Day 7: Only a matter of time

I've only been doing this daily blog for six days, and I've already missed a day! It was only a matter of time...
I'll do two posts today, one this morning (entitled Day 7), and another tonight (called, surprisingly enough, Day 8).

This morning, I wanted to talk a little bit about time, and the lack of it.
Yesterday was a rare luxury. Our office windows were removed a day earlier than advertised, so I wasn't able to work there, so I ended up in the library (having been in the canteen (too noisy) and the campus cafe (too cold)) working on conference proposals and scanning through books that might be useful for those conferences, and for future work.

I had lunch with a colleague, and we discussed the future of the programme and possibilities of expanding into new taught Master's areas (subject to a review that is looming ever near like a threatening iceberg), and then I was back in the library. Obviously, I have to make more time for this sort of thing.

With this job, it feels so often that we do not have time. I'm becoming more and more aware that I need to make more time, and to organise my time more intelligently. There are certain jobs that come around every year - module reports, updating module descriptors for quality committees, summary of public engagement activities, budget planning - that I deal with when I'm prompted to deal with them. Why don't I make space and time for them in advance? Well, I'm going to.