I’m due any day now. (Yay!!) And I’m working up until the end. I assumed I’d be in a panic, finishing things up at the very last minutes, hoping that the pregnancy would run late. But as it turns out, I was able to pull together the big projects by the beginning of the possible window, leaving me with a four week period of time in which I can’t really commit to all that much.
And it’s kindof awesome.
I’m actually reminded of my first library job, as the microtext assistant at Wake Forest. That position included a lot of work, but it was all task oriented. I might have one big project going at a time. So, as I streamlined the job and freed up a few hours at a time, I went looking for interesting projects… which led to some of the bigger impacts I’ve had on my organization. And it was a lot like how I’m looking for projects now.
First, the projects were really obviously job related: writing up reports that would be due once I was gone, planning for the first week of the Fellow I’ll be supervising in the fall, putting a little extra time into some of my campus committees. Then I found I was able to more fully participate in professional development opportunities, rather than attending physically (and working mentally on other projects in the background). This type of participation gives rise to new ideas and approaches, and now I have some new things I’d like to work on. I’ve even been able to work on a pilot or two.
For example, I’d been interested in implementing a QR Code pilot for the past little bit, as a bridge to augmented reality. Some others in the building became interested in the concept, too, so we decided to move on it. And since I had wrapped up big deadlines, I had a little time to see that it happened.
I’m making it sound like all of a sudden I have loads of free time… it’s not really quite that. Every day I still get 20-50 emails to deal with and new meetings are scheduled that come with new tasks… it’s just that the big things are squared away leaving a little time to breath.
And it’s giving rise to good things for the organization. Pilots, additional attention, and new ideas are good things. And having this space to think and breath means coming up with more of them. For example, I was talking with one of my conspirators at work and we came up with an idea to have a page online of testimonials (in video, text, or whatever format) about why our library is an amazing place to work. Then, when there were job ads, we could send that link out, too. I’m not sure that project will happen, but I think it’s a really good idea (because ZSR is amazing), and definitely not one that would come up in the course of day-to-day business.
This all reminds me a little of summer vacations as a child and teenager. The school year was g0-go-go, then the summer would be there for daydreaming, recentering, and thinking about big picture things. The following year would be influenced by that. We lose that in the “real world,” which means we lose the benefits that came with it.
So, from all of this I’m thinking more about how to give myself arbitrary deadlines to wrap things up periodically. Even if just one time a year it felt like everything was closing out, then there’d be space to think about what makes sense to do next. And I wonder how to create that feeling for others in the organization, too. Because it’s all fine and good for one person to have some space for this type of thinking, but that’s just one person. Imagine all the things a library could be doing if everyone (who wanted to) came to a place where they could really think about new services and projects and try things out!
Related posts:
- for five weeks to a social library
- some days are busier than others
- going off-line for a few days
Source: lauren pressley