Monday, July 24, 2006

Taking back my summer

I have a confession to make:

I have been intentionally and willfully ignoring school-related emails and phone calls lately.

The past few weeks have been busy: students finishing up, deadlines to meet, other various things going on. So at first, the ignoring of emails was more along the lines of "I'm too busy right now, I'll respond in a day or so when I have time." Then day turned into days turned into a week...you know how it goes.

This is totally unlike me. But as the emails piled up, I realized a few things:
* There are too many people that want to have too many meetings this week.

* I want and need to take a break from work this week, now that things have calmed down. I need and want to do a bit of work, but I don't need or want to work full-time this week.

* If I don't attend these meetings, it really doesn't matter. I have yet to get an email saying "has anyone heard from Jane?" So I take that to mean that, while I'm interested and involved in the greater initiatives, the world won't end if I play hooky.

* It's very freeing to not respond, and I don't feel the least bit guilty.

So I'll be spending this week doing some work in the mornings, but mainly catching up on my fun reading and my nap-taking and on a few household projects. Mainly, though, I'll be hiding from my school responsibilities (except for one, which really is necessary) and continuing to ignore the demands in my Inbox. That, after all, should be what summer is all about.

5 comments:

~profgrrrrl~ said...

Sounds delightful :)

ScienceWoman said...

Good for you, Jane!

Anonymous said...

Yay! I'm so proud of you... ;-).

Anonymous said...

My advisor is very good at optimizing for constraints. He makes an effort to be irresponsible about nonessential issues. I'm not sure that I would want to be that irresponsible, but there is something to be said for it.

Anonymous said...

Hello Prof Jane,

There was something that my boss used to say about meetings. "You know how important you are to a meeting when you don't go". Awesome philosphy in my opinion.

As always take care,
SV