Time suckers

Ack. I hate it when I'm on a productivity binge and get derailed by external forces. Today, it was the Attack of the Killer Meetings that did me in. Typically, Mondays and Thursdays are my meeting days, but I try my best to confine them to the span of a few hours---preferably in the mornings---so that I don't spend my day attending meetings and waiting to attend meetings. Not so today.

One of the meetings ran over; another got pushed back to the afternoon, and basically lasted the entire afternoon. The latter meeting was mostly productive (although I suspect that we could have finished things much faster if we tried harder), but I really wanted to get a few things done this afternoon, and of course I didn't even have time to start them. And this is a short week for me (vacation! yay!), so I was really feeling stressed about getting stuff done in the few days I have available. Luckily, I realized that I can salvage some lost work time by taking some work-related reading on the plane, so that makes me a bit less stressed. (but still, I wanted to move those percentages in the sidebar up a bit! wah!)

In other time-sucking news, I've just been asked to serve on yet another committee for next year. I need to turn it down because I really don't have time for it and I suspect that it's not one of those assignments that I need for tenure (how awful is that? but it's not a high visibility thing, which is the only reason I'd consider doing it with the crazy schedule I have next year). So anyway, for some reason I'm having a hard time saying no---I've been ignoring the request for a few days now. And I don't usually have a problem saying no if I have to (even if I am the queen of overcommitment). I don't know if it's that I feel bad saying no, or feel guilty---I think it's a bit of both. And I shouldn't feel bad or guilty, but there it is. (and I also feel guilty for not responding yet...yeah, I'm a mess.) Well, hopefully I can get over this long enough to send my refusal and get this multi-faceted guilt trip off my back!