13 Eylül 2020, Cumartesi
saat: 05:32
I had my evaluation meeting with the department chair last Friday it went really well!!!! I am really happy with how pleased she seemed with my three articles under review and I don’t have any strong “must be sure to fix this” feelings which is good. So I am going to fully relax into the weekend now! my to-do list is a mile long and some of the tasks are gonna be exhaustingly time-intensive but I am going to set aside Saturday as a day for working on those and try to preserve Sunday as a true rest day for my brain/spirit. I feel a little bit like I’m back in grad school again where time was elastic and the workload was impossible and weekdays were prime 9am-6pm work hours. NOT a headspace I want to be in long-term, but I think I can put some boundaries around it and accept that September often feels like this and doing some of this work now will save me a lot of time/stress later in the semester. I also want to set aside time on that Saturday workday to really give serious thought to which tasks I can delegate to others. My instinct always is just to handle everything but I know if I prioritize and delegate thoughtfully I’ll have so much more energy/focus for my core responsibilities.
Some final scattered thoughts: I can feel concretely how much more organized and capable I am at my job than I was 12 months ago and that is very encouraging. I remember saying last year that I was finally starting to feel a little more like an actual professional (as opposed to being stuck in that weird enforced intellectual/professional adolescence assistant professor position keeps you in). And now a year later I feel even MORE like an adult lol. I am highly skilled in the art of listening and asking follow-up questions and taking good notes even when my brain is completely fried! I am competent at all the core responsibilities of my job; good at a fair number of them; and excellent at a few of them, and that feels like a solid place to be. Lots of areas to keep getting better but enough stuff going well that I feel happy and excited about work every day. I think I also want to start carving out a little bit of time to reflect and journal each week because I do want to track some of the things I’m learning and also practice articulating some specific goals for myself instead of just letting it all live in my head. that will be good for me and also a good way to practice the things I’m asking students to do each week.
This may be just for this week, but I think I need to carve out a little time when my brain is fresh to just quickly sketch out what kinds of resources and additional workshops I’ll need to create, and to figure out how I can keep the various promises I’ve made. (I have an entire google doc that is just titled PROMISES MADE, lol, because otherwise I just make vague promises in meetings and then they get shoved to the bottom of my brain and forgotten. and I feel like even if it’s just a small thing it damages my credibility a little or makes me seem a little scatterbrained/not reliable. SO all promises made will be kept, eventually.)
Okay! onward to the WEEKEND!!!! I’m gonna lie in bed for another 30 min then take a long meandering walk with A., I think.
