Scheduling Hell

Imagine someone hands you this form, and asks you to fill out your schedule so that s/he can figure out a committee meeting time (Scroll down, please, because I can't make the html not leave a big space):

Time	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri
8-9
9-10
10-11

And so forth.

How do you fill it out?

An odd question, perhaps, but you have two choices, of course. You can fill in the times when you have classes or other obligations, or you can fill in the times you're free.

Maybe your obligations look like this:

Time	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri
8-9
9-10	Class	Off Hrs	Class	Off Hrs	Class
10-11	Class		Class		Class

And so forth. Maybe you put X's in.

Or maybe you put in when you're free:

Time	Mon	Tues	Wed	Thurs	Fri
8-9
9-10
10-11		Free		Free

Okay, so technically you have neither class nor office hours at 8am, but really, no one wants to get to campus at 8am, so you either don't put it down or you X it out.

I have a theory that there are two sorts of people in the world; the ones who will put in the hours they have obligations on the form, and the ones who will fill in the hours they are free. And the ones who fill in the obligations will have perhaps 15-18 hours filled in for classes, meetings, whatever. There's a subset of these who will fill in exactly what the obligation is, so the scheduler knows if it's somewhat flexible (office hours, for example). That leaves, say 22 hours open for scheduling meetings. And the ones who put in only free hours will have 10-12 hours open for meetings.

I don't think one group is really any busier than the other, but we seem to have really different perceptions.

I was in a meeting today where we spent almost an hour trying to figure out when we could meet as a committee. Three people filled out the form with classes/office hours/other meetings, and two filled it out with the free time.

It's not that anyone is lazy, but between the five of us, there were three hours in the week that could be used for a meeting, and each of those times was on one or another person's non-teaching day (a day we can grade or prep at home, pretty much). We pretty much all teach 11 hours a week, in class. That's inflexible time; some of us have additional meetings that are inflexible. (I'm on a college committee, for example, that just schedules itself every week from 3:30 on one day and has for years; you know when you run for it that you have to have that slot open.)

There was a fair bit of rigidity in there, too. Someone who teaches til 9:45pm doesn't want to come in at 8am that morning or the morning after. Someone with a kid or kids wants to be home by 3pm on certain days. Someone with a longer commute doesn't want to come in just for an hour meeting, and doesn't want to wait four hours between a morning class and an afternoon meeting. All these are understandable and reasonable, but they sure do make scheduling a pain.

I'm only grateful that my non-teaching day is the worst teaching day for two other people, and so there were no times at all open for meeting.

ps. My html skills sort of suck.