. That doesn’t count doing something with the email, like, again, focusing on replying to an email, or even just simply scanning the subject line. It’s just the psychological effect of being interrupted. And then if you happen to glance at your email, even just look at the sender, sometimes… don’t we have this situation, like, sometimes you get an email from a person and you just like, “Oh crap, I don’t want to deal with it.” Maybe you see that person, or maybe you see the subject line, and you don’t know what it is… that, even if you don’t open it and see what it’s all about, that will stick with you. It’s called the Zeigarnik effect. The Zeigarnik effect is the phenomenon that we remember uncompleted tasks better and longer than we remember completed tasks. And on a practical level, what the Zeigarnik effect says is that if you have something that grabs your attention, and it’s sort of an open loop, like you don’t resolve it right away or ever, it will continue to exert a downward force on your attention even when you are not consciously focusing on it. So you can get this email from the Dean or whatever, and the subject line says, “I need to see you in my office right away,” or something like that, something horrible sounding. And you can think that you put it out of your mind, but you haven’t, and someone’s tapping the brakes on you while you think you’re going back to work. And so there’s measurable results of the attention drain that just simply being interrupted by email will have on you, there’s even more drain for actually doing something with it. And even if you feel like you haven’t really been interrupted, your brain disagrees with you. It’s currently operating at a less efficient pace than it would have and so it’s hard to even quantify how much time is spent by not being able to go full speed on the task that requires full focus just because of interruptions.

Rebecca: I know, a few years ago, I went through and spent quite a bit of time trying to remove all of the design features that are meant to grab your attention, turning off pings, turning off notifications of any sort. A little red dot on my phone that tells you how many message there are, I turned that off, so that I wouldn’t have this [LAUGHTER] ongoing anxiety about needing to check my email. I moved my app on my phone to three screens away.

Robert: Rebecca, were you successful in doing that? I mean, do you feel like you were able to shut off all the stuff that was grabbing your attention?

Rebecca: It helps, but I had to take further steps, and that definitely my timing of wanting to do that, moved into when I moved into a more administrative role, and my email exploded. I was looking for every excuse [LAUGHTER] and opportunity to get it out of my way.

Robert: Yeah, they make it hard. App makers today are just absolute experts at grabbing attention. That’s the business model of apps, is to get your attention for things. The apps are free because you’re the product. Your attention is the product, and so it’s very hard to permanently shut down notifications from a lot of apps. That’s why many high schools are starting to ban cell phones now, that we’d like to have students using technology. The apps now are just so good at sucking away attention that it’s almost all or nothing at this point. That certainly, I feel, is true for faculty. I totally feel where you’re coming from there, Rebecca.

Rebecca: So you noted that you also recently gave a workshop to department chairs, program directors and college administrators. You’ve already pointed at how much time administrators do emai.l [LAUGHTER] I’ve have experienced that. [LAUGHTER] And you’ve talked a lot about the focus and clarity and the need for presence. We’ve talked about that a little bit already. Can you elaborate more on how to gain that back?[LAUGHTER] Help, help me, help me.

