I frequently get asked as to how much time I spend on the various facets of my job. One of the biggest questions is how much time I spend with Beach Hillel, since I serve as the rabbi. In past years, I would spend a significant amount of time with other Hillels, such as Orange County Hillel and Inland Empire Hillel, and I was curious as to how much of that was spent with them. Whenever people would ask, I would roughly estimate percentages or fractions of how much time I spent with my different activities, since I didn’t have the hard data with which to respond.
However, since my primary benefactor expects me to send him a breakdown of my activities and how much time I spend doing them, I have the data collected. So, in preparing the annual SoCalJSS/SoCalJYAE report (which will be forthcoming), I finally went through and sorted it out for the time period of August 2012-July 2013.
I came up with two separate sets of data and, yes, two separate pie charts (who doesn’t love pictures?). In the first of these, pictured to the right (perhaps, above), I show how much time was spent with a variety of my activities, which yields the following: 44% with Long Beach Hillel, 35% with young adults, 14% with Jewlicious Festival, 4% with other Hillels (& AEPi), and 3% with bar mitzvah students.
The second of these two data sets incorporates not only my time dealing with “end users”, but also incorporates “back-end” time, such as donor relations, communication (which is sort of a catch-all, that can include phone calls with young adults or students, Facebook messaging with students or young adults, as well as setting up meetings, etc.), and administrative work. For this year, it broke down: 25% with Long Beach Hillel, 20% on young adult work, 16% on communication, 14% meetings, 9% donor relations, 7.5 % Jewlicious Festival, 5% administrative work, 2% with bar mitzvah students, 1% the Long Beach Yom HaShoah event (of which I was the Rabbinic Chair), and the remainder working with other campuses’ Hillels.
I am very glad now that I have this data that I can “keep in my back pocket”, so to speak, and be able to respond to people in a substantive fashion regarding the way I spend my time. One element I do want to do going forward is to break up the components of my communications: how much time is spent on donor communications, how much of it is Beach Hillel-related, how much of it is young adult-related, and so on.