We're seeing some attrition around here . . . well, summer (and winter) can be like that. It's not all sun (snow) and fun. Mosquito bites, sunburn, incidents and accidents, distractions welcome or un-, all kinds of things can get in the way. We send good wishes to those of you who are dealing with overwhelm and Too Many Things.
Some people are better at rolling with punches than others. Some actually like an unpredictable environment; some of us do okay at the rolling but mind having to do it; some get really off-track when things don't go as planned. If you're good at it, what are some of your tips and tricks? If you're not, how do you help yourself get back on an even keel?
Here are the goals for last week:
Daisy
Get data analysis done and sent off
Write grant application preliminary notice
Update grant agency paperwork
Do not try to micromanage student’s field work from a distance
Pick a section from old paper and finish it
Patience, patience, patience in all house-human interactions
Medical stuff for partner
Get back on exercise wagon slowly and carefully
Dame Eleanor Hull
- daily exercise, safe food, bed no
later than 11
- Two hours x 5 on research
- One hour x 4 on teaching prep
- Life Stuff as possible
Elizabeth
Anne Mitchell (carried over)
Enjoy the week off.
Send off the mid-internship evaluation to the
requisite folks.
Swim in my younger daughter’s pool (such
luxury!)
Read and write as the impulse hits.
heu mihi
prepare for trip
JaneB
1) work no more than 30 hours
2) make some lists for smaller things that fit under the areas of personal replenishment, reducing next year's pressures and fun/creative stuff.
3) replenishment: back to basics - keep it up! Eating plenty of fruit and veg, drinking enough water, a small exercise habit (10 minutes a day of deliberate exercise), a small chore habit (5 minutes of picking up or one of the recurring chores like a load of laundry each day), journal daily.
4) pressure reduction: if I have room in the 25 hours, review my honours module and decide what can stay from this year's iteration and what I can easily and quickly refresh. Also have meeting to divvy up work for the shared project module.
5) fun/creative: write a letter to a friend/read for half an hour at least 3 days/do at least two crochet stripes on the "desert colours" blanket project/play D&D, write another job board game or do other prep/play with watercolours a couple of times.
Karen (held
over)
- Finish syllabi, get materials/tech requests
in, make progress on first module VILE content
- Write on my own research each day (read for my
own research each day)
- (if permitted by gatekeepers), get draft grant
complete
- conference paper proposal in
- 2 x yoga (livestream classes from home)
On one hand, I get bored when life is too regimented, and due to health stuff I often have to adjust on the fly to being short on sleep or otherwise unable to do the planned thing. OTOH, I will cop to being a bit of a control freak and getting grumpy when things don't go as planned. I tend to throw up my hands and do something like bake cookies, go for a walk, or read for fun, to regulate my mood, before trying to get back on top of the lists.
ReplyDeleteHow I did:
- daily exercise, safe food, bed no later than 11. YES, YES, Ha very ha. Still mostly staying up till past midnight. It seems to be the Summer of the Night Owl.
- Two hours x 5 on research. YES? A little patchy some days but I feel like I'm making good progress.
- One hour x 4 on teaching prep. YES on average. I think. Anyway, some useful progress there, too.
- Life Stuff as possible. YES. I got the new phone I need, though I still haven't set it up. It's a step in the right direction! Also more trip planning/booking/organizing. I got my 2nd Covid booster. Did a lot of weeding. Is it a character flaw that I can never leave invasive species alone but have to dig them up in whatever garden I have? This year, it's wild carrot: very pretty but spreads like mad, and though some butterflies like it, there are native species that they also like, so I'm trying to pull out the wild carrot in preparation for planting natives.
New goals:
- daily exercise, safe food, bed by midnight
- Two hours x 3 on research
- Set up VILE sites for both classes
- Life Stuff as possible, see friends, enjoy self
A good amount of "yes" there, and if it's the same wild carrot we have in Europe, it's easier to weed out than many invasives... I hope it is!
DeleteI am fighting wild carrot too! It is a huge improvement after the last yard which had cow parsnip. I am grateful that the wild carrot smells nice when you pull it up and does not produce stinging sap... Hope you get to do a lot of the "enjoy self" stuff!
