Calendar Jenga

This week's post is about our calendars. You know that thing that lives in your computer or in your phone or as a physical daytimer. I don't know about you but my calendar has no more room for anything and this week was a week of folk cancelling and then other folk trying to fit into slots that have now appeared in spaces that were no longer free.

And this calendar work is really work that we don't stop to acknowledge. Calendars do a kind of work on our lives that isn't truly acknowledged beyond the "I'm so busy" exclamation. What I mean by that is that depending on the kind of work you do, preparing for meetings or going to events requires a kind of pre-work that our calendars also don't make manifest. Maybe you have to read a thing or many things to make the meeting effective. Maybe you need to give feedback on something, or maybe you actually need to write a thing or prep a thing. When is all of that pre-work supposed to happen when our calendars are just filled with meetings that require pre-work?

This week folk had conflicts and cancelled, and then others squeezed into my calendar last minute, or when I tried to find a time that would work for 20 people at once (ha ha ha good luck) this "calendar jenga" is a real part of our lives now. But the thing is besides the pre-work there is also the calendars that exist in our minds or somewhere that we also don't acknowledge that take up more cognitive load each day. Like as I am typing this, I remembered my neighbour is writing the LSAT on Monday so maybe I should check and see if she needs me to get her some food or groceries so she can keep studying. And then my brain goes to the date and I think about whether or not I missed someone's birthday in my busy-ness this week. And then I think, did I forget to buy a thing, or right I like have no more bread in this house and I have to get that tomorrow.

And I am definitely a list person as I know many of you are. I have written about this list writing before. And I even now have a little black book I carry with me because sometimes things I am supposed to do or people I was supposed to contact occur to me while I am walking to the store, or while I am cooking supper. And sometimes this book helps me focus on important household management things like today when I thought I could sleep in a bit and then remembered I needed to get up to put the garbage to the curb. 

I try hard like most folk to plan time in for everything. For all the yeses we said early in summer because November seemed like a long time from then and now you realize it is in 4 weeks away and every day you try to work on that piece of writing, something new shows up that is seemingly more urgent with an earlier deadline. And part of this is because we make a lot of assumptions around linearity in HigherEd. We think everything is going to according to plan and nothing is going to intervene to impact due dates, deadlines, or cause you to be double or maybe tripled booked many times a day. 

Calendar Jenga lies to us like that. It is an attempt to make 2D something that is deeply 3D and relational. Our attempt to fit everything in, and this includes the learners, graduate students, staff, teaching teams, librarians and librarian staff, and other administrator folk doesn't always work because we cannot plan for the unexpected. 

I mean we can in some ways plan more inclusively in our pedagogical design, like dropping a lowest discussion post grade, or scaffolding assignment elements that can be chunked together. But for the most part our spaces and institutions are premised on a type of linearity that doesn't really exist and hasn't for decades (maybe it is time someone bought them a new calendar). So for this week I want you to take some time to see what is taking time,  what you wished you had more time for, what is literally stealing hours out of your day, and also to reflect on what you can do in your spaces to disrupt the belief in a linearity of time and a march towards productivity and project goals that only exists in a normative space that is not the reality of our eduspace.

Change the Narrative Resource

The New Yorker. Jimmy Kimmel and the Power of Public Pressure. The Political Scene Podcast. [44 minute podcast, episode page has links to readings but no transcripts sadly]