Last week I was on holiday and, therefore, away from work. In the two preceding weeks I felt that I had worked very efficiently and effectively, pushing forward quite a few projects and starting to establish some interesting ways of structuring some parts of my activity. I spent a good chunk of time before I went away setting things up ready for my return, for example deciding what I was going to do each day this week in what I thought was a sensible, achievable manner.
I returned to work yesterday with ~90 emails to wade through. Some of these were trivial – bits of information that I didn’t need to act on or store anywhere, although even these took a certain amount of time and bandwidth to process. Others required my attention, authorizing payments, forwarding timetabling requests, chasing assessment marks etc. I had one 1 hour meeting scheduled in the afternoon – it became a 1.5 hour meeting. Today I had two meetings scheduled – essentially the whole morning. I have further meetings scheduled for Wednesday (2 hours) and Friday (2 hours plus, now, another 2 hours or so…). I quickly realized that my best laid plans for this week needed to be completely scrapped – there was simply top much ‘stuff’ shouting for my urgent attention to have the luxury of getting on with the work that I planned and wanted (and needed) to do, for example starting to prepare for the new academic year’s teaching in less than 3 weeks’ time… So the plan has been almost entirely erased from my whiteboard, the tasks I had scheduled for myself have been unscheduled, the programme of ‘nudge’ tasks I had laid out (office improvements, alumni database) has been shelved for now.
With a bit of luck I can get my head down tomorrow, work through all of the new ‘stuff’ and emerge on Thursday with a clearer space to set about things afresh. I certainly need to start thinking about next year’s teaching soon. Just to add a little more stress to the current situation, I have an abnormal weekend ahead which involves traveling to and from the New Forest to run the New Forest Marathon on Sunday morning. If the weather is good then it ought to be an enjoyable and uplifting run in some great surroundings. But one thing is certain, it won’t leave me feeling refreshed and full of energy ready for the week ahead!
Tim O'Hare 