Robert: Yeah, right. I mean, we all sort of need the help. I gave this workshop to, it was at University of North Carolina, Charlotte, to a group of 30 or so department chairs, program directors, Associate Deans, sort of like mid-level management positions in the administrative tier, and so these folks get a lot of email. I’m a former department chair myself, and I know you just get drowning in email. And before the workshop, I asked them to estimate how much time and energy they spend on email and maybe identify some of the pain points that they were experiencing. And about half of the participants in this workshop said that they receive, not send, but receive, between 50 and 100 emails a day, and about 30% of them said they receive more than 100 emails a day. There was no top end on that survey item. It was just like 100 plus. For all, I know that 30% could be getting 1000 emails a day, and I know that sometimes my department chair currently will fire up her laptop for a department meeting, and I’ll look at the badge on her mail app [LAUGHTER] on screen, and it’s always four digits long, and that just makes me anxious. I also asked these folks, like, how much time they spend, and over 70% of the participants in this workshop who responded to the survey said they spend three or more hours per day on email tasks, which include checking email, composing emails, replying to emails, and reading emails, which to me, seems crazy because, having been a department chair myself in the math department at Grand Valley… It’s a large department. We have 60 faculty members. We serve 1000s of students. It’s almost like being a dean, and there is a lot of just straight up work that you have to do as a department chair, and none of it is reading email. I mean, it’s things like working with faculty, meeting with students, and scheduling courses, and these are not email tasks, okay, so you have at least three hours being sucked away by email. And one of the things you just asked me to clarify was about focus. How do you achieve focus in a state like that. I mean, you have to have focus. So doing good work in that level requires a lot of personal characteristics, but for me, it’s focus, clarity, and presence, were like the three things when I think about what it takes for any faculty member, really, but especially those who are involved in administrative work to do a good job with what they’re tasked with doing: focus, clarity, and presence. One of the hardest things I found about being a department chair. I was department chair for one year, and that year was 2019-2020, and so you think about what happened during that year. One of the things that really kind of sticks out from that particular year, if we all remember this, is that nobody knew what was going on. This is a five-year anniversary of the March 2020 shutdown of everything. And I remember the hardest part of being a department chair was that I had to figure out what the work was. It doesn’t come to you packaged up real neatly, like here is this project, we want you to do this project. Here are the goals of the project. Here’s when you know you’re done. Here are the stakeholders. You have to spend time focusing on clarifying what the work actually is, like a student shows up in your office say, “Well, my professor is really mean, and I want you to do something about it.” So I have to say, “Okay, what is the real problem behind this? Who’s involved? What’s the right task? Does this person just want to be heard? Is there something that needs to be done?” You have to have deep focus to be able to pull off this work. And everything that I just mentioned earlier about email is the antithesis of deep focus. It mitigates against deep focus at every stage. And so with email, we get so much of it, but the number one job is to, like, use it as little as possible. Back in the day when you had to enter in like, a hugely long address to send an email, I think we should go back to that, honestly, we should actually have to write like a 100-word essay to send an email, like a requirement to do this, just to put a little bit of friction in between yourself and the keyboard, and that way, we would have a little bit more intentionality with what we’re doing, and we wouldn’t get so much that’s just pulling away from us. So focus and clarity and presence are absolutely essential for doing any kind of good work in academia, especially if you’re one of these folks like I worked with at UNC Charlotte, and our current way of conceiving of how to work with email is not helping.

