Pausing the new semester frenzy

The promise of the summer “break” has started to fade, more and more people are back in the office these days, and in the south, there’s been a cold front giving us a break from the 110-degree (40+°C) weather so it’s basically fall now (😜). A new academic year is about to begin!

There is something comforting about working in an environment where you can count on a regular flow of events across time. Classes start and stop, old students graduate, new students start, conferences and meetings are always held around the same time of year, you get the idea. This allows me to anticipate my busy seasons and be productive, despite the inevitable bumps in the road.

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about time, and how my perceptions of it are influenced by the people around me. You might have read that first paragraph and assumed that classes were about to start. In fact, we are still 3 weeks out from that happening. So why am I trying to speed up that time? I’m not, but last week I found myself falling into an old pattern of letting other peoples’ frantic energy become mine.

This habit started as a junior faculty member, not really knowing how to be a faculty member, constantly worrying that I wasn’t doing enough. Not enough research, publishing, grant writing, grant getting, classes taught, committees served on, students supervised, and on and on.

As I progressed through my career, I came to see that I was in fact doing more than enough. With that realization in place, I began the process of settling into the next phase of my academic career, unlearning some bad habits I fed as a junior faculty member. For me one of the biggest “unlearnings” was allowing other peoples’ sense of urgency become mine. I guess I’m still a work in progress.

If you’ve been reading these for a minute you might remember one about the 5 Voices wherein, I talked about us all having different working preferences. These preferences of course also extend to how we each think about and manage time. One of the things that I have learned to do over time is to do my work with low-key energy, which allows me to be at my most effective and productive (i.e. I don’t work well when I’ve procrastinated, and a deadline is looming).

On the surface this may sound good, but it belies an important assumption I sometimes make. The assumption is that everyone works the same way that I do. So, when students, collaborators, and partners show up to meetings full of frantic energy my default people-pleasing setting is to adopt that energy and help to solve the problem of urgency so they can get back to the low-key energy I like to work with.

The problem with that approach is other peoples’ defaults are not the same as mine. For other people there may be no resetting to my low-key. They are high-key (?), always. So, what does this mean for me? It means I end up wasting energy trying to solve a problem they don’t have.

Last week, when I noticed that I was feeling the need to solve problems that aren’t problems for other people I said, “let’s pump the breaks on this, classes don’t start for 3 weeks” 🤦‍♀️.

That act of saying this out loud made me realize why I had been feeling anxious all week. I was responding to urgency that wasn’t mine and trying to solve problems that weren’t problems for the people around me. I would like to say that the articulation stopped me from feeling anxious immediately, it didn’t. In fact, I’m still feeling anxious as I write this. But I know why I’m feeling it, so there’s that.  

I am and forever will be a work in progress. The goal is to get it a little less wrong every day. So, as we start to close out the summer and head into this new academic year what are you working on to get it a little less wrong?

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