I’ve noticed in my few years in academia that the year steamrolls until by this time, with just a few short weeks left until spring finals are over, staff, faculty, and students alike are running even in their sleep to keep up. Have you woken up at night to scrawl a note or set a reminder on your phone lately? Me too.

It doesn’t help in the library world that we seem to load all our conferences into a window from late spring to early summer. I’m sure this has to do with making sure people can attend before they are off for the summer if they are faculty or are on a 180 schedule. For those of us who work year round, it is probably a well-intended attempt to get us all fired up for that mythical time in the summer when we are “free” to do projects.

I’ve never really seen summer projects get completed, at least not the long lists we all make in the winter during planning meetings. I’ve got several large projects on the horizon myself, although I am trying to be reasonable and actually said no to something last week. I also have the inevitable end of the academic year  hiring committees,  plus co-chairing One Book One Manchester, our community wide read, with the city library director. I’m still distilling the notes from attending the Association of College and Research Libraries 2019 conference in Cleveland a little over a week ago, and I’m going to a few other learning opportunities or mini conferences in the next couple of months. I have some amazing opportunities coming up to do research, work on student success efforts, and participate in collaborative work on Open Educational Resources on my campus and in our community college system.

This is all super exciting — I’ve never had this many professional development, continuing education, and collaboration opportunities at once, nor so much institutional support for my growth as a librarian and educator. I’m fortunate. But I’m sitting here tonight wondering why the end of the academic year is this stacked up. Why don’t we have conferences in March? Why don’t we set more reasonable expectations for what can happen in the summer (when many people will also take vacations)? Why don’t we (ok, I) take on one project at a time?

For me it’s been a perfect storm, as I say, of support and opportunities that are too amazing not to try. But one thing I heard often at ACRL 2019 was that we have to caution against being overwhelmed by expectations, we have to help ourselves and those who work for us by setting boundaries such as actually taking lunch breaks, not working late or going in early every day, and managing to say no sometimes. I also heard an interesting talk by Fobazi Ettarh about not succumbing to “vocational awe” by making librarianship out to be the saving grace for everyone and everything on our campuses. Ettarh suggested being a “bad librarian” can be good, by which she meant, have a life outside of work, don’t sacrifice your social life or your well being to serve librarianship, and call out libraries and librarianship for the things we don’t get right, as well as celebrating what we do.

It was also my great pleasure to walk up and introduce myself like a total fan girl to Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, ACRL’s Academic/Research Librarian of the Year, to ask her how she does it. She works in a library with 2 librarians, like I do. I wanted to know her secret to doing more with less. Her advice? Take care of yourself, so you can take care of others. Take your lunch. Go home on time. So as we enter the last few weeks of the semester I will be working hard to work less hard — to come home to my family in the evenings close to when they are expecting me. To take a real break every day. To keep myself physically and mentally rested, hydrated, and happy.  I’m going to try to give myself permission to be more like my favorite Zen master, a grey tabby called Gwen:

We’re going to go curl up with a book now.