Busy, busy..

The autumn semester is busy every year, but this year it really is crazy busy. I can count on one hand the number of days I have had without meetings, lectures etc. Don`t get me wrong, I love the pace and the steady stream of emails, phone calls and students waiting in line outside my office, I really do, but the problem is that I never have time to read up, get back to people and I feel like I am behind on all my projects.

I realise that there will always be some stressful semesters, but I am wondering: am I working slower or is the workload increasing by the hour? Judging by my “to do” list (see picture:-) it is the latter. I now have to keep that list with me at all times to make sure that it gets done. I seem to spend more and more time adding printers, fixing paper jams, setting up proxy, formatting Word documents and so on – in addition to the usual: how do I find..? How do I do..? questions related to searching and citing and writing.

I am just wondering – what can I do to make my work hours more efficient? Make more tutorials and put them up on YouTube? Make every student with a IT related question visit the IT department? Saying no to projects? (Stop blogging, you say? .. OK:)

Having fun at work!

I consider myself a lucky woman for many reasons, but one of them is that I have a really good job. This may sound a little phony, but I sometimes have to remind myself how incredibly important it is to spend your days doing something meaningful.

Like last Friday, when one of our excellent professors came by my office to ask if the library would be interested in participating in a project on his faculty. (Thanks, by the way! Great to have academic staff that takes an interest in the library.) We had a really nice chat about the project and other related projects, which led to me contacting a librarian at a university in Norway and one of my collegues found an app on her phone that makes it possible to use the phone as the library card at the self-checkout station. Maybe not exactely innovation, but intrapreneurship; a new way to do something at your local workplace.

Annie Dillard wrote: How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. So, I guess I’m trying to say “thanks”!