When I wrote about how the typical week always includes something unexpected, I talked about the importance of having spare capacity in your work-plan to accommodate those unexpected tasks or events. But what happens if you don’t even have a clear sense of what your typical week involves?
For several years I offered e-mail support for clients. They write a weekly e-mail reporting on what they’ve accomplished and what they plan for the coming week. I provide encouragement, commiseration, reassurance, suggestions, or whatever they need to achieve their goals.
After doing this for several months with several clients I started to notice some patterns.
A research project called “What do I do with my time?”
The first few weeks are more like the data collection phase of a research project. I receive weekly check-in emails that document all the ways in which they didn’t do what they planned to do and all the things they did that weren’t in the plan. We start to notice patterns.
Most people don’t randomly forget about whole categories of their work. But it is not uncommon to have only a vague sense of how long some things take. Or to leave things you do all the time off the list. It’s as if the list is there to remind you of things so you leave off the stuff you know you won’t forget. Unfortunately this means that your list isn’t a very good representation of the total amount of work you are trying to do in a finite amount of time, leading to inevitable frustration that you didn’t get things done when your list looked so reasonable.
You might also notice that there is a pattern to what gets deferred. As Kerry Ann Rockquemore pointed out in one of the posts in her series on perfectionism:
First and foremost, writing is the one area of a faculty member’s work that has no built-in, daily accountability (and by “accountability” I mean if you don’t do it, there will be negative consequences). For example, if you don’t show up to class, there will be immediate consequences. If you stop attending meetings, turning in departmental paperwork and/or attending events, you will find yourself in trouble fairly quickly. But if you don’t finish the article you promised yourself you would work on this month, nothing happens. There are no immediate consequences, and nobody notices.
Writing down what you do in a week can be very helpful. By writing it down, you notice the disconnect between what you think you can accomplish and what you really can accomplish. More than this, you notice details. You notice the things that you had to do but somehow skipped over at the planning stage. You notice what you actually gave priority to, and what you deferred.
Noticing is the basis of action
As you notice you adjust. A few weeks into this practice of reporting on your week, you get better at making plans you can keep.
Of course, there is no typical week. Just when you think you have it figured out, something happens. You have to go to a conference. Or you have a bunch of papers to grade. Or someone gets sick. Or a hurricane blows through.
Some of those things can be planned for. Some can’t.
You will never have the perfect system
Once you get comfortable with the lack of typicality, you get more done. You spend less time worrying about the system that will make all this easy. You spend more time noticing what’s happening and adapting. You also get better at planning for the known variation.
You have a better sense of what a good week looks like. You forgive yourself more easily for the not-so-good weeks.
Edited May 31, 2016.
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