I woke this morning filled with a sense of un-rightness. My alarm had gone off, as it has been obsessively programmed to do, at 5:15 a.m., and, by some lapse of habit, I had hit the snooze button and fallen back to sleep, to awake at the distinctly un-virtuous hour of 7! The sun was already pretty high over the horizon, my husband had done the laundry (line-drying and all), my daughter had made the coffee (authentic South-Indian filter) and left for her practice session, and I…, well I had let a good part of the morning slip-slide away (soundtrack: S&;G song here)! And the un-rightness also stemmed from this persistent sense that I had “stuff to do”, and that time was running out.
But when I think about it, I realize that it’s a sense that dogs me pretty much all the time. I suspect it is a burden that pretty much all professionals carry unless you are in one of those fields where it is literally impossible to carry your work home or in your head—such as a bricklayer or a tailor, perhaps. Even then, the aches in your joints and muscles remind you of work even when you can’t do it.
A few years ago I wrote about the futility of making lists (not checklists, which I agree are very useful), because all they do is remind you of how little one gets done and how much never gets on the list in the first place. So I’ve pretty much given up on lists—except for those calendared reminders that help me avoid double-booking myself (a pesky habit I am yet to overcome). However, there is that ongoing register in my head that seems to function like a ticker on steroids, incessantly typing out the undone tasks, and that’s what I hear when I finally emerge from my snoozed out sleep in the mornings.
So for some context: I am, technically, on break. The semester is over, grades have been turned in, even a doctoral dissertation defended, plans (sort of) made for the next term, course outline ready....so it’s time for some R&R right? You would think.
So, all that stuff that still has to be done? Research projects, papers to be written, new published work to catch up on, and early drafts of theses to read/correct. All the stuff that doesn’t get done during the term, when commuting to work and back depletes whatever energy is left over from teaching and meeting with students and handling sundry institutional tasks.
As every academic knows, each of these can be a separate source of stress—even though they are part of the reason one signed on to the job in the first place. Even though one is reading, writing, and thinking about ideas that one finds fascinating. New papers emerge in the literature at breakneck speed (and Google Alerts makes sure we hear about it) and one has to develop a super-efficient system to sift through the pile and figure out which ones to spend time on reading, or even skimming. Reading then becomes an instrumental, even strategic activity, instead of being a contemplative one. “Reading for pleasure? Ha, I haven’t done that in years!” said one senior academic friend who works at a major America university.
Perhaps it just bad time management, or inability to prioritize in a way that can lead to some balance. Perhaps it’s a symptom of FOMO in the professional sphere, leading to the notion that you have to keep running to stay ahead—or even abreast. So much so that taking time off to enjoy oneself or to relax (simple things like watching a movie, reading a novel, just lying around) feels like time away from the things one should be doing, with the always-lurking sense that that “to-do” pile is not going anywhere, it’s sitting on the home screen of your laptop waiting for your next login.
To my mind, the biggest drawback of connectivity is this, the perception that the world—or that part of it that you occupy—hurtles ahead even as you step off the travellator to catch a breath. That everything that represents work is just a click away. So one has to find a way to insulate one’s consciousness not only from the knowledge of one’s own pending work, but also from the temptation to check in on the state of the workplace.
Holidays are meant for going away—physically and mentally. The physical part is easy enough. But the mental bit is what I have had a hard time working on. It’s easier when the demands on one’s time come from elsewhere (family, community, friends) but in the absence of such demands, it becomes difficult to disconnect from work/place, to ignore that constant, nagging ticker tape, that list that seems to go on and on.
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