Prof. Kristin Stephens-Martinez

When I became an associate professor of the practice, I said yes to almost everything because I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That led to an unsustainable workload that I wrote about here . [ Also posted on Medium. ] In this post, I share a framework I’m developing to help me decide whether to say “yes” to a service request, with the goal of thinking more strategically rather than reactively. I’m writing this for anyone who feels like they are spending too much time on service or feeling overwhelmed by it all. I’m also writing it for current and future me as I navigate these requests. Understand why you have too much service Before using a strategy to better handle service requests, we must know thyself! Use the Five Whys to dig deeper In some ways, the answer to this question seems obvious, because you keep saying “yes.” But we need to dig deeper by using the Five Whys from design thinking. The Five Whys is an iterative process for exploring the causes and effects...

I became an Associate Professor of the Practice in January 2024. This means academic year (AY) 24–25 was the first time I had to negotiate the service requests and demands of an associate professor. Now that the academic year is over and I spent the last semester digesting the repercussions of those negotiations, I thought I’d write a blog post about it. My hope is that this blog post can serve as a case study on how workload changes when you become an associate. [ Also posted on Medium. ] First, my experience may not be yours, but I think sharing it would be useful to others. It gives you, my reader, a visceral sense of what could happen. Moreover, this blog post is a way for me to better process what happened. It also provides future me with a snapshot of what that first year was like and helps me better imagine the trade-offs and repercussions of my decisions. So this blog post is unlikely to be for everyone, dear reader. But for some of you, let me provide a bit more of a vivid vis...

TLDR: This post is a behind-the-scenes look at a task tracker I’ve developed over years of managing teaching teams (from 3 to 36 teaching assistants). I share examples of the task lists we use each semester, plus templates for modules, exams, and weekly tasks. You’ll also get insight into how I design the tracker to streamline work and support my team. [ Also posted on Medium. ] I’ve written two blog posts about how I track tasks: my to-do lists and my teaching team’s to-do lists . But both are kind of abstract. I write about the things that go into them, but no concrete details. And I did this because I didn’t want to presume others’ contexts. However, that abstractness never fully sat well with me because, when it comes to learning, sometimes concrete examples or case studies are essential. So, this blog post introduces an example course teaching staff task tracker in a Trello board . Screenshot of some of the lists in the Trello board. This post is an experiment to see if peopl...

If you follow this blog at all, you know how much I love thinking about productivity ( to-do list tracking , calendar time management , time tracking , etc.). So, hopefully, it should come as no surprise that I believe a person’s system that helps them be productive needs to evolve. As time passes, things change, and so must the productivity system! There are so many changes that could trigger a need to reflect and evolve: a change in service responsibilities, a change in a course, the arrival of a child, a change in how your kids need you, etc. [ Also posted on medium. ] So, this blog post is about how I deliberately and conscientiously evolve my productivity system. I’ll focus on what I generally do and provide some concrete case studies in hopes that they will help you think about your own situation. General Process My process has two main parts: a mindset and a monthly reflection . There are a few pieces to the mindset. First is just accepting that the productivity system has to c...

This is also on medium . I use Trello  to track all the things I need to do. Trello, at its core, is just a to-do list management tool. It is versatile to many organization strategies and is great for a single person or a team to organize the tasks that need doing. However, this versatility can be very daunting as a novice because you are just starting to figure out a system to keep track of what you need to do. And a novice rarely does well in an environment where there are many ways to do the same thing, a.k.a. a versatile system. A beginner does not have enough experience to determine what technique is better than another. Moreover, a novice finds it challenging to keep track of the many ways to do the same thing. So, if you are a novice, here are my suggestions for how to use Trello to track your personal to-do list (how I use it to organize my research team(s) and teaching team(s) I'll leave for a different blog post). First, I'll go over the fundamental way I use Tre...