I'm feeling...overwhelmed.
I know this is a cyclical thing. It's my week teaching my co-taught class. I have a lot of setup I need to do for the end of the semester in both classes. There's a ton of admin stuff that needs doing, largely because I've been putting it off and I can't do that anymore. I've got a conference coming up*. The kids are off from school for Pres Day, which involves cobbling together childcare arrangements (not totaling my usual hours). LG has a gymnastics meet coming up. It was her birthday this week. Valentine's Day. Yadda yadda yadda.
But.
The kids don't pick up after themselves. One of them is 2, so expected. The 10-year-old? Well, she's a pig. So either I pick up after her or I have to NAG her all the time. Reward charts don't work. Natural consequences don't work. Mostly we're in a vicious cycle of NAG. And I'm in a similar position of powerlessness in my admin job, where I delegate things to students or other faculty and they don't do it, or they kick it back to me in various ways, or I have to NAG them to do it, all of which is more annoying than just doing the tasks myself. Or, I get all kinds of email that basically positions me in the middle of the people who want something: case in point, I had an email exchange that probably took ten minutes of my day because somebody wanted money for something and I had to get the person who actually PAYS for things in my department to do it. And this is just one small example of a major pattern. It's a lot of minutiae and keeping track of other people's minutiae. Which I'm good at. But I'd like other people to be good at it too.
Now I'm going to make potatoes. And read for class. Because I was too busy dealing with the details today to finish reading for class. (Yes, most of the time I do the big things first, so occasionally all the smaller nonsense needs to be dealt with. And I don't meet with other humans at 8:30 at night...)
Okay. I feel better. Thanks.
* If there are any writer types who read this who will be at AWP and want to meet up, well, I might just be game. Lemme know.
I know this is a cyclical thing. It's my week teaching my co-taught class. I have a lot of setup I need to do for the end of the semester in both classes. There's a ton of admin stuff that needs doing, largely because I've been putting it off and I can't do that anymore. I've got a conference coming up*. The kids are off from school for Pres Day, which involves cobbling together childcare arrangements (not totaling my usual hours). LG has a gymnastics meet coming up. It was her birthday this week. Valentine's Day. Yadda yadda yadda.
But.
The kids don't pick up after themselves. One of them is 2, so expected. The 10-year-old? Well, she's a pig. So either I pick up after her or I have to NAG her all the time. Reward charts don't work. Natural consequences don't work. Mostly we're in a vicious cycle of NAG. And I'm in a similar position of powerlessness in my admin job, where I delegate things to students or other faculty and they don't do it, or they kick it back to me in various ways, or I have to NAG them to do it, all of which is more annoying than just doing the tasks myself. Or, I get all kinds of email that basically positions me in the middle of the people who want something: case in point, I had an email exchange that probably took ten minutes of my day because somebody wanted money for something and I had to get the person who actually PAYS for things in my department to do it. And this is just one small example of a major pattern. It's a lot of minutiae and keeping track of other people's minutiae. Which I'm good at. But I'd like other people to be good at it too.
Now I'm going to make potatoes. And read for class. Because I was too busy dealing with the details today to finish reading for class. (Yes, most of the time I do the big things first, so occasionally all the smaller nonsense needs to be dealt with. And I don't meet with other humans at 8:30 at night...)
Okay. I feel better. Thanks.
* If there are any writer types who read this who will be at AWP and want to meet up, well, I might just be game. Lemme know.
always the urgent overwhelms the important. drives me nuts.
ReplyDeleteas for the cleaning up, I have to confess my deep appreciation for a grad student in my lab who is much, much more compulsive about the dirty dishes in our lab sink than I am. I takes such a load of stress of my shoulders to know that she'll nag people to clean up long before it gets to the point where I feel compelled to nag (or wash them myself).