Not today please I am too busy

A friend of mine describes me as someone who has turned multi-tasking into an extreme sport.  I can go with that imagery.  One thing that my sport of multitasking teaches me is that near enough is quite often quite good enough.  Nothing in life needs to be perfect, not my parenting, not my hair, not my teaching preparation (no such thing anyway) and certainly not my research and writing.

I choose my battles.  I don't care that my son's school uniform shirt is no longer white with a yellow stripe and black colour and is instead a nice multi-coloured smear.  Ok I do care, but not enough to bother trying to fix it.  The shirts come off my son and into the wash where they come out clean but not white.  I don't care that other mothers bake and individually decorate cupcakes for their children to take to school on their birthday (I hired a neighbour to do it).  My son was happy, my son's friends were happy, and I was happy.  Win-win as they say.

Another thing my extreme sport has taught me is that lots of people are willing to waste your time.  You have to be ruthless in watching out for them.  It could be something as nice as asking you to wait for them to join you at lunch or coffee (thus spinning out your allocated time beyond what you initially planned).  Or it could be something darkly political such as engaging in plagiarism with your hard earned material.  This latter one was particularly confronting.  I could lie down and roll over and not waste time energy and resources on it or I could confront it head on.  I took it on.  It took time (and pushed up my blood pressure) to sort out but it was worth it.  It was my hard work that was being appropriated without credit and frankly that should not happen in a university work environment by another academic (senior to me actually).  Bad enough in the private sector where bosses claim credit for your work (yes I am still looking at you Ms EvilBitchMonsterBoss) but to happen in a University where plagiarism gets students kicked out and brings down academic reputations is just unacceptable.  Now I need to figure out the best way of ensuring that does not happen again (apart from always being coordinator of a unit).  Ideas are welcome.

Back to the juggle.