07.30.08
Project overload!
Don’t get me wrong, but I think new projects are like flypaper– they stick too me way to easily and are impossible to get rid of! Over the course of this summer, I was appointed to two new committees, bringing my total to five– yes, that’s five committees, to generate ever more projects for me. I hope the two newest committees are temporary assignments as my library implements two major, yet interconnected software applications, RFID and floating collections. These committees are on top of a new committee generated from a consultant’s recommendation for my department last fall and two permanent, longstanding committees I’ve had for a number of years. None of them were optional, so opting out wasn’t possible.
In addition to the two new committees, my library is evaluating CONTENTdm (digital project management software). I’m heading up this evaluation and trying to get my cataloging staff trained and on board to use it (at no cost to the library). To complicate matters, I’ve lost one employee this summer and her workload is now shared among the cataloging staff until replacements can be hired later this fall. And this week, one of my most productive catalogers is on vacation. Can you say too much work, too few people?
I’ve spent the last several months working overtime way more than I wanted to, sometimes as much as 7 hours per week. Do I earn more money for this? Nope. Does it get me farther ahead? Probably not, although at the time, it seems like the right thing to do because a deadline looms or my mind is fired up about an assignment following a meeting. Will I ever learn to stop working overtime? Who knows? I wonder if other people in similar positions in other professions are as overloaded as I am.
I’m starting to feel the squeeze of too much to do, day after day, unrelenting and overwhelming. Pushing my brain and my body to keep working on a project long after everyone else has gone home and the sun hangs low in the sky isn’t good for me– I know that in my heart. It’s just hard to turn off my stupid brain, because it enjoys working on creative and challenging things until it’s exhausted. Problem is… I’m feeling as though I’m moving towards burnout or a meltdown…unless I can figure out how I can delegate some of my routine tasks to my cataloging staff. With the current situation in my department and library, I know they’ll be thrilled to receive one more thing to do. 
06.11.08
A juggling act
Some days when I arrive at my office, my mind is abuzz with everything I need to do. Some tasks I do daily, like sending files of bibliographic records to Marcive for authority control or checking catalogers’ work as they cross-train into other areas. Other tasks are part of bigger projects, like updating documentation, filling out vendor profiles, or reviewing vendor work to assess the quality of shelf-ready books. Some days all tasks get pushed to the side as meetings, webinars, and employee counseling sessions eat into my time. Some tasks like the six-month overdue employee performance appraisals never get started, much less finished, because something else of burning importance invariably comes up.
It’s a never-ending juggling act that sometimes leaves me literally short of breath– I mean shallow breathing, hyperventilating, short of breath. It comes from the feeling that everything, from small task to big project, is due right now– a feeling that all are of equal importance and high priority. In my mind, I know this isn’t possible or even realistic. But in my panicked heart of hearts, I sometimes wonder if it will all crush me some day, like a tiny bug under a size 11 shoe.
Thanks to the stress, my hair is graying at a faster rate than some of my staff are working in a day’s time. My facial skin is breaking out and the skin on my forearms is getting blotchy (probably just age spots). I’m skipping lunch, working late, and I never exercise any more (bad, bad, I know). I think I look perennially tired, but thankfully, nobody has pointed it out to me (yet). I have more to read, to do, and to think about than ever before.
Despite all the stress, I’m enjoying the challengesof my job more than ever before. We’re starting a digitization project with OCLC’s CONTENTdm software, we’re getting shelf-ready books from two (and possibly three) vendors, we’re looking at ways to streamline our cataloging and processing procedures, we’re going to install Innovative Interfaces’ Floating Collections product, and I’m still trying to re-organize my department’s workflow and cross train staff in response to a consultant’s recommendations last fall. All of this is in addition to serving on numerous committees within and outside of my library. Every so often I drop a ball or two, but not for long. There’s always someone to remind me to pick it back up again.
06.03.08
Calm vs. crazy
Monday was such a calm day at work that I was beginning to think I showed up on Saturday by mistake. After a small flurry of emails between me and a vendor and a phone call to another vendor, the rest of the day was relatively quiet. Few people came into my office, the phone didn’t ring much and even email activity quieted down. It was kind of serene– and downright eerie.
