… Just Email

It is Friday of the first week of classes. It is the last week of August a month I’ve spent almost entirely either sick with Covid or trying to get back to normal. I’m still foggy, fatigued, and phlegmatic. How’s that for an alliterative tricolon?

Yesterday I finished emails and fell asleep for 2 plus hours in the afternoon. This is unheard of for me. I can certainly perform, I’ve had great classes and meetings, but instead of feeling energized I feel zonked. Yes, I’m griping, but I’m also doing that thing of re directing my focus and exercising my writing muscles to try to get to a different mental space.

Beside this little writing exercise, I’ve been starting my day with a short walk and reading something intellectual and in my discipline but without direct connection to any project. My idea is that if I get my blood moving and my brain working before the email, it will set a better tone for the day. I’m finding my work for the college all-consuming. This isn’t necessarily bad. I love my students. I value my colleagues. I’m motivated by our mission. The work is good and meaningful. Besides the fatigue, there is my age old problem of switching gears. I tend to do one thing well and find it all consuming in any moment. This is a core asset to my identity as a researcher. Once I get stuck in I don’t let go.

When I was a lowly grad student, Michael Crawford (yes that one), said to me the secret of success was knowing exactly what you most wanted to look up the next time you had just 15 minutes in a research library. This terrified me. My supervisor told me not to worry, I wasn’t at that point in career. Now, I so wish, I knew the answer to Crawford’s question. I have promised many people many things related to my research. I even think I know what most of them are. I have as always a thousand puzzles I’d like to investigate. I have ambitions to continue to apply for grants and similar opportunities so future me will have what she needs to do the work.

And then there is email.

I find it more addictive than social media. Social media is where I dump intrusive thoughts. Email puts me in a reactive rather than proactive state of mind. What have I missed? Who needs my attention? Where are the fires? How can I avert the next crisis? I write and write and write and beast never quiets. Until it does and then I wonder why I don’t have answers to my questions yet…

I yearn for pigeon post, inter office mail, paper memos, and actual letters. Anything to slow down the flow of communication. It is like drinking from a fire hose. As I type this I’ve my work email closed on my computer.

And… I just slipped and peeked at it on my phone, as I was trying to remove it from my phone for the long holiday weekend. So now I know I have a draft personal statement to comment on and a bunch of lunch requests for a catered meeting next week (no I don’t have a secretary right now and the back up person is out on annual leave). This is not urgent stuff. I can write and get back to those little tasks when I finish this little writing exercise.

I. CAN. COMPARTMENTALIZE.

I. CAN.

Or, I must believe it is possible to both rest enough and work enough.

My beloved has suggested that I physically block out my research hours on my calendar. The advantage of trying this out is both the reminder to myself and also the physical act of knowing I’m sacrificing my research if I take a meeting at that time. I won’t say it won’t happen but at least I will have to face facts about what I’m doing.

The other goal for today is just to figure out what tasks can get fit around the edges. Stuff that doesn’t need large blocks of free space but that I could knock out rather than obsessing over my inbox.

That phrase I used earlier, PRO ACTIVE, rather than reactive, is really my current professional goal. I want to drive my work forward rather than scrambling from behind.

Another part of my internal dynamic is that it is so much easier to prioritize the immediate needs of living humans, than my own quest for knowledge. There is still a part of my brain that feels research is selfish. A vanity project.

Obviously that thinking is a little messed up. My research connects me to many brilliant humans with whom I also want to remain engaged. And my own drive to know is a worthy of attention. I never doubt that when I doing the actual work. Of course I sometimes find certain tasks boring, but the material remains ever fascinating. It is when I’m am focused else where that I tend to discount it.

Ok. With this window still open, I sweeped up the last of those emails and set an out of office until Tuesday.

It will be ok. I might even get some writing and/or research tasks done.

Or I might just sleep.