Rebecca: There’s so much noise and so little signal. How do you get to the signal?

Robert: Well, I wish I had a simple answer for this. Part of it is we have to deal with the email we have first of all, and then we also have to deal with the email that we don’t have yet. The participants in the workshop said this was their biggest pain point, is that they just get so much email that it’s hard to allocate the resources and time to deal with it. And so I’ve had them think about, where is all this stuff coming from? If you’re getting 200 emails a day, where is it coming from? Why are you getting 200 emails a day? And what are the characteristics of those emails that make them worth your time? It was interesting to probe that, and one of the department chairs there confided to me that she has… and this is a small department, this is not like the physics department or something, where there’s hundreds of people involved… but, it was a small department and she had 21 direct reports in this department. And I’m thinking, I don’t even know if they had 21 faculty in this department. I say the first thing you got to do is go to your dean and ask them to do something about this org chart that you’re embedded in. You should not have 21 direct reports. And if you can cut down on that, you can cut the email off at the source. And so part of the answer to your question, Rebecca, is find the sources of where you’re getting email from and try to divert things away from email. For example, if you’re in a position to delegate, you should definitely be delegating things. I remember when I became department chair, it was the day before classes started, and my first and only term as department chair, and I was in Detroit, over across the other side of the state, giving a talk, and I was getting back in my rental car before driving back, and I just thought, well, a day before classes started, this is when a lot of stuff hits the fan, so I’m gonna check my email. And I had just, like, 100 emails, but there were some weird sources, like from parents, from like, high school teachers, and there were all these weirdly random questions about, like, you know, “My son wants to major in engineering. What math course should he take?” Or “What’s your curriculum like at this level?” I was like, why am I getting these emails? And when I got back home, I checked with one of the emails was from a student worker, and she was emailing me to let me know that she wouldn’t be in that day. And I checked in with her to see if she was okay, and said, like, “Why did you email me about this? Why didn’t you email the department secretary about this, that she’s the one who oversees your work?” And she said, “Well, you’re listed as the contact person for the department.” [LAUGHTER] And I checked, and my blood just went cold when I saw this like I am the public face of the math department, okay? And I checked the website, and sure enough, down there under for any questions, please contact it had my email address listed. And I went straight to the department administrative assistant and just said, “You take my name right off of this. Why is it there?” [LAUGHTER] And she said, Well, it’s there because the previous department chair liked her’s there. And I know for a fact that my previous department chair was checking email five to six hours a day and not getting home until one o’clock in the morning on most days because she was at work check emails, and I was like, “I don’t do things that way. [LAUGHTER] I want you to shut this off.” So shutting things off as the stores is a great way to achieve some clarity. Clarity, by the way, is another thing that I mentioned is important to administrative work. Clarity. It’s best understood the opposite of clarity is ambiguity. So if we are working with emails, for example, and we don’t really know what these emails are to us, like, what role or what value do they play in our lives? We’re going to respond to everything, as the default is just like, if it’s an email and it shows up in my inbox, I got to do something about it. And I think the first step towards finding the signal, Rebecca, is just realizing that that’s not the case, that when you get an email in your inbox, it might have something to do with you, but it probably doesn’t. In the substack post and in the workshop that I gave, I described a process of clarifying things that show up in your inbox. That’s taken directly from the David Allen book called Getting Things Done: A Guide to Stress-Free Productivity, which I recommend every faculty member to read as many times as you can. It’s the pathway to wisdom. It’s not written for academics, but it totally applies to academics. And so when something shows up in your inbox, you have to start questioning it. First of all, is it an actionable item? Is it something that requires action by somebody? I find a lot of times, the answer is no, and sometimes that it’s an item that is merely informational or like a report from a committee. And I don’t have to do anything with that except file it in an appropriate folder. And using folders in your email is a really good pathway to kind of clearing the chaff out. It’s still there. You know, you put stuff in a folder, it doesn’t go away. It’s just out of sight, out of mind. Sometimes you get an item that is just totally irrelevant: spam, or it’s some sort of propaganda from the university, and we get this stuff all the time. So that’s wonderful. I’ve seen it once. I don’t see it again. Just click delete. Just delete it and be done with it. Sometimes it’s something that you want to think about, but you don’t want to or can’t right now. Okay, so it’s like an invitation to a conference, for example, and you can’t go this year, but maybe next year, so you put that in a special list called “someday maybe,” that’s a list of things that you want to do, maybe someday, but not necessarily right now. And then everything that’s left over are the actionable things, and some of those are actionable within two minutes time, a quick question that can be replied to instantly, so it doesn’t have to stay in your inbox. You just do it. Sometimes they are actionable, but not by you. For example, when I stopped being department chair, I was still getting department chair emails because people weren’t updating their list, and so that was actionable, but it wasn’t me, and so I just had to forward it to the right person. They didn’t need a reply. I don’t need to say I am now forwarding your email to the right person. I’m just going to forward it. You don’t need to talk to a person to tell them what you’re doing every single time, and eventually you have these emails are all very clear, like, what do they mean to you? What are you supposed to do about them? Do they have a deadline? Is there another person involved? Is it not an action, but is it a project, like a collection of actions? So what is the next action that you can perform on this project? If you run everything in your inbox through that clarify loop, you will soon have an empty inbox, because these things that get clarified end up on lists instead of your inbox, and you have instead a list of actions that you can and should perform when you have the time for it, and then you have a signal, you don’t just have a bunch of stuff. Now that’s hard to do, but it’s a habit that has to be ingrained, and not everyone is willing to put in the work to build that habit. They would instead expend twice as much energy not having the habit, which is kind of sad in my view. I write about this a lot at the Intentional Academia substack, and so I will stop getting into the weeds unless you all want to know more. [LAUGHTER]

