Taming the IR/IE Queue: What Works and What Doesn’t
The Challenge
If you search through a bookstore, a video tutorial library, or your favorite search engine for ideas on being more productive, you will find more content than you could possibly digest. I know this because those are the places I searched when I needed advice on how to tame my Institutional Research and Effectiveness (IR/IE) work. Unfortunately, the resources I found were only ever partially helpful because they addressed some—but not all—of what comes across my desk.
No two IR/IE roles are identical, but I wager that some of the elements of my job show up in yours: part compliance reporter, part on-demand analyst, and part database navigator. The varied elements of the job are what keep it interesting. Keeping on top of these responsibilities means keeping track of critical deadlines, managing ad hoc requests that walk into our office, and administering a system of self-service reports in an organization with shifting data needs and definitions.
None of the productivity resources out there address the uniqueness of the IR/IE job, so I decided to pick some from what I’ve read and, through trial and error, figure out what works for me.
What follows is a summary of a few hacks that I’ve found to work particularly well as well as promising ideas that did not quite get the job done. At the end of the article is a table listing all of the hacks I’ve tried thus far, the advantages and disadvantages of each, and whether or not I am still using that hack. For the technological context, my work laptop runs on Windows 11, my institution utilizes Microsoft Office (including Outlook) products, and my cell phone runs on Android 17.
What Works
Let’s start with the elephant in the room: email. In her book Up Time, Laura Mae Martin makes a few recommendations that I have found quite helpful.
The first is to use rules to automatically sort my email. I’m not concerned with ever reaching “Inbox Zero,” but I did find that my inbox was where I went to look both for those messages that were important and those that were informative. I did not have any rules sorting my email for me, so on any given morning, I would receive two database-generated data-quality-check emails (99 times out of 100, the quality was acceptable) next to higher ed newsletters from The Chronicle, Inside Higher Ed, and Higher Ed Dive next to an email from my VP asking for an update on a project with a looming deadline.
If I wasn’t careful, it was easy to miss the VP’s email.
I therefore decided to set up the following email rules:
- All newsletters or “breaking news” emails now get moved to a News folder, and all emails in the News folder get deleted after 2 weeks (if I don’t read it within 2 weeks, is it really still “news”?).
- All emails from our system office—often reminders of upcoming deadlines—get moved to a dedicated “PASSHE IR/IE” folder.
- All database-generated data quality emails get moved to a dedicated folder.
The second useful recommendation from Martin is to ask myself, of the emails that are not touched by the rules, which ones can I respond to within two minutes. For those emails, I simply respond in that moment. For all other emails, Martin suggests moving those emails into three custom folders:
- Respond: For those emails that require a more thoughtful response but no further action (personal example: instructions on how to access the sought-after data using a self-service report system).
- Read: For those emails that require a closer, more in-depth read (personal example: updates on the Pennsylvania legislative budgeting process that affects state system appropriations).
- Revisit: For those emails that require an action or a follow-up.
These hacks have given me more leverage to tame my inbox. But email is only one part of the IR/IE workflow. What about the questions that come to me via a phone call, a meeting, or a hallway conversation?
To handle those, I need a central place to jot down those requests (including those that linger in my main inbox). Perusing YouTube, I have found a way to use Google Tasks effectively for this purpose. I’ve created separate Tasks lists for each domain of my IR/IE responsibilities: Reporting, Analysis, Data Governance, and Administrative Tasks. These lists are parking lots for good ideas; when someone says to me, “We should look at a trend of withdrawn students by their average GPAs, by those who withdrew in their first year, or by their starting major,” I place them in the Analysis to-do list. It’s a good question, but it will take me time to fit it into the daily workflow.
Combining Martin’s and YouTube’s advice, I have built a Google Tasks list titled “Today’s List,” which contains the most urgent and important tasks that I need to tackle on any given day. I update the list at the end of every workday, setting my project priorities while trying to account for the next day’s meetings and deadlines. I like that, every night, I can glance on my phone at the day ahead. It helps to prepare me mentally.
Understandably, Tasks integrates beautifully with Gmail and other Google products but not so well with Microsoft Outlook. Since my institution uses Microsoft products, I use Microsoft To Do on my phone to set up reminders for quick, discrete actions, usually from the app on my phone. My Android phone allows me to add a one-touch button in the Quick Setting panel that creates a new To Do reminder. Whenever a thought pops out of nowhere—“Don’t forget to take home your laptop tomorrow” or “Send out the Zoom link for Tuesday’s meeting,” —I go to my phone, create a To Do reminder, and set it to pop up on both my phone and in Outlook at the specified date and time.
What Doesn’t Work
Perhaps more informative than what works for me is the list of hacks I’ve tried that don’t work.
First, a system I used in the early 2010s to keep track of requests and projects (defined as anything taking more than one day to complete) was inspired by a post from Kevin MacDonell, a university advancement data analyst, in his CoolData blog. The system required tracking everything in a single Excel workbook. This workbook included original due date, the requestor, a description of the request, and a subjective evaluation, by me, of the priority of the request. Although the system worked okay for me as a relatively siloed, junior analyst, maintaining it for more than a few years was untenable. I did not always remember to document deadline changes as they came in, and any changing criteria of what was considered “complete” was difficult to accurately record. The result was a workbook in which almost every project was flagged as overdue and never complete. This made for both an inaccurate tool to measure progress and a psychological albatross for me.
