Work/Life balance
Usually, I'm really good at constraining my work to my paid hours (22.7 hours a week, in my case). Well, there's a grey area where my personal identities, interests and pleasures overlap with my work ones, but I don't usually do things that are clearly work outside the hours I'm paid for. I've always run my jobs like that, but it's got even more important to do so since I've had kids since, not only am I much busier, but also it has much greater knock-on effects on other people, chiefly D who has to wrangle the kids on his own (and the kids, who don't have me, but I don't think it bothers them much, as long as they've got D. Extremely beneficial effect of me going off to Edinburgh at the end of May: LB has got really keen on D. He still prefers me, but it's as if it suddenly made him realise that Daddy is really good too. It's lovely. Also PB is keener than usual on me at the moment, which is wonderful. But I digress).
The exception is when I have two particular types of hard deadline. One is funding bids, the other is the fixed points of the course writing process. I totally suck at limiting my job to my paid hours when those deadlines are approaching. Today (Saturday) I was at work all day long.
D took the kids to Woburn Safari Park. They had a wonderful time, by the sound of it. LB was so busy exclaiming 'Look [PB], 'raffe (giraffe)' that he missed his nap altogether, despite the usually irresistible soporific powers of driving around in a car after lunch. They were having so much fun pretending to be tigers on the bouncy castle that they recruited all the other children into being tigers. And, as LB communicated to me afterwards, 'peacock, jackdaw, birds, head (indicating something zooming over his head) [LB ] head' (they saw peacocks, about which he has a bit of a thing, jackdaws, and some birds you could feed, one of which flew right over his head and ruffled his curls.
Part of me wishes I'd been there with them. But, you know what, in another way I was having just as much fun at work. I had a really stonkingly good day. One of those days when you just focus completely and it all comes together. I was too absorbed in what I was doing to be conscious of having fun, but whenever I stopped to make another cup of menthe-reglisse tea, or go to the loo, I was aware that there was nothing I would rather be doing at the moment than this. This makes me think that I am totally in the right job.
However, that doesn't mean I think it's okay to work beyond my hours (academic norms notwithstanding). What catches me out, I think, is not starting on big tasks early enough, because the deadline seems ages off, and they're intimidating (not actively fear-inducing, in the case of course writing deadlines, my current issue, just hard work and unappealing because of it). The other thing is prioritising what people want me to do, rather than what I judge to be the important thing. This is hard to change because I really fear pissing people off, to a completely irrational extent.
So, any tips on managing workload, with those foci? My ideas so far are mostly 'start serious work first thing, don't look at LJ until the end of the day' and I'm not sure I can stick to that.
The exception is when I have two particular types of hard deadline. One is funding bids, the other is the fixed points of the course writing process. I totally suck at limiting my job to my paid hours when those deadlines are approaching. Today (Saturday) I was at work all day long.
D took the kids to Woburn Safari Park. They had a wonderful time, by the sound of it. LB was so busy exclaiming 'Look [PB], 'raffe (giraffe)' that he missed his nap altogether, despite the usually irresistible soporific powers of driving around in a car after lunch. They were having so much fun pretending to be tigers on the bouncy castle that they recruited all the other children into being tigers. And, as LB communicated to me afterwards, 'peacock, jackdaw, birds, head (indicating something zooming over his head) [LB ] head' (they saw peacocks, about which he has a bit of a thing, jackdaws, and some birds you could feed, one of which flew right over his head and ruffled his curls.
Part of me wishes I'd been there with them. But, you know what, in another way I was having just as much fun at work. I had a really stonkingly good day. One of those days when you just focus completely and it all comes together. I was too absorbed in what I was doing to be conscious of having fun, but whenever I stopped to make another cup of menthe-reglisse tea, or go to the loo, I was aware that there was nothing I would rather be doing at the moment than this. This makes me think that I am totally in the right job.
However, that doesn't mean I think it's okay to work beyond my hours (academic norms notwithstanding). What catches me out, I think, is not starting on big tasks early enough, because the deadline seems ages off, and they're intimidating (not actively fear-inducing, in the case of course writing deadlines, my current issue, just hard work and unappealing because of it). The other thing is prioritising what people want me to do, rather than what I judge to be the important thing. This is hard to change because I really fear pissing people off, to a completely irrational extent.
So, any tips on managing workload, with those foci? My ideas so far are mostly 'start serious work first thing, don't look at LJ until the end of the day' and I'm not sure I can stick to that.