Interesting idea, but suspect IAMC
Had an unexpectedly agreeable time at the conference dinner last night, which was not entirely down to the amazing location with views across the Thames.
Unusually pleasant and thought-provoking conversation with the person I was next to, in which the concept of 'pre-tirement' was mentioned - individuals who want to focus on the bits of their job they actually enjoy as they get closer to actual retirement.
Which I've encountered in a slightly different form in academic friends who are all, yay, retiring, no more admin and bureaucracy, can focus on the research and writing.
Which is about retirement as providing the opportunity to do with bits they like.
And I don't suppose many people would say, oh, give me more of that lovely admin: person I was talking to copped to really liking organisational things that had arrived at a fairly late stage of their career and not something that could really be predicated on what they had trained for, but it was higher-level stuff and not, I suspect, the more tedious tasks people mean when they say admin.
But on further reflection, I'm not sure it's always possible to unpick the tiresome from the good bits; or this may be just down to the particular thing I did, which meant that tedious as it might be doing user-facing duties, it did provide some sense of what people were researching and their needs, that fed into things like acquisition and cataloguing priorities.
And that there was something about interacting with donors and doing the increasingly exhausting task of preparing materials for physical transfer that I felt that stopping doing this would be deleterious to my general competence at my job.
I suspect this is generalisable to other things: e.g. relationships.
This is possibly different from feeling one is being expected to do A Thing that is not the job you thought you'd signed up for, e.g. the pressure upon authors to be out there promoting their books. This entry was originally posted at http://oursin.dreamwidth.org/2602723.html. Please comment there using OpenID. View
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