DeleteMisery loves company! Good luck with yours. It wouldn't be so bad if we'd had some rain recently, but the ground is hard which makes it much more difficult, especially with the bigger, older plants.
DeleteWell done me, I set up last week's prompt then didn't actually reply to it! Sigh...
ReplyDeleteTechnically I was on leave last week, but in practice I worked Monday morning and all of Thursday (meetings... deadlines...) and a fair bit of the time in between thinking about it. After a few pretty idle days, though, I'm hoping to ACTUALLY be off in the coming week... and to find the energy to tackle housework things. SIGH.
I definitely like the variety of an academic job, but I struggle with transitions and interruptions sometimes. Or rather, I tend to go for low-hanging fruit and let myself be distracted by the needs of others, then struggle to actually work on the Top Left stuff, especially the research stuff (I can work in the gaps on projects once they exist, but I've gotten to a point where I think I need/want to actually do some Big Thinking about what the last part of my research career is going to look like - what are the big questions I'm going after, personally, not just via grad students who naturally want to keep ownership of the work they did under my direction, making it hard for me to work on it at my pace and in my way. I want to embrace my oddities and follow MY thought patterns for a change...). After the last two years, I don't know that I really care about a lot of this stuff; too much has been last minute and reactive, and it isn't getting any better. I'm not sure I can do this job much longer, and that makes me very sad, because I used to be good at it, and I loved it.
My reliable, smart, all round good person skills teaching partner officially left NorthernUni on Friday, and it's not at all clear who will replace them in their various lower level module and administrative roles where we worked together - none of the candidates are going to be effective supports and partners for me, unless they underwent a personal transformation this summer, and oh lord between that and the expectation of everything in person, I am just dreading September.
Oh, and the Dean has decided we need to look outside for a new Head of Department (i.e. that there is NO MONEY to help with teaching staff losses other than precarious contracts for inexperienced bottom of the pay grade folks (who are often wonderful, but there is so much of the invisible work which they can't do, and shouldn't have to do, which falls on the shrinking number of people with longer tenure like me), but they can hire in a new professor-grade (top pay grade in UK for academics), gah!) so we won't get to sort out the other roles until Christmas, so the hope of having a larger admin role and less teaching is now postponed. Again.
I'm having a mood downswing again - working 25-30 hours is a struggle, my house is still a tip and my sister is muttering about visiting (and she will be kind to my face, but she's my kid sister who is very judgey about OTHER people and who just has her life together (small business, child, husband, dog, lovely home that could be in a magazine with a quick hoover round, skinny, Put Together, the sort women my age try to claim to be all over social media), and my house is in a horder/nervous break down/I live alone and am very... ADHD in this aspect of my life state of uncleanliness and chaos).
Right now I am so very short of... get-up-and-go? I guess my analogy is that if the basic goal of balance is to keep your jug topped up so you can pour to those around you, what I need to get the hang of is that whilst stress empties the jug faster, burnout and mental health issues and whatever it was I ran into at Easter have fundamentally changed things - cracked the jug so it can't hold as much or give as much, or changed the shape of it, or something. It feels like even doing the topping up things is a chore and hard work, and that a week's worth of regeneration is gone in an hour of work, and it is not good. So when we go back and my work requires 45-55+ hours a week, not 25-30, I don't know what will happen. For the moment I am NOT THINKING ABOUT IT! Which is not super effective...
LAST TWO WEEKS:
Delete1) work no more than 30 hours yes for week 7; week 8's goal was 0 and I did about 10 (plus allowed it too much head space)
2) make some lists for smaller things that fit under the areas of personal replenishment, reducing next year's pressures and fun/creative stuff. I wrote a few things down
3) replenishment: back to basics - keep it up! Eating plenty of fruit and veg, drinking enough water, a small exercise habit (10 minutes a day of deliberate exercise), a small chore habit (5 minutes of picking up or one of the recurring chores like a load of laundry each day), journal daily. very mixed - see dip-rant above
4) pressure reduction: if I have room in the 25 hours, review my honours module and decide what can stay from this year's iteration and what I can easily and quickly refresh. Also have meeting to divvy up work for the shared project module. I did about a quarter of the honours review. And did the divvy-up meeting!
