This week, however, I got some perspective.  In order to enhance my qualifications for the classes I’m already teaching, I signed up for an online class on cognitive psychology this semester.  I’m dropping it.  There are three reasons:

1. The instructor is not instructing.  She assigned the readings (a chapter and 2-4 research papers per week, often the ones that are the root of major theoretical models), assigned us to write a summary of each research paper (a couple of paragraphs) and a 5 question multiple choice quiz on the textbook each week, and that’s it.  No feedback, no discussion, no additional perspective on how to integrate the materials.  If we didn’t figure it out ourselves, we were out of luck.
2. She then proceeded to base the mid-term on the type of integration questions that you would expect to have come up in the course of a classroom or message board discussion.  Since we have neither, the class is pretty much on our own to do it.  I put in 8 hours on it yesterday and would have had to put in all day today to do an adequate job.  Of course, I don’t HAVE all day today, as I also have to grade labs, post the next tests for both classes, write up a study guide for one of the tests and review my lectures for the week.  Oh, and work on the major group project she assigned as due on thursday.  I calculate that I would have needed close to 20 hours today to get that done.
3. Of course, it isn’t all her fault; I also overestimated my ability to get everything done and stay sane at the same time.  I leave at 7am and come home at 9pm four nights a week, leaving essentially no time to work on weeknights.  Until now I’ve been able to squeeze it all in on the weekend, but there was no chance of that this weekend.  Worse, I’ve been running myself ragged to keep up, something that is not good in the long run.

So I’m dropping.  I’m OK with that – I overestimated my capacity given that this is the first semester teaching one of these classes, and I’ll revisit in the future when teaching the new class becomes less week-to-week preparation effort.

Overscheduling myself, however, wasn’t the only piece of my life I got perspective on this weekend.  Prior to this weekend I had gotten bored with my dissertation topic, bored with working on my lit review, and uninterested in the entire thing.  Then I got a look at this midterm, which includes 4 questions along the lines of this example:

Peruse the results sections of your articles from the first half of the semester, looking for a set of results from a multi-experiment paper that you were particularly impressed with.  Describe how the statistical tests were performed, and how they supported the hypotheses.  Explain why you were impressed with this set of results.  Now, look for a set of results that produces the opposite effect on you, meaning, you are not at all impressed or convinced by them.  Explain your reasoning.  Finally, how might the experiment be altered such that it could produce impressive results, that you feel are worthy of publication in a major psychology journal?

I read that and caught myself thinking longingly of my lit review and getting back to work on my dissertation.  I actually told husband that if I wanted to work that hard I would just write the damned dissertation.  After all, isn’t that what the work of reading a paper for a lit review is all about?  How are the results, are they convincing, what would have to change to make them convincing?

So with that jolt of perspective, I am letting go of my key overcommitment, refocusing on the core things I have to do (work, teaching), and putting any remaining time into my re-energized interested in my dissertation.  That effect alone may be worth the (thankfully low) tuition cost.

• The internet and all the amazing information it brings to our door
  • RSS feeds
  • Facebook and social networking sites
  • YouTube
  • Wikipedia
• A new TV season starting up
• Books and/or magazines on every possible topic
• Free education via things like Open Courseware or ITunes U

It is easy to get overwhelmed or want to do more than any one human could do.

Over the past few weeks I have begun a practice of laser-sharp focus and elimination of the unnecessary or reschedulable.  My current commitments allow nothing less, and frankly it has dropped my stress level more than any other single change I could make.

My current commitments are not trivial; a full time job that expects around 45 hours per week, teaching 2 different classes (4 nights per week total) at a local community college, taking 1 course toward a Masters in Psychology, and doing a small yearly consulting data analysis job for a local school district.  I get up around 7am and get home around 9pm most days, then spend my weekends grading homework, preparing for the next week’s classes, doing my own homework and catching up on sleep as I move into the next week.

This would be incredibly stressful for most people, and frankly it would have been for me as well until I realized a few things this summer:

• It’s ok to say no sometimes; your friends will still like you
• You may WANT to do a lot of things, but some are more important than others
• There is great satisfaction and relaxation to be gained by letting yourself off the hook for some things.

In my case, that meant

• I would blog (here) when I had the time AND something meaningful to say
• I would not worry about keeping up with my RSS feeds and would, in fact, trim them back substantially to just the ones that are of special interest or relevance
• I would not try to keep up with facebook or other social media, at least not in anything that passes for real time.  (I get facebook updates in an RSS feed and try to scan them for big events in my friends lives a couple of times per week.
• I would carve out a single block of time each week to spend with friends and not feel bad if that meant I had to pick which friends to see on a given week.
• I would not worry about my dissertation literature review for the moment, but just continue to collect articles and references that I will read later.

Mostly though, it meant that I chose to focus on the critical things and not feel bad/guilty about what I’m not getting done.  Would I like to be able to do all those other things?  Of course I would.

But sometimes less is more, and this is one of those cases.  I’ve committed to certain activities in my life as having priority for the next 3 months (until christmas) and will focus my attention on those activities.  After the semester ends, I will revisit the targets of my focus for the winter holiday.  After that, I will again review my targets for the next semester.  These are not static choices, but fluid ones that can respond to my top priorities at any given time.

In doing so, my stress level has dropped and my productivity has risen. I work through each week step by step and never feel overwhelmed by all that I do.  That, to me, is true productivity.

The schedule isn’t getting any easier, however.  This upcoming semester I’m not taking any classes, but I am

• Working full time
• Teaching 2 nights per week at the community college, including lab (5 credit hours total)
• Comprehensive exams (studying and then writing)
• Data prep for my dissertation

That’s plenty. 

So I will be putting together a comparable schedule for the semester, but with one small modification.  Every day I will be printing out an hour by hour schedule, and writing down how I actually spend the time that day.  Each week I will review the results of this tracking and revisit the schedule for the next week.  My goal is to refine the schedule to make it realistic and adjust my time estimates to be more accurate.

The other key to my plan for the semester is to reduce commitments; if it isn’t core, it isn’t on the schedule.  That means streamlining and integrating my workouts so that they are part of my day and not a big exception.  First, I will be taking public transport on non-teaching days, which means a 5 mile bike ride to the train station – figure about 30 minutes each way.  However since the train is faster than sitting in traffic that time should net out.  Second, I am making a commitment to do my strength training during the evenings while watching television – I enjoy the relaxation time, but there is no good reason not to do squats and curls during commercials.

Here’s to a somewhat less stressful semester.