Tuesday more than made up for it. I had to come in late, handle multiple problems, phone calls, and visitors, attend a meeting, work with a colleague to try to figure out how to set up new digitization software, and return calls to the director and HR director (which I ran out of time to do). I ended up working until 7:50 pm, because it was finally quiet in my office and in my mind. I was able to really dig into finding solutions to the problems we encountered while setting up the digitization software. I just wish I had time for that kind of stuff during my regular workday, rather than after everyone was gone.
Wednesday promises to be a hectic repeat of Tuesday, with another late arrival, three scheduled meetings, returning phone calls to the director and HR director, and handling whatever crises arises (I’m sure there will be at least one or two). I hope I have time for lunch. That sounds silly, but it’s true. Some days it’s easier to just skip lunch and use that hour to get more work done, rather than take it and have to work an hour over to make up for lost time.
Sometimes I wish everyone else would take a vacation– all in the same week– so I can get some work done without staying so late.
05.29.08
Spreadsheet to-do-list
I recently dug up and refreshed a to-do list I had created in Excel, because from September to December of last year, it worked so well for me use a spreadsheet to keep track of big and small projects. When I first opened the file and looked it over, it was one very long list, with lots of stuff checked off and almost as much stuff still not checked off. I found it overwhelming to look at and darn near closed it up right then and there! I know I could have removed the rows with the checked off stuff, but I like to see that I’ve accomplished things, so that wasn’t the answer. I know it sounds dumb, but it works for me.
I decided to break the tasks into categories as tabbed sections, since I had roughly organized them this way they developed last fall. What better way to keep each list separate and more manageable, yet still together in one Excel file. I find that I like seeing the main categories on the tabs and viewing just one tab at a time, but with the others just a click away. It’s so much easier to focus on the tasks listed there and know how far along I’m coming on a big project. Just for the record– I’ve tried to organize my tasks in Microsoft’s Outlook by assigning them to categories, but every so often, my computer hiccups and rearranges my task list. Then I waste time trying to reconstruct the view so I can figure out where I left off.
I guess the thing I like about the spreadsheet method for my to-do list is that it doesn’t have annoying reminders. If I use Outlook and try to set deadlines on too many tasks, they seem to pop up at inopportune times and I end up ignoring the reminders. It’s too hard to predict that at 8 am the next day, I will definitely be doing a particular task, which will then be followed by an additional task with another reminder. If I can’t do a task as it was originally scheduled, I know I can move the reminder to another time or day, but then I’m just putting it off, sometimes indefinitely. I’m very good at procrastinating on my own, so I don’t need help from any software.
I do try to use reminders sparingly, though, so I won’t forget to do really important things, like attend meetings or do something by a specific date. I find that I tend to pay more attention to those types of reminders and never ignore them or put them off. It’s a rare occasion that I miss a meeting or turn in paperwork late when I set a reminder for it. For everything else, the spreadsheet gives me much more flexibility to work my tasks into my schedule, rather than schedule tasks into my workday.
05.27.08
A sense of accomplishment
Have you ever had something, whether it was a simple task or a big project, hanging over your head for what seems like forever? Finding the time to do it just doesn’t happen and each day that goes by means you’re that much farther behind in getting it done. Maybe it’s something with a deadline or a sense of timeliness and not doing it just makes it worse. You know other people are waiting for you to do it, yet it just isn’t getting done despite your best efforts to squeeze it into your busy schedule.
Well today I finished compiling several months’ worth of cataloging statistics. Big deal, right? It wasn’t so much the compiling that was hard– it was figuring out a new way to compile them, making sure that method was accurate, redesigning our statistical reports, and coming up with new instructions so that I could (hopefully) delegate the task to someone else in the future. It was a major project, to be sure! Compiling my department’s monthly cataloging statistics used to be so easy that I had it down to where it took just an hour or two to do (yeah, we hand-counted EVERYTHING we did in our department!). But a consultant came along last fall and was convinced I could get the same numbers out of our automated system. He said we should stop counting so much by hand and stop counting EVERYTHING we did. Easier said than done, I say.
