When in doubt, throw it out. Phil Race gives some tips on how lecturers can cut their workload and the stress that plays havoc with their health

"I'm already working a 70-hour week."

"With these extra numbers I've got just too many assignments to mark to think about changing ."

"I can't run the same sort of tutorials with a class of 240 that I used to run when it was only 60."

"Package some of it up into a flexible-learning option? Where will the time come from?" "Do it in the vacation? What vacation? I've got four publications to write and get accepted in the next four years!" "It's a nightmare getting them scheduled for the practical work, let alone to mark their reports."

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Lecturers in most universities are working a lot harder and longer than they did 20 years ago, as the comments above illustrate. Yet despite all the administration and paperwork thrown at them, they still care about the welfare and success of their students.

But what about their own welfare? More lecturers are going under with stress-related illnesses. The stress is not so much caused by having too many things to do, but by having too little time to do them all well.

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As a result, some good people are quitting the profession. So what can be done?

There are several ways that lecturers can reduce their workloads while maintaining (or even improving) the quality of their students' learning experiences. Perhaps the real problem is that we are too busy doing the "wrong" things to find time to learn about better ways of tackling our workload.

Here are some ideas to play with - you may well be doing some of these already Assess less, but assess better

Students are over-assessed already. We try to measure too much and often end up not measuring any of it very well.

Students try to do too much and often end up not doing much of it well. Devise shorter, more-focused assessments. Assess essay-plans sometimes instead of full essays. Assess short-form structured reports sometimes instead of full reports.

Halve the number of practical activities, and improve the quality and relevance of those that are left. Cut out students having to do the same things more than necessary. Cut out measuring the same things too often.

Explore the possibilities of computer-delivered assessment for those parts of the curriculum that lend themselves to structured questions and pre-planned feedback responses. Make more use of well-facilitated student self-assessment and peer-assessment for appropriate elements of the curriculum.

All of these approaches can save lecturers' time, and can also save students' time, giving them more time to learn well, rather than just try to meet assessment deadlines with surface-level work.

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The lone workers

Make better use of the ways in which students can help each other to learn. Set some work to be done in tutorless groups. Assess something arising from that work, to make sure students do it, but assess an end product where students' journey to that end was the real purpose.

Face-to-face

Use face-to-face time, especially lectures, to spotlight important or difficult parts of the curriculum, but do not try to cover everything. Let go of the relatively straightforward parts of the curriculum for students to study from well-briefed activity with learning resources materials. Emphasise that this curriculum will be covered by assessments and exam questions in just the same way as the spotlighted material.

Do not do so much administration.

It can take twice as long to make some paperwork "perfect" as it might to make it adequate. Use people who are good at administration. They can often do it just as well and much faster. They do not cost as much as you. It costs a lot less to bring in someone to handle paperwork than for you not to manage to do it very well. You can do more important things with your time.

Plan ahead. Do not slave for hours over a hot photocopier. Get your request in early to Reprographics (who can also do it much more cheaply). Reduce the number of times you handle each piece of paperwork. Pass on things you are not going to read. Do things straightaway that you are going to have to do anyway.

Make a friend of your wastepaper bin.

Get a good filing system so that you do not spend ages looking for that document. Get someone who knows about filing to start you off (or even to maintain your filing) Monitor your meetings.

Most things that can be achieved in a three-hour meeting can just about be achieved in a one-hour meeting (if there is a shared will to be efficient). If you are not going to contribute to a meeting, do not go (but be willing to live with any decisions that others will make at the meeting). Regard most meetings as a luxury rather than real work.

Recognise that being at too many meetings can be a work-avoidance strategy.

Tasks Recognise that most urgent-and-important tasks were a little while ago important but not urgent. Keep trying to do some things that are not yet urgent, even before getting down to that urgent one.

You may be surprised at how this tactic can reduce the number of urgent tasks on your schedule. That reduces your stress levels and that increases your efficiency. The backlog is soon eroded.

Human nature is such that 90 per cent of many tasks are done in the last 10 per cent of the available time. Most of these could have been done equally well in the first 10 per cent of the available time, less stress still.

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All of this may look like nothing more than common sense. But some of it is not quite common enough. If anything in this article inspires you towards ways of reducing your workload while at the same time improving your teaching, tell everyone about it.