What is it like to be a pinball? I think I know – because I often describe my AVP days as “pinballing”. I go from one thing to another to another, back to the first and then over to a fourth thing. I zig and zag and zig again. And sometimes (but not often) I feel like I’m going down the drain.
This month I thought I’d give you a feel for a day of pinballing. I’ll save the gory details – but I’ll highlight the work. The key to understanding why I feel like a pinball is knowing that I rarely get to spend much focused on a single thing. I start one thing and then have to zig over to another, more pressing thing. I work a bit on that thing and then have to zag to a meeting. I leave the meeting and zig to issues that arise via email. I get through a few emails and than zag to a new problem that requires me to make some phone calls and put out a fire. I get the fire under control and zig to another meeting about something different. I get back to my office and zag back to the first thing I started with. And so it goes.
Here’s a sample list of a single day’s zigging and zagging. Just to state the obvious (one more time) – the day wasn’t one of methodically moving from one thing to the next, which is what a list implies. It was a day of pinballing back and forth and across and over and around and back again to these tasks and meetings:
- Editing and updating the full-time faculty hiring manual
- Drafting a formal response to a faculty complaint
- Offering comments on a draft Bellwether award application for ACC’s OER work
- Attending a meeting about how to trumpet more effectively (and more broadly) the benefits of the Texas A&M Chevron Engineering Academy so that we can recruit our allotted 100 students
- Recruiting folks to participate in a “transfer self-assessment” that ACC is working on
- Drafting the answer to one of the questions for the Leah Meyer Austin award application that ACC submitted
- Offering advice to a dean about eStaffing issues
- Sending off a brief description of a presentation I’m giving at the upcoming Texas Pathways conference
- Offering advice to another dean about a personnel issue
- Prodding some folks about a looming deadline for gathering initial information on campus moves
- Sending some information to the Grants Office for an addendum to the Texas Corequisite Project grant
- Inviting a couple of faculty to attend THECB’s Star Award luncheon in November (ACC is a finalist for our Z-Degree/OER work)
- Meeting with colleagues in IT about the infrastructure needs to support an effective early alert system
- Etc.
Pinballing between and among and across and down and over through all of the above. It was a typical day!
Image by OpenClipart-Vectors from Pixabay. No attribution required.