Less is more: lessons from my first year as faculty

Well, it's certainly been a long time.

Last fall, I had high hopes that I would be able to continue posting on this blog regularly. Yes, I knew the first year as faculty was notoriously overwhelming. I knew I'd be in for what my colleague called in a very understated way "a very busy time." 

But I also knew I was an organized, productive person. A person who was good at accomplishing goals. After all, I ran a blog about all those strategies and tools for making good use of time and managing expectations and setting smart goals. Plus, these posts were hardly a huge time commitment. Certainly much less time and effort goes into writing a short post than into planning even one day of the classes I was teaching. Wasn't all that true?

It turns out, it was. And that's exactly why this blog vanished for the better part of a year. 

When it came down to it, I might have been able to find the space in my calendar each month for a couple of hours to write a post and send it out. But when I looked at my to-do list and had to make those hard choices about the things that absolutely needed to happen (including critical self-care like sleeping enough, exercising, and traveling to see my partner who was at the time living in another state), this blog always ended up on the chopping block. As much as I enjoy the meta-cognition of thinking about how to function in difficult times, sometimes it has to just be enough to do it.

I've done a lot of reflecting on the last year. My first year in my dream-job-in-training was rewarding in so many ways. I am more confident than ever in what my values are and how to ensure that my day-to-day work aligns with those values. But I'm also once again having to confront the fact that there are finite hours in a day, a week, a month... a life. And I have so many ways I want to fill that time.

Parkinson's Law and Growth Mindset

Another thing that has become extremely clear to me this year is Parkinson's law: work fills to expand the time you give it. This is a difficult thing for me, a historically perfectionistic person, to combat. There is always more to do. There are always ways to improve. And that's a wonderful thing! But it's difficult for me to find the stopping point. To say this is enough, for now. I have long struggled with the idea that less is more, at least when it comes to what I can contribute. My impulse is to give more, to push more, and to do it right now.

In my classroom, I push back against perfectionism with growth mindset. And that is an amazing first step to backing off of intense perfectionistic tendencies. It's good to reframe mistakes as opportunities for growth and improvement, rather than permanent, catastrophic, life-altering failures. But one of the struggles with growth mindset, once you're in it, is finding the right pace for growth. Sustainable growth requires periods of expansion balanced with periods of rest. It requires truly subscribing to the idea that sometimes, less really is more.

The future of Building Balance

I've done quite a lot of thinking over the summer about where I want to put my time and energy. And I'm not ready to let go of this work just yet. Instead, I want to pull back (intentionally, this time, not accidentally) from the burden of coming up with new monthly topics for this blog. I'm working on a longer-term project -- a semester-long course designed to help people cultivate their personal toolkit and establish habits and develop resources to find their balance in work cultures that are always asking for more -- and I want my energy to go toward that instead. 

So this fall, I will be switching temporarily to a review format for these posts. I'll present a few of the books, podcasts, and other media that have helped me develop my own systems, with a few of the highlights that make them resources I return to over and over again. The posts will be shorter, and there will be less of a call to action, but I do hope that sharing these sources of knowledge can help you all do some of your own exploration as I work in the background to develop this workshop.

And if you're interested in taking part in the workshop, stay tuned! I'll have more on that front this winter.

Take care everyone, and if you're feeling overwhelmed, remember that it's okay to step back for a little while from things you love but don't have the energy for. Find the places in your life where you could do a little less.