First day of school

I am happy to report that I made it through the first day of classes without incident. In fact, it was a really productive day. I only have one class on MWF, but I was on campus for a full day of work.

Even though I'm only one day into my career as a tenure-track faculty member, I can already tell that I'm going to need some new strategies for managing my time. I found it pretty straightforward to manage my time while I was dissertating-- if not prepping for teaching, I was (or should have been) working on the diss. Teaching required day-to-day planning; dissertating required longer-term planning and reassessing. I became adept at balancing the short-term with the one long-term project.

Now, though, I have a host of different time frames. The teaching frame is still familiar, though I am teaching one entirely new course (designed by me!). I have to get the writing center up and running (which requires recruiting new tutors, designing training, thinking about work study vs part time budgeting). I need to revise dissertation chapters and send out for publication. I have service commitments (which are mercifully low right now as I get used to things). And more that aren't even occurring to me right now. Some things need to be done today, some next week, some require frequent attention in order to be done by the end of the year. I'm not going to try to keep track of all of this in my head.

I'm planning to revisit David Allen's Getting Things Done. I read the book two years ago, when I was in the middle of dissertating. I wrote about it here. I found bits and pieces useful at the time, but a full-scale implementation wasn't feasible or necessary then. It might be just what I need now, though.