Workaholics Anonymous (Suzanne)

Yesterday I went to MJIL training day, met a lot of cool new people, exchanged introductions, and all that. And you know how when you meet new people, there’s always this one set of stock lines you use to make polite conversation? In this instance, ‘what did you get up to over Easter?’ was one of them.

Um. Yeah. Over Easter, I finished two assignments, practiced four hours a day, caught up on my law reading, started an application for an internship, and transcribed my orchestra parts from the key of A to the key of B-flat. What did you do?

So, really, as you can see, my life, or lack thereof, is a little bit pathetic. The sad thing is that there’s still a lot on my to-do list that I haven’t even started (reading for music history, law reading for the week back, the rest of the internship application, planning for my big scary 100% and 50% essay assignments, recording an audition for an international music competition, my SALP community project), that I really need to start working on right now. The plan was to finish all this stuff early over Easter weekend while all the fun spots in town were closed (as the readers of my first year blog no doubt know, I hate Australian opening hours), and then take the rest of the non-teaching period off, but that doesn’t really look like a possibility right now.

I think I really do need to cut large chunks of commitments out of my life right now. SALP will be finishing this semester, so that’s one less thing to worry about, but it was supposed to be finishing next Monday until I got a month’s extension in order to finish off my hours. I kind of regret skipping some of the seminars now because the policy is that you can trade off not going to the seminars with doing more community service hours, and I’ve got a seminar skipping ‘debt’ of… well, a lot of service hours. I’m also overloading one and a half subjects this semester because I want to get a little bit ahead in order to go on exchange without worrying about my subjects being phased out while I’m away, and I think I won’t do that next semester because it’s not strictly necessary. Really, though, it’s not the number of subjects, but one particular subject that causes the problem – when you have to work around four hours of practice daily there’s really not a great deal you can do to clear up more time. I probably spend more time on that one class than all the others combined, even with the overload.

As for extracurricular commitments – running the JCH Choir takes a fair bit of time, I’m glad I appointed a co-coordinator this year and maybe I should delegate a bit more. It’s also officialising so that means I won’t have to do it next year because a new coordinator can be elected. MSS, MJIL, AJLL, and my various other alphabet soup organisations are really time consuming, but only intermittently – unfortunately, when you do more than one intermittently adds up to become regularly. I need to find funding for the JCH ball too as part of the sponsorship committee, or we won’t have one, which will suck. My volunteer tutoring is required to finish SALP, and my student loves me so I’d feel really bad if I quit on her. I took up paid tutoring for VCE specialist maths this week, which I shouldn’t have done, really, but I needed the money and I also really missed maths.

So the plan of attack goes like this: I finish SALP. I stay on AJLL another year, but then I stop (which I’ll probably feel really bad about because one reason I got the position is because I said I could stick with the journal over the long haul). When I run for re-election at MSS this year, I pick an easier position. Or I just don’t run for re-election, sad as that will be. No additional commitments in the meantime. No overloading for any of my remaining semesters.

So hopefully that means I get my life back a little starting next year, and maybe I can focus on actually doing a good job in one or two commitments rather than an ok-ish job in a billion.

It’s a plan.