{"id":139,"date":"2017-08-19T12:39:29","date_gmt":"2017-08-19T16:39:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/?p=139"},"modified":"2017-08-19T12:39:29","modified_gmt":"2017-08-19T16:39:29","slug":"ten-days-in","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/?p=139","title":{"rendered":"Ten Days In"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>So I got to feeling very overloaded this week at work. Tuesday was the worst; every time I finished one item, two more were in my inbox. My e-mail notification was popping so often that I had to silence my laptop and flip my phone over so I couldn&#8217;t see the screen&#8211;each &#8220;ding!&#8221; was stressing me out more and more.<\/p>\n<p>I decided to take the advice I&#8217;d been giving out to others over the years, and establish some healthy boundaries to keep me from feeling like I&#8217;d never see daylight again. Here&#8217;s some of what I decided to do:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Me Time:<\/strong> I have been taking from 10-12 each morning to work solely on projects of my own choosing, at the cost of all the random tasks everyone else has been giving me. It&#8217;s important to me that I try to keep long-term goals in my mind, even when short-term problems seem overwhelming. I&#8217;m thinking of making this a semi-permanent feature of my day, since I was very productive with it this week. I&#8217;m behind on where I should be on several projects&#8211;this started helping.<\/li>\n<li><strong>Prioritize Teachers:<\/strong> Sometimes I get lost in administration-driven projects and tasks that I forget my stated purpose: to support classroom teachers integrate technology in instruction. I took the time to help several teachers with their gradebook incidents, and they were all very grateful. It&#8217;s gratifying to feel that I was able to help someone with a classroom need. The random nature of technology incidents makes this hard to schedule, but I&#8217;m toying with the idea of focusing on teacher incidents from 8-10 each morning (working on structuring my day a little more, see above).<\/li>\n<li><strong>Choose Battles:<\/strong> If it&#8217;s easier to complete a task&#8211;even if it shouldn&#8217;t be my responsibility&#8211;than to go to war over making a point that it&#8217;s not mine, I often do it. Especially right now, when I don&#8217;t have time to fight every battle. That said, something on my to-do list this year is to sit down with a copy of my job description and figure out a way to unload as many of the tasks that don&#8217;t advance me professionally as possible.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>It&#8217;s way early in the year, and I&#8217;m certainly open to adapting myself in new and different ways, but I feel these few changes have made me more productive (and more sane) so far.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>So I got to feeling very overloaded this week at work. Tuesday was the worst; every time I finished one item, two more were in my inbox. My e-mail notification was popping so often that I had to silence my laptop and flip my phone over so I couldn&#8217;t see the screen&#8211;each &#8220;ding!&#8221; was stressing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[34,36,35],"class_list":["post-139","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","tag-productivity","tag-sanity","tag-workflow"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=139"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":140,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139\/revisions\/140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=139"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=139"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mikevigilant.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=139"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}