John: There’s several things that you said that just struck me. You reminded me that five years ago, this month, we went into that little pandemic, and I was the director of the teaching center, and Rebecca was working with me there, but she had the good sense of being on sabbatical that semester.

Robert: That was a great time for a sabbatical, yes, unless you were traveling.

John: …and I do remember the increase in the volume of email because faculty were not always used to teaching remotely, and so there were pretty much hundreds of questions coming in with people needing support. We had a lot of online hours to provide support, but it was a bit of a challenge. One other thing you mentioned, though, is using something that would raise the cost of engaging in email might deter some people, and I don’t think we can go back to those [LAUGHTER] long addresses anymore, but it’s an interesting idea. It reminded me of something I had read about probably 15-20, years ago, where an economics department for economic department meetings, whenever someone said something in the meeting, they had to put $1 in this bowl [LAUGHTER] that was divided up at the end of the meeting, and if you went over a certain length in what you were saying, you had to keep adding additional dollars. So we can alter incentives, perhaps, but I don’t think that’s likely to happen again in the near future. But you referred to a fundamental law of academic work, which you call the law of the whole person. What is this law, why is it frequently violated, and what role does email play in violating that law?

Robert: Right? Well, first of all, John, when I was a kid, that was called a swear jar, and if you cussed, you had to put a quarter in the jar, I’d be in favor of it, to be perfectly honest. So yeah, the law of the whole person is a term that I made up. I’m a mathematician, so I like to think about overarching structures that unify things. And so I’m thinking, what is the driver of this focus on focus, presence, and clarity in academic work? And where is really that signal from your email coming from? And it comes from the fact that we are not just machines, right? We are whole people, and we have interesting lives, or we want to have interesting lives that involve more than just work. We want to do excellent jobs with our work. We want to teach well. We want to do outstanding research. We want to provide valuable service to our institutions. We want to serve our colleagues and our students absolutely. But we also, a lot of us, have kids, we have hobbies, we all have health, physical health, that we have to maintain. And none of this is strictly tied to work. And so the law of the whole person is just, if you want to call it the fundamental academic law, I think that would be a nice subtitle for it. It just says that you have the right to be a complete person with a multi-faceted life and pursue anything that you find interesting and passionate, and you have the right and also the responsibility to take whatever measures you need to ensure this happens… within reason. I mean, we can’t skip teaching classes because I need my beauty rest or something like that, but you have to do your job, but you also have to do things that aren’t your job in order to be a complete human being. And as to why this is so frequently violated, I have theories, but no firm idea, but we do see that the default higher education appears to be that if you say no to stuff that is seen as a negative, like if someone asks you to be on a committee and you say, “I can’t be on this committee because I’m already on 20 other committees and I’m teaching five classes,” then you’re not a team player, or you don’t care about students, or whatever the case may be, and a lot of folks will manipulate people into doing whatever they want them to do by playing off of this idea of you don’t care about your job, you don’t care about students and so forth. We’ll ask you to work on the weekends and so on and so forth. And many faculty members feel bullied by others in higher education to the point where they believe that they really have to, for example, answer every single email the moment that it arrives in their inbox. I was on a committee recently where on a Tuesday afternoon at 5:30 in the afternoon, I got an invite to be on a Zoom call for that committee at seven o’clock that evening, [LAUGHTER] and I had to write the chair back and to say, “Dude, I don’t even have my email turn on after five o’clock. So if you’re trying to get me to actually be in a meeting at seven, there better be some compensation attached to it.” And this is not very well received [LAUGHTER] by this committee member, just to be clear about that. So why is it violated? It’s partially cultural. We have a culture in higher ed of overwork and self sacrifice, and it’s partly because there are some really bad actors in higher ed in some places that just want everybody to do more work than they’re doing, to do all their work, and to just manipulate people. And some of it is not so nefarious, but it’s just that people are afraid to say no, to set boundaries and stick with those boundaries, out of a fear of retribution, or being seen as not a team player, not dedicated to students, or maybe just even afraid of conflict with another person, and when that happens, other people are going to swoop in and take advantage. And from my view, this is a serious illness in higher education that can only be solved by each individual faculty member realizing that the law of the whole person is true. I mean, you do have a right to live your life in a way that is fulfilling and meaningful and wholehearted, and you got to put your own oxygen mask on first, as they say on the airplane, before you can possibly be expected to help other people.

Rebecca: As you’ve been talking, I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the strategies that I’ve used, and that largely involves a lot of the things that you’ve talked about: setting boundaries, using filters and things to make sure that a lot of the noise just doesn’t even get through to the inbox and then not treating my inbox like a to-do list, like all of those things have helped substantially to kind of settle and calm things down and make it a lot less overwhelming, or feel that need to constantly have to check email. So I highly recommend [LAUGHTER] the things that you’re talking about, because they really do work. They do help. They don’t eliminate email, but they make it more manageable.

Robert: Yeah, I don’t think anybody necessarily wants to eliminate email. I mean, some do. I mean, Cal Newport, one of my favorite writers, has this book called A World Without Email, and in it, he describes exactly what it might look like if you’re a knowledge worker with no email. And we didn’t used to have email. 100 years ago, we didn’t have email, obviously. The term that you hear is Inbox Zero, and this is a widely misunderstood term. It sounds like you want to have no emails in your inbox at any given point in time. That’s impossible, frankly. I mean, I haven’t been checking my email since I’ve been online with you all, but I know it’s been pinging. I don’t even have my notifications turned on. But you know, I’m going to flip this thing open, it’s going to have 20 emails in it. It’s more like the zero in the phrase Inbox Zero refers to the amount of attention that you are paying to your email outside of any time period that you are giving attention to your email. So you set up boundaries. You mentioned boundaries, and one of those boundaries that I highly suggest, and it’s totally possible, is to only check email at certain times of the day. For example, I only check email between 7:30 and 8:00 in the morning and between 4:00 and 4:30 in the afternoon, twice a day, 30 minutes. But within those 30 minutes, I am laser focused on email. That is the only thing that’s occupying my mind. I do one thing at a time, and in those times, it’s that time is email. So you want to have as little attention, the amount of headspace it takes up should be close to zero at any given point. So that’s the kind of focus and clarity and presence that I’m talking about here.

John: But it provides you with the opportunity to have the focus and presence that you otherwise might not if you’re constantly reflecting on the email or responding to those notifications and losing that efficiency of your time.

Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’ve all had this experience of where, I mean, the opposite of presence is absence, of course, like we’ve all have these experiences where we are trying to have a conversation somewhere, but their mind is just, quote, unquote, somewhere else, and it’s just a really disheartening experience. I mean, you kind of feel belittled, like this person is not paying attention to me and just wishes I would shut up. And we don’t want to be like that, insofar as it’s possible for us. I mean, just to be a good human being, you want to be fully present with the people and the tasks that are in front of you at any given time. And so the idea is to put the email in a box, give it full focus when you’re in the box, then give it no focus when you’re outside of the box. That’s the kind of ruthless boundary making that we all have to do. We all say we set boundaries, but a lot of us are not nearly ruthless enough about those boundaries. One of the best things I did when I was a department chair, right after that experience with finding I was listed as the contact person for the entire math department, so anybody and everybody with a math question on planet Earth would email me stuff, was to go to our administrative assistant and say… her name is Jan… and I said, “Jan, from now on, between 8:30 and 11:30 in the morning, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I am off the grid. If somebody comes by, I’m not here. I don’t have the email turned on. I might even not have my computer turned on. I might just be working with a notebook, like when I go just completely old school. But I’m also going to set up three appointment times between two and four, Monday, Wednesday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. So anybody and everybody who wants a piece of me can sign up for an appointment, a 20-minute appointment, and they have my complete attention within those 20 minutes.” And a lot of folks didn’t like that at first, because they were used to this open-door policy where you’re a faculty member, you might have this too, and sometimes it’s good to have this, sometimes it’s good to have an open-door policy, but have a 24/7 open door policy is not serving students. It’s setting yourself up for this dissipation of focus. And if a student shows up, you’re not going to be anywhere near present. You’re going to be in a completely different room than that student, mentally speaking, because your mind is elsewhere. So yeah, setting those boundaries and giving full focus to the thing that the boundary is set up for, within the boundary and zero focus to it outside the boundary, to me, is like the key. And when I was a department chair, I had no idea what I was doing. I had one year of assistant chair under my belt, but otherwise I had no clue what I was doing, and I had to have three hours a day of focus time just to educate myself on what it is I’m supposed to be doing, and I needed every minute of those three hours every single day to do it, and I would have never survived otherwise.

Rebecca: I think it’s important that you’re underscoring this need to schedule focus time. And also I noted when you said you were checking your email, which is at the end of a working day, presumably, so that the middle of the day full of focus and not full of interruptions. Do you think the timing of focus time [LAUGHTER] and email time is important to individuals?

Robert: Well, I think it is. And every individual’s got to figure out what works best for them, and for me, it’s a bit of a holdover from when my kids were real little, and they would wake up at these crazy hours of the night and the morning, it just seemed like 5:00 to 5:30 was like the only hour that none of my children were ever awake. [LAUGHTER] I don’t know why that was, and so that was my focus time, just by default, I had to do 5:00 to 5:30. I don’t do that now, my kids are… two of them out of the house, and one is 17. So where they’re all just like self-regulating at this point, but it’s still a holdover, because that’s what I do. My sons get ready for school. I come down here and I check my email for half an hour, and that’s it, until the end of the day. And I told my students that, I told my colleagues that, like, I’ll get to you. I’ll get to you faster than other people get to you, but it won’t be immediate during the week. On the weekends, I don’t check stuff on the weekends, but if it’s during the week and it’s between like eight or seven o’clock in the morning and five o’clock at night, you will get a response from me within 24 hours. It will not be within 20 seconds, but it will be within 24 hours. And I always make this, I always hit that goal. And so students are cool with that. It seems like no other professor they have does this like they say, “Well, I’m gonna get right back to you.” And they never do, because you’re over promising and under delivering. And for other people, it may be, you have to schedule a couple of hours a day. Schedule a couple of hours a day to focus on email. That still seems like a lot, but maybe it’s appropriate for some, like the people who are in my workshop. But the thing is, you schedule it and you keep it in a box. It’s a fixed appointment on your calendar, just like a class is or a faculty senate meeting is, our students don’t expect us to be teaching them things outside of class time, unless it’s office hours, like so why should we expect to deal with other people’s email outside of email times? It’s just another appointment, and you work really hard within those appointment times so that you don’t have to think about it at all outside the appointment times. Now what time that is for you and for John or anybody else, you have to experiment with that. And it’s different things at different stages of your life, different times of the week, different times of the semester. But the important thing is to set it up, box it off, keep it in the box.

Rebecca: Another part of it is a lot of scheduling and getting organized around when you’re allocating time. But also does that involve training people to use the phone or other mechanisms of communication when that might be appropriate?

