Not a lot to say this week

A very exciting non-MPOW but LIS related project has been taking off in my spare time over the few weeks, and I hope to be able to share more details with you soon. There have been a lot of involved subprojects, actions, etc. involved, and my GTD skills have definitely been getting a workout keeping all of the balls in the air and making sure things happen as they should in the order that they should. ultimately it comes down to the same-old same-old...capture everything, process for actions, organize, review, and do...I know I couldn't even dream of attempting something like this without having a good system for this many-tentacled organism I'm trying to coax into existence. I'm sorry to be so cryptic about this (for now), and this post is an apology for my silence as much as anything else, but I'd like to leave you with one thought for the week: What ridiculously huge someday/maybe has been sitting in the background for a while, occasionally nagging you to think about taking action? And why don't you? When you realize that the worst thing that can happen is failure... and that with risk management most failures are recoverable...things get a lot easier. :-)

Don't let fear keep you from your goals. See you next week.

Intersession life and stuff

For my fellow academic librarians...don't you just love that first week after spring finals? It's a great time to slow down, sit back, relax...and promptly collapse under the weight of 15 "summer projects". Here at MPOW we've already got our reserve room cleanup in progress, and then tidying up some item type glitches that were created in our ILS migration--fortunately it only impacts a thousand or so AV items. Also it's inventory time, and we have about a thousand govdoc microfiches that need to be cataloged, and I'm developing a seminar for the clients of our university's business incubator, and we're going to be revamping our web tutorials, and...you get the picture. :-) I've also come to the conclusion that as I find more "nifty projects" to do at work and in my wider life, I need to reevaluate how much time I spend on my ongoing projects. For instance, I'm taking an orientation class to become a CASA--as a former welfare caseworker this is a need very close to my heart and there are never enough of them to go around. Librarians' research skills and helping personalities can make us a good fit for this--if you're looking for a service opportunity, check with your local chapter to see if they need new advocates. (okay, plug over, back to the post :-))

Anyway, as I was saying, I've been thinking a lot about how much time I can commit to some of my professional development projects, notably Scattered Librarian. After some thought, I've decided that I'm going to scale back to one scheduled post a week--knowing of course that I'll probably pop in with brief posts more often as my muse/current events bring up various topics. In a perverse sort of way I think that will have me keeping up with things better. Unfortunately, I've decided to put the RSS digest on temporary(?) hiatus, at least the LIS links. If you're not on LISnews.org's feed, their This Week in Library Blogland does a much more thorough summary of what's out there. I will, however, be posting my 5 favorite time management blog posts each week at the end of said scheduled post, and I'll certainly keep sharing all those wacky reference sites I run into from time to time. If I decide to start pursuing more speaking opportunities or anything like that, I'm sure you'll see the volume here picking up a lot--but I've got quite enough going on for now, and I think I'd be better served spending more time in the comments feeds of your blogs as well as updating mine. We'll see how it goes... :-)