Another tried-and-failed system is one I think a lot of us rely on: record tasks on Post-it notes (or with a sticky paper product of your choice). While this was a convenient medium for recording in-meeting ideas, hallway conversations, and upcoming deadlines, once I saw more than five notes stuck to the bottom of my computer monitors, they ceased to be prominent reminders and simply became part of the décor. That was anything but productive.
The final hack that I want to call out as ineffective for my personal IR/IE workflow is the idea, inspired by Laura Mae Martin, of dedicating time each day to file unread emails accordingly and then to work through what I had already filed in my Respond/Read/Revisit folders. This idea sounds good in theory, but when I try to implement it, I either underestimate the time to address my unread emails (rabbit holes can be labyrinthine) or I get waylaid by a request from senior leadership or a question from one of my team members. Here, I think that drawing strict, daily boundaries that allow me to effectively handle email is incompatible with the open-door policy that characterizes how I approach my job.
As with everything, though, your mileage may vary with any of the productivity hacks that have or have not worked for me.
Overview
The table below summarizes the good and the bad with each of the hacks I have tried.
| Productivity Hack | What’s Good | What’s Not So Good | Still In Use? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Outlook email rules | More quickly see the most important messages Works with sender names, keywords in the subject or body, and can take a variety of actions (e.g. move to a folder, mark as read, forward to another) | Yes | |
| Respond | Read | Revisit folder | Encourages a two-stage approach for handling email | Requires the discipline to routinely review each folder and to address all filed emails | Yes |
| If an email can be responded to or acted upon within two minutes, do it right then and there | Encourages quick action when possible Works in tandem with the Respond | Read | Revisit folders | If, for some reason, a flood of emails each meeting this requirement arrived, the rule might need to be amended | Yes |
| Setting up a shared IR/IE Outlook calendar that shows upcoming deadlines, IPEDS lock dates, and staff days off | Keeps the entire team on the same page Everyone has access to the calendar, so responsibility for maintaining it can be shared | Cannot set up deadline reminders on my own Outlook calendar without being duplicative | Yes |
| Setting a Google Tasks list for the following workday | Encourages planning ahead Having a list to start with in the morning shortens the time between the start of work and the start of productive work | Often, the next-day Tasks list is either too ambitious or is sidelined by that day’s urgent issues that need to be addressed | Yes |
| Microsoft To Do reminders | Set date- and time-specific reminders for discrete actions to take Reminders appear on work computer (through Outlook) and on phone | Flagging emails and forcing a reminder through To Do never seems to work properly Syncing problems between the laptop and the phone when marking a reminder as complete | Yes |
| Excel project tracker | Detailed notes of the next steps to advance the project Conditional formatting can show what is behind and what is on track | Onerous to maintain, particularly for complex projects (e.g. data analysis task that opens up a data quality issue) | No |
| Keeping papers on my desk as reminders | Easy to print out an email or a document that directs the next step | Requires physically large desk surface When desk surface is covered, papers get stacked and requests or projects get lost | Sparingly |
| Post-It notes | Easy to capture tasks in a variety of settings, including virtual and in-person meetings Post-It notes can record an idea in the moment that can then be recorded in a Google Tasks list later | After four Post-its, the notes fade into the background | Sparingly |
| Written to-do lists | Flexible formatting for notes | Hard to re-order priorities Hard to modify to reflect projects that just expand | No |
| A single Google Tasks list | Convenient to record ideas at my computer or on my phone Option of adding subtasks or task details for more in-depth information | List quickly becomes very long and tasks get lost | No |
| Multiple Google Tasks lists for the four main domains of my job (Reporting, Analysis, Data Governance, Admin) | Convenient to record ideas at my computer or on my phone Option of adding subtasks or task details for more in-depth information Lists serve as parking lots for good ideas until they can be added to the daily task list | Yes | |
| Adding every ad hoc request to Google Tasks | Documents all of the ad hoc work that is accomplished | With no clear threshold on how much time an ad hoc task requires before being added to a list, this becomes unproductive busywork | No |
| Setting due dates on Google Tasks | Reminds you when something comes due | Google Tasks only appear once in tasks.google.com Reminders do not appear in Outlook | No |
| Blocking time on my calendar to address Respond | Read | Revisit emails | Encourages alignment with the Respond | Read | Revisit folder structure | Inevitably, urgent questions or data needs preempt the blocked time Difficult to predict the timeframe of a given day that will be clear enough to address the filed emails | No |
| IR/IE team shared drive folder for ad hoc requests using a naming convention of “JDoe_ShortDesc” and which appends a ticket number (if applicable) to the end | Requests (and associated work files) are centrally stored, organized by academic year and requestor Files are discoverable by all team members, including those who will join us in the future Enables cross-reference to office ticketing system | Yes |
Want to share a productivity hack that works in your IR/IE office? Email me at kevin.mccarthy@sru.edu.
Kevin McCarthy is the Director of Analytics and Decision Support at Slippery Rock University in Pennsylvania. He leads the team responsible for providing data and analysis to drive decisions, to forecast enrollment, as well as responding to reporting requirements from state, federal, and other external agencies.