Month: March 2008

I always used to think that calendars were simple affairs. You’d either write appointments and deadlines into a paper calendar, or you’d write them into an electronic calendar. What could be simpler? Well, apparently even the enigma that is The Research Process is easier to get right than a process for simultaneously keeping track of my affairs and advertising my availability for research consultations. Here’s how it’s worked for me for the years that I’ve been a librarian.

2005-2006: My palm kept me pretty much on track with my own schedule. I could sync it with my work desktop and my personal laptop, take it with me to meetings, and generally keep up with my life. To broadcast my availability to students, I’d make up a new printed calendar each week and hang it outside my office, just like my co-workers did. This was kind of annoying, and felt like duplication of effort, but it seemed like our best option at the time, even though they’d get out of date really quickly.

2006-2007: Weeeee!!! Google Calendars made it easy to feed a pretty looking calendar to an HTML page. At this point I retrained myself to keep track of my schedule on my palm, and then publish an “Availability Calendar” which, instead of saying when I was busy, said when I was available to meet. This took off almost immediately. Students who had been shy about adding to my full-looking (and full-feeling) days were now much more confident to ask for times that were clearly designated as being for them. They also grasped the analogy to faculty office hours much more readily. My co-workers and I noticed that the number of surprise drop-in appointments dropped as students started emailing us to reserve slots from the “available” periods, and this not only reduced our stress levels and helped us provide better service, but it also just gave us more control over our work days. Of course, the down-side was that we were each still maintaining two calendars: Google and Palm.

2007-early 2008: Enter Zimbra. We couldn’t sync Palms anymore, but if we wanted to be able to schedule meetings with each other we’d have to use Zimbra and not Palm. I sure wasn’t about to maintain THREE calendars, so something had to go. Clearly, the Google Calendars couldn’t go. They were our one best option for working out logistics with students. Therefore, we retired our Palms. This left us with no portable calendars, so a few of us actually bought paper calendars to take to meetings. I rather stubbornly refused to go that route, though. If I wasn’t prepared to maintain three electronic calendars, there was no way I’d maintain two electronic calendars and one paper calendar.

The rest of 2008: But today I finally sat down and put the latest upgrade of Zimbra to work for me. It’s finally able to publish calendars just like Google Calendar can. (Well, almost just like… but enough for my purposes.) I created a new calendar within Zimbra, designated my “Available” times, and published it to my web site. Today I’m officially down to one calendar for the first time since I’ve worked here. Of course… I still can’t take my calendar with me to meetings unless I shell out for some wireless device or other (or better yet, my library supplies us with them). So maybe it’s time to start thinking about that paper calendar…

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… apparently. Which is perfectly fine with me. I actually don’t like calling people. How do you know if they’ll be there or not? Or if they’re busy? IM and email work best for me because I can decide how my message will arrive and whether or not I care that it’ll arrive when the other person can deal with it immediately or put it off till it’s convenient.

Well, today I retired my very first phone log. This is nothing fancy. It’s just a little pad of paper where I’d write down the date of in-coming and out-going calls, and relevant notes about date/person/subject and such. What makes this moment significant is that it took me three and a half years to fill up a little pad of lined note paper. That’s not a lot of calls.

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Have you ever noticed how we work and we work and somethings go right and some things go wrong and some things are frustrating and every once in a long while somebody stops and says, “You did a great job.” Ever noticed how you have the impression that those “great job” moments are incredibly few and far between?

When I stop and think about it, I usually think that people almost never stop and thank their librarians. I mean, I usually have a pretty good sense of of when I’ve done a good job, and I’m generally an internally motivated person, so I don’t go around getting gloomy about how rarely people tell me when I’ve done well. But you know the feeling. And I’m sure the same is true for lots of other professions. And I actually don’t think this stems from a general lack of gratitude. I think it happens because most people see a job well done and think to themselves, “That person is so good at his/her job” or “That person speaks so eloquently,” and then figure that the person must know this about themselves, and that lots of other people must tell them this all the time.

The longer I’ve been a professional, the more I’ve come to realize that most people, even the famous people, actually don’t hear from people when they’ve been especially helpful or insightful or eloquent. I realized this about a year and a half ago when I worked up my courage to write to a very famous library-type to thank him for a presentation he’d given that my colleagues and I found immensely useful. His reply shocked me in its pure joy at having been thanked. Since then I’ve worked much harder to get over my shyness and thank people when they’ve made an impression. I still don’t do it nearly enough, but I’m working on that.

Well, today I’ve been putting together my dreaded annual review document for which I’m supposed to condense an entire year into a page or two of “highlights.” As part of this process, I’ve gone through my “100 Dollar” folder. This is the folder where I throw printouts of emails expressing appreciation, notes about when people have complemented me, and anything else that will help me remember the good days. This folder grew out of something a co-worker said to me shortly after coming to work here. She said, “People tend to remember frustrations and failures more than they remember their successes, so you need to think of a way to counteract that. The way I do it is by keeping notes about successes in my 100 Dollar folder. That way, when I’m in one of those periods when everything seems to be going wrong, I can look back and remember when things went right.” She then explained that the name came from a line in a book where a boy remembers the good times “back when everything was 100 dollars.” At first I thought it was strange and a little bit self-indulgent, but I’ve come to realize that it really is true: we need to be reminded that people are appreciative, and that we really do make a difference in and among the routines and stresses of day-to-day work life.

Today, as I went through my folder, I realized that I have at least a couple of notes in there for every month I’ve worked here since the beginning of my very first Fall Term. Every note made me smile, and everyone brought back a flood of generally pleasant memories (especially the one from a student who said she heard from a classmate that I was “a queller of panicked fears” and could she please meet with me). In fact, I’m somewhat in awe of the number of notes that are there, and feel a little bit small for not having remembered most of them until faced with a physical reminder. It really is true that we dwell on weaknesses and make those into the dominant features of our realities. So I write this now as a reminder to myself to look back over this folder from time to time and remember that in and among all the times when I haven’t been able to find the research a student wanted, or when a class crashed and burned, or when I failed to communicate in a way that helped rather than hurt a situation… in and among all these things, these are not the only things people remember when they think of me.

This realization sure is a pleasant way to end a long Monday. But it’s more than just pleasant; it’s also motivating. I know I’ll make mistakes, fail, flounder, and generally mess up. I can guarantee you I’ll do these things quite frequently if history is any guide. But you know what? Life goes on, and it’s generally going in the right direction.

And you know what else? I love my job and the people with whom I’m privileged to work.

And you know what else? That’s definitely enough gushing for one post.

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