Robert: It feels weird to say training people to use the phone, because we all kind of learn to use a phone when we were in kindergarten, right? But yeah, I think when it comes back to presence, I think we often use email, as we mentioned already on this podcast, because there’s like no friction to use email. I don’t have to get up out of my chair, I don’t have to talk to another person. I just got to pull my keyboard up and start typing. And because it’s so easy to send an email, we do it a lot. But there’s something missing about this, and it may not be the most efficient way to do things like if I am working like with my colleague, David Clark, who is the co-author of Grading for Growth book with me, his office is just down the hall from me. If I’ve got a question for him, I’m just going to get up out of my chair and go talk to him. I mean, he may not be in, but I’m at least going to try. And I know, for example, he holds office hours in a student workspace at certain times of the week, and I know he’s going to be there, and it’s open, I’ll just go stick my head in, I know he’s going to be there. So why email him? And that saves a lot of time, just simply having a conversation with somebody. We’ve sort of lost that art. I think COVID is partially complicit in this, obviously, because there was no office we could walk down to, and human contact was extremely limited. So we should really appreciate its presence all the more now that we can actually have face-to-face contact on a regular basis with people, we should try that. [LAUGHTER] We should get back into the habit of doing that or phone calls. Sometimes it’s not the most efficient way to do things. A lot of times it is. And I am always thinking like it would this be quicker if we transmit more information through body language and face-to-face interactions than you ever will with emojis or whatever. So speaking of cutting things off at the source, I wonder how much of our emails could simply be… we say like this, this meeting could have been an email, but how much of our emails could have been face-to-face meetings, quickies, like, just quick stuff, not task force, terrible scheduling stuff, but just like, walk down the hall and talk to a person.

John: Right before I came to this session to start recording this, I was in a Zoom meeting with a lot of people, and it’s scheduled for an hour, and much of it could have been handled with an email. But the nice thing about it is that did give me time to respond to about, I think, 14 emails during that meeting, which would be harder to do ​​[LAUGHTER] if it were face to face.

Robert: We could be incredibly productive during Zoom meetings, [LAUGHTER] maybe that’s the key, John, we got to schedule Zoom meetings. Just like no content new meetings. I’m just going to schedule, we’re just going to sit there with a camera on, staring at each other while we answer emails, like going to hyper-productive mode. I’m willing to do an experiment on that. [LAUGHTER]

Rebecca: People have time for writing, like writing teams or writing meetups. So you can just do an email meetup, and then you’re doing email in community so that you don’t feel alone when you feel tortured by your email. [LAUGHTER]

Robert: I wonder if that’s really a thing, Rebecca. I really believe there’s something to that. If any of your listeners have tried something like that, I would love to hear about it. It sounds weird, but it sounds also like it could be cool.

John: Do you have any other advice for our listeners?

Robert: The most important thing is, I think it goes back to the law of the whole person. Rather than mention anything new, I’ll just reiterate, maybe what I feel is the most important thing. Like every person out there has the right and the responsibility to be a whole person. Otherwise, why are we even working in higher education in the first place? And so don’t let anybody tell you that it’s not the case. And if you are in a situation where you might be fearful of doing things like setting boundaries, saying no to certain things, just give it a try once and see what happens. I don’t know if anybody’s going to get fired for saying no to one thing, and if you do, then you probably didn’t want to work there anyway, honestly. So we can’t wait for institutions to do this for us. So whenever I post about stuff like this, I get some pushback from people saying like, “Well, this is an institutional problem. The system’s at fault. It’s not fair to expect faculty to take on extra responsibility simply to claim fundamental rights,” and to that, I would say “Wou’re not wrong. However, have you seen the state of higher education today? Do you really think that it’s going to suddenly reform itself overnight?” The answer is probably not. Where all meaningful higher ed reform comes from, whether it’s in pedagogy or research or simple culture issues like we’re talking here, it usually comes from the bottom up, from individual faculty, staff, and administrators doing things for themselves, but not necessarily by themselves. So you have a community here of listeners on Tea for Teaching, and I hope that all of your listeners will come and check out the Intentional Academia substack, where I’m hoping to build a community of faculty, the coalition of the willing, who are willing to put up a little resistance to some of this push that we have to just simply produce more and more and more with less and less and less. It’s really time to start claiming our humanity for ourselves, and maybe that’s the ultimate life hack that I can provide.

Rebecca: Culture change really happens when there’s multiple people acting on the same value system, like their behaviors reflect the values, and they don’t just state the values. And so what you’re really suggesting here is that if we adopt some of these principles ourselves, others will see us doing it, might feel permission to do it themselves, and then slowly, that change can occur.

Robert: Yeah, that’s totally right, Rebecca. You know every successful revolution occurs when the blueprints for change make it into the hands of ordinary people and they start having the courage to act on them. And you said, permission, I think that’s a really important thing to consider. I would especially challenge anybody listening who is a tenured faculty member at a higher ed institution. You’ve got all the tools you need to not only make good things happen for yourself, but also all of the untenured people who are at your institution. You’re protected, you can do all this stuff and say no and respond on your schedule and do things like set away messages on the weekends. We set these away messages when we go on vacation. But like, have you ever tried setting one like, just to always be on from Friday to Sunday? Just little stuff. And it’s important also to realize that we’re not talking about major things, like little things. Everybody’s got something that they can do to kind of claim their whole personhood for themselves just a little bit more. And once you start making little chips away at that, pretty soon the whole thing becomes easier than a lot of people thought it was going to be, is my experience.

