Getting poop done.

Librarians are notorious whiners. That's just a fact of life (Whaaa...my job is hard. My administrators don't support me. My institution is underfunded. I have too much to do.). Today I brought this up and was basically told that this isn't unique to my profession, it's just a fact of life in an office these days. (OK, it wasn't 'in an office' it was 'in a fast paced, fast changing environment'--but I'm not willing to use that sort of crispy corporate speak.)

One bit of advice that I will take to heart, because it's not the first time it's come up, is that if I want to tell someone that I'm too busy to take something on, I have to have a bit of a metric. I have to have some facts to back up my assertion. And I also need to make some suggestions as to what needs to be done in order for me to take on another project. So.....

You, loyal reader, who so lovingly requested more blog action, are about to get to read my time inventory. It's Jon's own version of Getting Things Done (which I haven't read). But for the past couple weeks I have been trying to live by the two minute rule (if I open an email and I can deal with it in 2 minutes or less, I do it). That worked pretty well for a while, until I started avoiding looking in my inbox because I knew there were 30 or 40 things that were demanding 2 minutes of my attention.

Today though, I have a good opportunity to take inventory of the inbox because I didn't delete anything all day. So here is a typical day:

59 emails. Of which:

• 14 university, departmental notices that were skimmed and deleted.


• 10 library business that required ~2 minutes of action.


• 8 pieces of spam.


• 6 library notes that were read and saved or deleted.


• 5 personal notes (only 1 of which required action--about an hour worth of weekend planning)


• 3 notes from FaceBook (that's new for me just since WAML).


• 2 library business that required more than 2 minutes' attention.


• 1 listserv message (digest format)


• 1 'book on hold' notice.


• 1 reference question.

Leaving 6 emails from today that still require a little bit of action on my part. All total, about 2.5 hours to take care of this stuff (but the hour of weekend planning is a bit unusual).