5) fun/creative: write a letter to a friend/read for half an hour at least 3 days/do at least two crochet stripes on the "desert colours" blanket project/play D&D, write another job board game or do other prep/play with watercolours a couple of times. no, mostly, some, yes, yes
THIS COMING WEEK: I am on leave, so...
1) do not work
2) do some things on the lists
3) replenishment: back to basics - reset. Eating plenty of fruit and veg, drinking enough water, a small exercise habit (10 minutes a day of deliberate exercise), a small chore habit (5 minutes of picking up or one of the recurring chores like a load of laundry each day), journal daily.
3a) substantial house projects: even the simple stuff like throwing a load of stuff into boxes so its less sprawling all over surfaces, cobweb removal and some hoovering would count.
4) pressure reduction: nothing. WEEK OFF.
5) fun/creative: write a letter to a friend/read for half an hour at least 3 days/do at least two crochet stripes on the "desert colours" blanket project/play D&D, write another job board game or do other prep/play with watercolours a couple of times.
:( I'm sorry you're feeling so rough.
DeleteAnd actually, I'm a fan of "not thinking about it," as my own prompt-response suggests! Sometimes advance thinking/ planning is helpful, but other times it just leads to stewing about things we can't control. There is a whole lot about your work situation that you can't control and that sounds truly, objectively, messed-up and difficult: having trouble with that isn't "depression" or "ADHD," it's reacting reasonably to an unreasonable situation. Unfortunately, in academia it's nearly impossible to get another job in order to escape the toxic one, which would be the most reasonable thing to do if we were outside academia.
DeleteThank you! I DO have a lot of things to do, so it makes sense to work away at them steadily, but I don't have the brain capacity at the moment, so sometimes you just have to shrug and pour another lemonade...
DeletePour another lemonade, and rest! That is necessary, you are fighting against so many big structural issues. I hope this week can be restful and restorative and peaceful!
DeleteUncertainty does not bother me much at all, I’m definitely a “roll with it” sort… I think my superpower for that is to have a really clear idea of what is under my control and what is not. I can happily get mad at myself for things under my own control, but I feel like getting angry or upset at things outside my control does no good so 99% of the time, I don’t... Of course somethings bother/irritate/disappoint me when things go out of control, but I don’t feel it as deeply as a lot of other people do. Which I’m sure makes me insufferable at times… The other thing that helps enormously is that I always have back-up plans – along the lines of “hope for the best, plan for the worst”, with at least a few back-ups. I think it is partly because I do a lot of research where the unexpected is normal so there is always something that happens (sorry can’t fly for a week due to fog/fuel shortage/ear infection, oops road is washed out, oh dear lab machine just exploded, oh sorry fuel cache got dropped on the wrong lake)… Having multiple back-up plans makes it possible to always do something instead of stewing about the things I am not doing. I think it works for personal life too, most of the time anyway!
ReplyDeleteNot a bad week for getting through a few things. This week is a short one and a lot of it will be student-focused. The grant paperwork is tedious beyond belief, I’m going to stay up tonight with a glass of wine and do it all in one fell swoop instead of letting it ruin another nice sunny day!
Last week’s goals:
Get data analysis done and sent off DONE AND PAPER SUBMITTED!
Write grant application preliminary notice ALMOST DONE
Update grant agency paperwork ALMOST DONE
Do not try to micromanage student’s field work from a distance DONE
Pick a section from old paper and finish it DID A FIGURE!!! YAY!!!
Patience, patience, patience in all house-human interactions DONE
Medical stuff for partner DONE AND RECOVERING
Get back on exercise wagon slowly and carefully DONE
This week’s goals:
Something fun with kid
Finish all grant stuff
Do something else with old paper
Proofread new paper galleys
Set up new office computer
Do something with new local paper
Draft out one section of collaborative out-of-field paper
Look at all that yes! Well done, you!
DeleteTo the extent that I do roll with the punches, having backup plans is a huge help! Knowing that I'm just switching from Plan A to Plan B (or C), rather than being completely derailed, turns the problem into one of transitions (still not trivial, but better). I should try to think of all plan-changes in cooking terms, because in the kitchen I'm fine with discovering I don't have X and will need to use Y.