John: We lose so much time in task switching, and I think we all think we’re better at it than we are. And the evidence, as you mentioned, is really overwhelming on this. And if we really want to be whole people for our students and with our colleagues, it’s kind of important to do the things you suggest and blocking off time so that we can focus on specific things for an extended block and we can be more efficient in responding to email when we’re only doing that. At the end of your blog post, I seem to remember there being a picture of a guitar [LAUGHTER] and a link to an article on there.

Robert: That’s correct.

John: One of the things I know you do is play bass in a number of bands. Could you talk a little bit about that and how that’s consistent with this law of the whole person? [LAUGHTER]

Robert: Well, so I’ve been a bass player for 30 years, but not 30 consecutive years, and I put it down for a really long time, in the 2000s when my kids were young and kind of fell by the wayside. And a few years ago, I had a serious health condition where that required emergency heart surgery, and I nearly died. And while I was dealing with this condition, I thought, this really sucks, and I could possibly go to my grave, having put away music for so long and not having gotten it out. So I told myself that if I would, just part of being a whole person, like I’ve driven so much energy into my work, work, work, work, work, but if I croak on the operating table, nobody’s going to remember any of that stuff. It’s going to be, I don’t know what they’re going to remember, like he was a good professor? That’s all right, I guess. But I mean, I kind of hope for more from life than that. I think a lot of us do. And so as far in that experience, I started practicing again, and I’ve been practicing basically two hours a day for the last five years, and now I’m in four different bands. It’s probably pretty cool. It’s the most important thing in my life, other than my health and my family. And so this is what you get when you decide that you want to be a whole person. You discover things that are very important to you about your life that you might not even have realized are still important to you. You thought that you set aside that hobby 10 years ago when you were working on your PhD and never picked it back up. But actually, you know, it’s still a very cool thing, and it connects you to a different part of the universe and to yourself and to other people, and that makes everything better, including your work, and so that’s maybe where the roots of the idea of the whole person comes from? Like, I insist that I do not work on the weekends. I don’t grade on the weekends or check work on the weekends because, frankly, I’m gigging every weekend, and so I don’t have time to work on the weekends because I have this side hustle. And it’s not making me a lot of money, but I’d do it every night if I could. it’s something I would never put away willingly. And my whole approach to work right now is focused on, how do I keep my work in a box to the point where I have the time to devote sufficient time and energy to becoming the best bass player that I could possibly be? That’s my mindset towards work right now. It’s not everybody’s. It won’t be everybody’s, but you got to put your life in context. You’re not just a machine. Nobody is. And if we ever get to that point, then that’s like a life lost, in my view.

John: I’ve had a similar experience. I played a number of instruments back in college, mostly keyboards, but sometimes guitar and bass and, with one band, drums. [LAUGHTER] But when I went to grad school, I pretty much cut that down, and then when I had young children, I didn’t play much at all. I started playing when my kids were in middle school, or thereabouts, but when work got too busy, I cut back, and I’ve regretted that quite often, and I’m playing in one band now, but it’s a little bit of a challenge finding that balance. I really like your approach of setting time aside to focus on activities and scheduling that.

Robert: That stuff is just as important to you as a human being, John, than anything that you’re doing with the podcast or work. I mean, they’re all important, right? And so they all deserve attention. And they say that when you’re an administrator, they say that your budget reflects your values, like the concrete form of what you really value. For a faculty member, it’s your calendar. Your calendar is where your values really are instantiated in extremely concrete form. And you take a look at a person’s calendar, you can tell what they’re all about. And so we use that, and you abide by the rules that you set for yourself, even when it would be easier to say, “I’m just going to grade tonight” or something like that. And again, this may not be, this is easier for some than others. I’m no one to talk. I’m a tenured full professor. I’ve got all kinds of privileges and stuff like that. So I get it. Not everybody can do that, but everybody should think about this, about thinking like, “What makes me whole as a person? Is it playing music? Is it gardening? Is it health?” We all got to take care of our health. Otherwise, none of this is of any avail. And if it means something to you, it should occupy some space in the 168 hours that we all get every week. Nobody gets any more or less than that.

Rebecca: It really goes back to this idea that your behaviors need to reflect your value system. I think one of the things that we have the power as faculty to do is to help our students also see value in these things as well. I know one of the things that I’ve worked with a lot of my students on is things like time blocking and managing time and making sure that they have time for some of those other things that are outside of school, so that they can feel enriched and feeling that they are a whole person, and that those things are also important. And when I’ve had those conversations with students or worked with them on some of these skills, they’ve really appreciated it, because they’re bringing more things into their life, and it feels more fulfilling.

