Input Overload And New Semesters

I am writing this on a Friday night instead of Sunday morning. I am doing this mainly because I think the feeling that I am feeling right now and that I have felt all week will probably disperse a bit by Sunday and I want to try to accurately capture that feeling for others. This is mainly because I know I am not the only one that is feeling this thing and it is something that happens right about now in September every year (at least in my part of the world). 

There is so much that aligns with the same calendar of the academic year in North America. New TV shows, podcasts, even some publications, take a bit of a hiatus over the summer, especially if they are education based, and return again late August or early September. I myself did that same thing with my podcast. That is because there is some sort of agreed upon thing that is far from universal that the summer is time for either relaxation or one's own research projects, or maybe even just dreaming up new ideas for the next year. Of course this is not the case for everyone, and in fact just being able to take those kinds of pauses is also some kind of privilege.

However, when these things do return, at the same time that those of us in K-12 or HigherEd also return to our roles, positions, or work, what happens is a mass influx of information and input and also an expectation that the information will be digested or processed in some way and organized for future or immediate use. This input overload is what I have been feeling a lot this week and I know I am not alone.

I have tried to set up schedules around the reading and discussion groups I facilitate, the regular meetings I have to attend, the course that I am teaching, and the prep that is associated with that, as well as the schedule for this blog and my podcast. Add to that other events I would like to attend, artistic and cultural, as well as all the podcasts that I listen to starting with interesting episodes and series, and I felt like I have been bobbing from one thing to the next this week. 

Educational development and faculty development, is already a bit of a just in time kind of work. We respond to instructor needs as they arise and often it is a continuing conversation throughout the semester to see if the pedagogical strategies will work in the particular context. It is already a workflow organization that requires an extreme amount of flexibility and what I like to call calendar jenga. So when you add other things that are taking the input bandwidth, things that are equally important to knowledge dissemination, research, and just things that interest us in general, it is very easy to get overloaded.

I actually have talked about this before, a few months after the pandemic started. In that post I gave a list of 4 things that I do when I feel this way, and that list, four years later remains exactly the same actually. I am going to try to finish Carol Off's new book this weekend, which is exciting, and listen to some podcasts including this one about Brutalist architecture which has many pictures of my beloved UTSC on the episode page. Sometimes just getting through my lists of input (like reading the 4 journal articles I had saved on my desktop this afternoon) helps with the overload and overwhelm. I know others just stick to the getting away from "the screens" as I was yelling to a neighbourhood friend this evening as I waved my hands about. 

How one navigates the overload and overwhelm is very personal. This is definitely the time where those strategies are needed because we are trying to plan a fall and winter schedule that works with all the life responsibilities we have. What are your overload strategies? It would be nice to share and learn from each other because as I say, we all need it at this time of the year.