The Value of Time

When I think about all the stupid crap I have to spend time on -- that I wouldn't if other people did their jobs -- it really pisses me off. First of all, I did finally get the rest of my paycheck today, but I also spent most of the day yesterday checking and rechecking my bank account. Around three in the afternoon, I sent an email to the payroll department asking what was going on (in a nicer way, of course). The reply I got was that they were "doing [their] best to make sure it happened." As you can imagine, I put about as much faith in that as I would in anything that department told me, after it screwed up my pay two months in a row. Later in the evening, I got another reply saying that the "transfer has been initiated" and should show up soon. It still wasn't there when I checked first thing this morning, but by about 10:00 it was. One problem solved.

Tonight when I got home from work, I was starving. I had a bowl of cereal mid-morning but was otherwise so busy all day that I didn't eat. My grading is caught up; getting that done is why I didn't have time to eat. So this evening I fixed myself a Healthy Choice meal (spicy orange chicken) and decided to multi-task. I popped my computer on to check on things while I ate my dinner. In my work email, the first thing I saw was an invitation to an adjunct meeting that (apparently) we are all expected to attend. It's on Thursday. Yes, this Thursday. Today is Tuesday, and this is the first "invitation" I've received. This is the other thing about my job that pisses me off, and it wasn't much better when I was full-time at my previous institution. It's the assumption that we have nothing else to do, or haven't already made a plan (for the day, the month, the semester -- whatever), which connotes a real lack of respect for the value of our time. It goes on from 1:00 - 7:30 p.m. My class tonight lasted a half hour past the end time. Students were doing presentations, and they were sincerely interested in all of them, including the last, so I wasn't going to cut off the student who was presenting when we reached the end of class time.

My time is valuable to me, not necessarily in a monetary sense (although that is also an issue) but in an I-can't-get-it-back sense. I've come to look at all these time-wasters (the ones I mentioned and the ones I didn't) as part of my job. I used to have my "Monday hassle pile" when I just blasted through all of it in one day. As my schedule became more crowded, though, I lost the time to do it all in one day. I think I might have to go back to that. It's definitely easier to deal with all the crap at once, to know every other day that I don't have to worry about it. There would still be some things I couldn't accomplish in that one-day timeframe -- repeated calls to my insurance company to find out where my claim money is, for example -- but it might reduce my overall stress level. Speaking of which, it's nine at night and I haven't done my daily thirty minutes of exercise. I'm going to do it now. I haven't missed a day yet.