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An Experiment
2024 so far has a rough start. My brain feels like it’s thinking constantly but there’s no cohesiveness or through line. Last year, I had hopes of being systematic and methodical in order to clear out a backlog of “work” that has been hanging over my head. A clutter of thoughts and tasks that was “preventing” me from spending time on activities that I truly wanted to do and working toward a daily life that reflected my interests rather than others. This plan was in both my personal and professional life. What happened was the opposite. My dad asked for help recovering from surgery and I was thrilled to spend…
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Time
I’m supposed to be thinking about time more. In my previous life on the bench, my daily life was dictated by my timer. Some days were scheduled almost down to the second, assays and tasks lined up one after another. But when I left that, I left a lot of my schedule behind. I find that I still need that structure. I tend to not pay attention to time at all. I constantly over or under estimate how long something will need to take. The tasks I have now don’t come with protocols or instruction sheets with the timing outlined. To add to the problem, there are fewer clocks in…
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Buckets
It is Friday and the end of the work day. One of the last conversations I had before leaving was a wandering one that was part weekend projections and part weekday recap. One of the statements that came up by my colleague was “I couldn’t tell you what my job is.” She meant how a liaison is specifically defined within an institution that also considers librarians tenure-track faculty based on research. This is a separate consideration than how we spend our time. I was just thinking about this today. I spend my first year tracking how I spent my time. The purpose was to make sure I was using my…
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Day in review August 27, 2015
I have yet another headache. It is making me short tempered and judgmental. Someone is sitting near me that had an odor that isn’t helping. I’m listening to the guy next to me discuss with his kid, the editorial changes he made to his homework. There are more than a few that are on the rush hour train taking up extra seats. Earlier today, I was supposed to spend about six hours at a variety of clincal shadowing experiences, but I was stood up (essentially). It left me with a free day, but I didn’t use it as productively as I would like. Which always brings me back to the…
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Monday problems
Today I got back to the meta-analysis that I was working on. I reviewed my notes and my original search structure. Next was adapting it to the vocabulary of the next database. The run produced similar results in terms of numbers. Unfortunately, I was stumped by the inability to save or export the list in an RIS format. I left it hanging while I went to a faculty meeting. When I got back, I had a sympathetic, but overall unhelpful customer service agent at Elsevier. She couldn’t do anything for me. The only explanation I got was a “system-wide” outage that hadn’t been resolved. The recommended that clear the cache,…
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End of a week
Friday is the Hallelujah it’s over day. The day I look forward to these days. While I love the direction my life is going, the time committment to it is staggering. I am ever edging closer to needing to either get a better handle on time management or acquiesce to working off the clock. I am resisting the latter with every ounce of my being. Time is the ever elusive thing that I am chasing. I never have enough of it. I have endless things to fill it with. Tonight I will do none of those things. I will pick up dinner on the way home and a gallon of…
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Time and department heads
Of course I don’t consider 2015 to be this horrible, impending doom that I implied in my last post. I’m not heaping a load of expectations on it either. I try very hard to remember that time is just a human construct, an attempt for us to make sense of our world. I do think that I spend a significant amount of time figuring out how to manage time, how to make the most of my time, and how to make sure that I am useing my time wisely. That’s a lot of paying attention to time. This has become particularly important at work. I have workshops to create, and…
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New Year Coming
It seems hard to believe, but the new year is almost upon us once again. This is not something unusual. Most of us think similar thoughts at this time of year. I always consider each year coming as a surprise. Whe I was a child I counted forward the years and discovered that the turn of the millenium would come in my lifetime. With a little more math, I realized that I would be twenty-seven. That little knowledge tidbit set me on my course and I don’t think that I ever recalculated. Year 2000 came and went. None of the appliances I had suffered any programming problems, and life went…
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Decision fatigue
I just read an article on Slate on a few tips to combat decision fatigue. I am notoriously bad at making decisions promptly. I’m almost always comfortable to happy with the decision that I’ve made. But the article was particularly timely. I, of course, already knew about this phenomenon; but I feel that this perfectly described my distrupted life and current work habits. Without realizing it, I have mitigated some of this. I cook on weekends so I don’t have to think about breakfast or lunch. I have a wardrobe that I bought all in one season, so it coordinates and I don’t have to spend a lot of time…
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Email and One Note
Today I accomplished two things that have been a nusiance: cleaning up my email and getting One Note to sync. These tasks fall under the “not real work” category for me. I generally consider them time sucks, that are necessary only in that they are tools that have to be used because of the systems that we have created around ourselves. Email has been a particular challenge. Pervious jobs have not been so communicaton heavy. Even when it has brief moments of activity, I can usually defer some of it by simply walking down the hall and asking in person. That can’t be accomplished easily here. Not only that, but…