Work, work, work, work

I feel tired hungover this morning. This is because I worked until 7pm yesterday (after starting at 8:30am). Last task of the day was a class, showing a group of research students what resources they need to consider using (“Google is not the answer to everything”), and how to keep up to date on their topics of interest (email alerts, RSS). These sorts of classes are always tough because you never know what prior experience students have of searching journal databases and so forth, and you always run the risk of boring the more advanced ones.

We’re also noting all our daily tasks at the moment and how much time we’re spending on each:

• Email general
• Email – answering reference questions
• Phone calls
• EndNote questions (yes I answer that many questions on EndNote)
• Individual visits to students and academics
• Collection development
• Meetings
• Presentations
• Campus/branch library supervision
• Information literacy
• Informal networking
• Reference desk
• Project work
• Other (blogging)

For some reason, quantifying what I do makes me really tired. I think I prefer to just think about the work I do as a nebulous blob, rather than to be able to say that so far this week I’ve had thirteen emails that each took at least ten minutes to answer, four EndNote queries that each took at least twenty minutes to answer, three hours-worth of meetings…

Next week is Conference Week, too. It’s going to be all go, go, GO!