Friday, October 11, 2013

Adapting to admin

My sixth-grade teacher once told our class that in a few years, people would evolve--yes, we believed in science back in those days--to creatures with giant heads to accommodate our brains and a big pod foot to push the gas and brake pedals of our cars, since no one would walk any more.  He was kidding, I think and hope, about the pod foot. Certainly his vision has nothing over the satiric view of us all in Wall-E as giant overfed babies watching screens and lugging our drinks with us as we travel in carts everywhere.

If he had predicted fingers adapted to flying over keyboards all day and the inability to cordon off time, he would have been onto something.  The admin tasks I took on as part of leaning in (thanks a lot, Sheryl Sandberg) are eating up my life and writing time, and while I'm not complaining and am appreciative of the opportunity--I said yes, after all--I'm trying to figure out how to do things more efficiently.

But that's the challenge and the fun of it, too: the tasks are interesting, and figuring out how to do things better than I'm doing them right now is, too. I just have to figure out how to turn off the admin brain that wants to play with these new challenges and get back to the old challenges of writing and teaching.

2 comments:

Stacey Lee Donohue said...

Yes, thank you for expressing what I'm also going through. You have it exactly.

undine said...

Stacey--thanks! I expected the long hours, but I didn't expect the seductiveness of "just figure out this one more thing" and the way it invades my brain.