The Absent-Minded Professor

Being able to work from home is a real perk of my job. I can be near and available to my family yet accomplish much of my required work, without as much required "face time" as many professional jobs require. But it is not always without drawbacks. Especially for a person with severe "concentration difficulties." ( I am using that loose term since I have no official medical diagnosis, though I have become convinced that I have ADD at least as badly as all the rest of my kin, some of whom have been diagnosed.)

The first and obvious problem is that I am available to my family. I am interrupted constantly. This does not tend to make me work more efficiently. Of course, I can shut myself off in my bedroom and threaten violence if I am disturbed for less than a concussion, but that tends to defeat the purpose of working from home in order to be near my kids. On the other hand, when all of my work takes ten times longer than it should, that doesn't lend itself to quality family time, either. Perhaps by the time all of my children are grown, I will have worked out an optimum solution to this dilemma.

But I am not sure that all of my work inefficiencies are because of working from home. Some are just because I can't seem to focus appropriately without the complete panic of a firm deadline within the next 12 hours.

Perhaps those of you with kids are familiar with the series of picture books by Laura Numeroff (Laura Numeroff books)?  These are like the life stories of a person with ADD. The classic is If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. In these books, a small event leads to an inevitable cascade of events, similar to the fabled story in which a man buys a new shoelace, needs new shoes to match, and ends up with a new house and car.

Well, I found myself today living a Laura Numeroff book. It went something like this (clever artwork and insertion of cute animal lead character will have to be supplied by someone else):

If You Want to Get Something Done...

If you want to get something done when there are less than two weeks before you have students in the classroom in front of you, pick a small, manageable task to start with. Let's see. Ah, here we are...

New task assigned yesterday at department meeting - rewrite my faculty bio page so that it is between 240 and 270 words, instead of the current 164. Why? Because the department assistant is making a bulletin board display and that word count fits her font size to make it all "look nice." (Seriously. I am not making this up. Never mind that I rewrote the bio less than 12 months ago, and put several hours into making it reasonably current, yet compatible with others in the department. Apparently changing the font sizes, or the layout, would be more work than having 15 of us rewriting to get the correct word count.)

If I try to accomplish a small, reasonable task, I am certain to be interrupted and sidetracked. Okay, I can do this task. First job...find the Microsoft Word file with the original text. Hmm. Not on my hard drive. Need to use the VPN (virtual private network) to connect to the server at work and look on my account there. Unfortunately, the VPN takes several minutes to connect/authenticate. Meanwhile, I may as well check my email.

If I check my email... I am probably going to find another task to distract me. Ah yes, here it is. Someone sending a tip on how to optimize my Moodle pages set-up. (Moodle is course-management software for the required internet presence of my courses.) Oh, that reminds me...Moodle is new software since I went on maternity leave (replacing Blackboard), and I need to learn how to use it. Better look up the on-line tutorials for Moodle and work through those.

If I start on a new task to distract me, it will require other tasks to be done first. I need to open the Moodle web page for my upcoming course to work through the tutorial. I need to put up some content to try things out. To put up a list of reading assignments, I will need to finish my course syllabus.

If I try to do other tasks first, these will lead me in circles. Hmm, I remember now why I didn't already finish the syllabus. It was because to do that, I need to review the semester design project to be sure I cover the relevant topics by the project interim due dates. I have had "review the design project" on my task list all summer long. Where is that file again? Oh yes, on the server. Which means I need to connect to the VPN. Which I never finished doing before. I could start now, except the kids are asking for lunch. Good thing I am working from home so that I can be here to do things like this with them. C'est la vie!