Being too busy can help you focus
Apologies to my wife for my lack of social presence notwithstanding, sometimes when you reflect on being overloaded you realize that it made you get things done. My last couple of weeks have been intense, but when I look back I realize I’ve now got about a week with a little breathing room because of meeting multiple overlapping deadlines.
Editing
During that time I ended up doing two large editing jobs and my own final paper. I have to provide a course evaluation before the end of Friday, but let’s just say it was pretty heavy. Since it was all online, in addition to two individual papers, we collaboratively wrote a group paper as well. Each of five units consisted of significant reading, which we discussed via Moodle forums, with group members then taking turns and posting discussion syntheses on a class wiki.
With the group paper, we all worked collaboratively with Skype and Google Docs and then I did a fairly big final edit and turned it in. The last group discussion synthesis also fell to me and both were completed within about a week of each other. On their own that wouldn’t have been too bad.
Work
In the past two weeks, I’ve also been head-down project managing a large social media site which we soft-launched on Monday. Particularly last week, time flew and there were a couple of late days in the mix. There are some ads running and a little traffic coming in, but a few remaining bugs leave it not quite ready for heavy promotion. Given the timeframe and requirements, I think the contractors we worked with did a good job. I’ll do a proper post on that when we get the last few bugs ironed out.
Paper
Even that would have been manageable, but if I wanted a break between the course I finished this week and the next one (starting next Monday), that final paper also had to be done. So, what I ended up with was outlining the paper every night when I got home from the project work. I ended up with most of a four day weekend intact through yesterday, so in big blocks of time, I churned out a paper yesterday afternoon.
Funny how, just when you think you can’t breathe, you suddenly get a huge injection of fresh air. Maybe it’s all about just holding your breath and keeping your head down.
