Today, after a two hour lecture first thing in the morning, I have been trying to drive my way through a fairly long list of tasks, many of which are somewhat overdue. I set aside separate, discrete periods of time (~2 hours each) for tasks related to my management role as Deputy Head of School and for those related to my teaching. Now, as I reach the end of the afternoon and look back on how things have gone, two main thoughts/feelings come to mind. First, I feel fairly pleased with myself for not giving in to distraction and sticking to my plan. Secondly, I can see that whilst I got a lot done, I got nowhere near as much done as I would like…
The problem, on reflection, is that every single task that I set out to do took longer than I hoped it would. This was for a variety of reasons including things like clunky documents that I had to work with and delays in being able to access a printer, but mostly it was simply a case of tasks being more complicated than I hoped they would be. Actually, I am not sure that they were REALLY more complicated – it might just have been that they took me longer than I wanted them to because I was over-ambitious about what I hoped to achieve in the limited time I had available. I am not going to beat myself up about this – I can only do what I have time to do – but it is frustrating that I haven’t been able to clear the backlog as much as I had hoped. I will just have to get my head down some more tomorrow and make whatever inroads into things that I can.
One thing certainly did seem to work, namely splitting my available time into sections for tasks associated with different roles or aspects of my work. I think I will experiment with this idea some more. It seems like a good idea to decide, before I settle down to work at a particular time, which of my multiple hats I am going to wear – educator, manager, scientist etc. and then to not allow tasks from one domain to bleed across into time set aside for another domain. This ought to reduce distractions and help me to maintain a singular focus on what I am trying to achieve.
Tim O'Hare 