Triage

In my morning blog-scan, I came across Tenured Radical talking about the end of summer. Only about a month until the new TAs come into town for orientation, and that will consume most of my days for a week. Not a bad thing, of course -- I like talking to new TAs -- but it's a week of dissertation work that I won't be able to do. AND I'm heading to Wisconsin for ten days in the middle of August. As I think I've said before, it'll be a working trip, but I'm not going to haul a bunch of books home, so I'll be working on job market materials that require little bookage: my c.v., my teaching portfolio, etc.

All this is to say that time runs short so, as Tenured Radical says, it's triage time. Time to figure out what can be done and what has to be sacrificed.

When I was studying for my exams (here we take our qualifying and comprehensive exams in the same week), my then-officemate wrote one word on a post-it and put it up on my wall: triage. I didn't understand. "You're going to have to cut some stuff. You can't reasonably tackle it all. Figure out what's not essential." It was the best advice I got.

So, what is essential in this next month? What must get done? And what can be cut?

My first response is that everything is essential; nothing can be cut. In some ways that's true. I've done a decent job making a reasonable schedule for the summer. I'm not totally screwed, in other words, with the amount of work I have to get done. Not totally, at least (screwed, that is).

So, what has to get done before orientation begins (in the last week of August):
1. Finish a draft of my article
2. Finish my teaching portfolio
3. Finish drafts of my cover letters

What can get cut:
1. Revisions: Revising my lit review and my invitational rhetoric chapters can wait. Revising my article draft can wait. There's a PCA article that I'd like to work on, but that's just going to have to wait. Maybe a long time.