After months of creating lists of data and trying to figure out where the system counts things differently than we humans count things, I’ve finally cracked the code. I’m actually looking forward to next week, when I can use my new method to compile the May statistics, hopefully within the first week of June. Then I can put my energies towards coming up with new statistical counts that reflect some of the new things we’re doing, such as getting shelf-ready books from vendors.
No matter what, I can’t forget the feeling of calm and the sense of accomplishment I felt when I posted the last report on our staff intranet and sent an email to my department announcing the reports were available. Feeling caught up (even in just this one small area) was a great way to end the day and a wonderful way to start the week.
05.21.08
To-do lists
Only a packrat like me can accumulate multiple to-do lists. I recently mentioned the scraps of paper I’ve been collecting with tasks and projects to do and the need to put them all together. In trying to think of a location to compile them (and do them- including checking them off), I remembered the Excel spreadsheet I started last fall. I still had it on my thumb drive, so I plugged it into my laptop and began transferring tasks and projects from scraps of paper to the spreadsheet.
It was nice to see all the things I’d accomplished last fall. I knew I felt busy at the time and the spreadsheet confirmed it– it had lots of stuff checked off. Ahhh, a rare sense of accomplishment. But when I opened the file, I noticed the last time I updated it was 12/4/07. Hmmm…. had it really been that long since I last used it? I discovered a few tasks and projects that weren’t checked off and yes, they still needed to be done. Darn–forgetting them didn’t make them go away.
I know I should work harder at delegating things to other people, but it’s a skill I’m not very good at. There are lots of things at my library where I’m the only one trained or authorized in the software to do them, so delegation isn’t as simple as picking an employee and saying, “Here- this is your project. I want it done by…” If I get too many questions when I assign something, I feel like I didn’t explain it clearly enough or train the person well enough so they could work on it independently.
I also need to break down bigger projects into smaller steps that either have deadlines or target dates, so I can know if I’m on track or way off it. I recently worked with an employee to do this for our digitization plan and we both like having a general timeline in which to begin digitizing and cataloging local maps and photographs. I need to go back to my other big projects that have been hanging around my neck like an albatross and put them on timelines as well. Maybe that will give me an incentive to squeeze them in and stay on track– and maybe even complete them before I retire decades from now.
05.12.08
Workload exceeds maximum!
Each time I got a voice mail today, my voice mail system gave me an ominous warning that my inbox was getting so full, it was considering not letting me hear any messages. It told me I had to delete or move emails first in order to free up space. It came down to my basic curiosity– how bad did I want to know who the caller was or what they wanted? Would it be worth it to free up inbox space just to find out I had a new task, project, or problem to handle?
Hmmm… curiosity got the better of me. I decided to squirrel away some unread newsletters that were piling up. I stuffed them into a folder on my hard drive, along with dozens of other unread newsletters from the same sender. Sigh… wish I had time to read them. Maybe someday…. Wait- forget that daydream of getting caught up– the voice mail beckons. After hearing it, I was right. I have a new project to work on and a phone call to return. Guess I’ll have to read those newsletters later, whenever that is…
I’m so far behind on reading my blogs I might as well clear out the aggregator and start over. When I worry about what I may have missed in unread blog posts, I try to tell myself if it were that important, I’d find time to read them every day. Of course, that’s easier said than done, especially when the voice mail and email inboxes are full to bursting.
In addition to emails, voice mails, and newsletters, I tried desperately to keep up with new projects today by writing them down on a pad of paper. It was a great idea– until I remembered I had several pads of paper scattered about my desktop with lots of old projects written on them. Guess it’s time to consolidate them on one large piece of paper and figure out which ones need to be done first.
I’ve tried putting new projects or tasks into Microsoft Outlook’s tasks and assigning due dates, reminders, and priorities. But they only end up annoying me when the reminder pops up and I don’t have time to do the task or project right then, usually because something else has come up. I know I can change the reminder or even dismiss it. I can also ignore it and have the software tell me how many hours, days, or even weeks I’ve been ignoring it. There’s nothing like being reminded you’re really far behind on your to-do list–and like a true packrat, I can accumulate overdue reminders like nobody else.
