An Excel spreadsheet might be your new best friend!

Ok, so my techno skills suck and are outdated! Maybe it’s not Excel, but it’s definitely something that counts as precisely as possible. Academia is a privately run organisation doing the business of creating public knowledge. This lack of lining up between structure and function, along with their deep pockets to pay lawyers to spin excellent legalese around their employees and tie them up with empty, circular, illogical, unfulfillable words and expectations, mean that the only evidence an academic can create that would have any standing about how many hours they were really working to prove just how defunct and deviously unrealistic the teaching allocation tools of universities are is through their own time-stamped precisely accurate data collection.

It is possible that their exploitation of you finally tips you over the edge, and you ask for all that unpaid money back. In addition to unwavering, unapologetic gumption to stand up for yourself, you will need unquestionable evidence of what you are claiming. If you are not already keeping a precise time-use diary, I suggest you do. The date, the tasks, and how long they each took should be recorded to at least the nearest half or quarter hour. Keep tabs on how much they are short, over, or meeting the three components of your work profile - research, teaching, and service - against your university’s Enterprise Bargain Agreement.

Maybe the day you ask for all that unpaid overtime never comes. Maybe you feel sufficiently valued, supported, recognised, respected, heard, and remunerated, so that extra time you are giving in service of your institution is done within an unresentful grace leeway. But if this does not ring true for you, something may just snap and you better be ready to channel the rage of your injustice and dehumanisation into cool-headed, clearly articulated, data-driven negotiation.