Robert: Yeah, and it seems weird that we don’t often talk about this. I have yet to see a general education program at a higher education institution that talks about things like calendars and time blocking and focus time and time boxing and all the stuff that I’ve been mentioning here today, and y’all have been echoing back as well. I don’t know what it’s about. It’s like, sometimes it’s about, like, study techniques, which I don’t know what some of the stuff in there gets taught, really is. I have these conversations with my students, and we talk a lot about deliberate practice, this notion of deliberate practice, which, as a musician I think a lot about deliberate practice. But a lot of my students have never had to think about practicing math, like, “How do you practice for a discrete math course?” And we talk about this a lot like when you’re in a feedback loop and you need tasks to perform and you need space to be able to recover from an unsuccessful task and use feedback and how to use feedback, and now we’re starting to impinge upon my other book called Grading for Growth, which is all about setting up grading and assessment structures in a class that give that process room to breathe, and so where deliberate practice can really take hold. And it’s such an alien concept to a lot of my students that although they appreciate it, they still revert back to old ways of doing things like, “Okay, I’m gonna cram for your test the night before” and stuff like that. So we have a lot of work to do in that regard, for both ourselves as faculty and also students, for sure,

Rebecca: This is like a good note to move on to our final question, which is always: “What’s next?”

Robert: So I was really encouraged by the result of that workshop that I gave at UC Charlotte. I felt like those faculty and administrators and managers, that the whole sort of tier tranche of academia, they really have a lot of needs, and it feels like traditional faculty development programs don’t really hit them where they really want it, like their approach is either overly simplistic, like you get a bunch of life hacks, like, “well, here’s how to turn off the notifications on your phone” or something like that. “Here’s how to do this. Here’s how to set up a folder in Gmail,” which are useful that they don’t strike at the root cause of the overwhelm and burnout that they’re experiencing, or they are on the other end of the spectrum, which are sort of like platitude based, like, “Oh, you just got to be more resilient and practice mindfulness.” If I were sitting in a workshop about resilience and mindfulness, I’d be thinking like, I don’t disagree, but how? What are the practical steps? What are you going to do? So something in between is really needed, and I felt like we, together, found that in between for the two hours we were together. So what’s next for me is I want to keep building out this workshop, and I would love if any of your listeners are interested in doing this, reach out to me on my website, rtalbert.org where I have a speaker form. You can request this workshop, and I’ll be very happy to provide it for you. I’d never talked about email before. It’s like nobody wants to talk about email it feels like, they want to talk about grading, flipped learning, and stuff like that. But email, this is sort of elephant in the room. It’s like nobody mentions that. It’s like some sort of verboten topic. But I feel like it’s a great need. I want to do more of those workshops, or even one-to-one coaching. So reach out, and I’m considering pulling together some of these ideas that have been put onto the Intentional Academia substack into a little ebook, like a little self-published ebook that I might throw up on Amazon for cheap, and so faculty can buy it and use it. I think this is a really important message. It’s not really getting addressed, to my view, sufficiently in higher ed at any level, whether it’s students, faculty or administrators or staff, too, like Student Affair s staff, those folks are absolutely burnt to a crisp right now, and they have it even worse than administrators do. And so that’s a need that I feel like has the potential to be filled. And so that’s exciting for me.

John: When is your second edition of your flipped classroom book coming out.

Robert: Thanks for mentioning that, John. So the second edition of Flipped Learning: a Guide for Higher Education Faculty is currently underway. It’s been 10 years since the first edition came out, and now a lot of stuff has changed in 10 years, and so it’s an interesting time to revisit this topic. I’m currently working on, sort of the non-central chapters, just doing little rewrites of like the preface, chapter one stuff. This fall, I have a sabbatical to add two major additions to the book, one of which will be a number of case study interviews from flipped learning practitioners, following a very successful similar thing that David Clark and I did with the Grading for Growth book. And also I’m going to completely overhaul the research review. Back in 2016 the research on flip learning consisted of 42 papers. That was, yeah, that was the entire corpus of research on Flipboard. Now it’s in the nearly 10,000 papers have been published since that time. And so I have a lot of work to do. That’s going to be in the fall. And hopefully the deadline for the manuscript is August 2026 and I’m shooting to get that done way earlier than that. So hopefully in 2026 you’ll see edition number two with updates about what we know now about flipped learning, what the role of AI is in flipped learning, how COVID changed the idea of flipped learning, and a lot of other interesting things, hopefully, besides.

John: Well, we’re looking forward to that, as well as reading your intentional academia substack.

Robert: Right? IntentionalAcademia.substack.com I probably should have picked a shorter title for it, [LAUGHTER] but that’s what it is that’s correct. IntentionalAcademia.substack.com

Rebecca: Well, it’s always a pleasure, and this is definitely an important topic for all of us to think about.

Robert: Well, thanks again for having me back, and I hope your listeners find this useful.

John: It’s an area that I think we all can use some help with. So, thank you.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on iTunes or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

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