Archive for October, 2015

Connections

Published October 27, 2015 Reflections Leave a Comment
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It’s late, and I have to be up early. But before I head off to sleep, I wanted to share a few thoughts from my day.

I spent the day at EDUCAUSE’s annual conference. Technically, the conference starts tomorrow, but today was filled with pre-conference workshops and other events. EDUCAUSE is a great place for someone like me. And a terrible one.

A couple of years ago I took the StrengthFinders assessment, and one of my strengths is characterized by finding connections in ideas, people, and things. My brain — and occasionally my Twitter feed — was exploding today, exploring the intersections of (sometimes) seemingly dichotomous things.

It started with a conversation last night about two areas I’m actively involved in on my campus: risk management and innovation. A concern over one often precludes the other, and yet, the types of risks our institutions face may only be able to be solved through innovation.

Today, the intersections between and/or convergence of ideas filled my thoughts. I considered how tweets from a workshop on unconscious bias influenced my thinking in the one I was attending on the (completely unrelated) topic of building futures capacity. The construct of work-life balance and the blurring of our private and professional lives. And the interesting distinctions we draw between the physical and the virtual, and how we define place, space, and community in an increasingly connected world.

For tomorrow, I’ve been asked to reflect on more intersections and connections, between leadership, power, marginality, and resistance. But for now….I should sleep.

In the Zone

Published October 7, 2015 Work/Life Balance 3 Comments

You know that feeling you get, when you’re working on a project — making good progress, ideas are flowing — and suddenly you look up and it’s already 11 p.m? You figure it’s probably time to close up for the night, put the laptop away, and go to sleep.

Which you do.

And then you lie there, lights off, wide awake, with a thousand ideas racing through your brain: Oooh…I should email so-and-so, to see if I can find more data for my project. What if I changed the order of my presentation around, would that make more sense? Don’t forget to add that thought to my to-do list. Wonder what the caf is serving for lunch tomorrow? (Okay, maybe not all the thoughts are productive ones!).

You can’t sleep….you’re “in the zone.” So you open the laptop back up, just to do that one. last. thing. Before you forget. It’ll help you get it off your mind, so you can sleep.

And now it’s after midnight, and you’re still at it. In. the. zone.

Do you know that feeling? Or is it just me?

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