I have two weeks - 75 hours - of overtime to spend, and I have no idea how to do it. It's just built up since before Christmas: exams, semester planning and administrating, obscenely packed workload in January and February- it adds up. And this is the time when I have felt so exhausted I haven't really managed to do all the work I should do. And I have still been doing work I couldn't write hours for, because I was doing it for others than the college.
Two weeks. And no, getting paid extra isn't an option at this college - it's why we have such flexible hours. Right.
I can't decide what would freak the department out more, if I said: I am taking two weeks off, right now, or: I am going to be away one day every week until May. Most likely I'll just do nothing, and once in a while just dream about what I could do with an extra two weeks added to my vacation, while more overtime heaps up. Mmmmmm....
I think I want to go back to Alhambra, and then follow the Spanish coast to Portugal. Oh yes, I wish.
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3 comments:
Oh, four day weeks sound wonderful, except of course your workload won't respect that. Going away is probably a better option...
So you keep time sheets too? I thought I was the only one! After 2 1/2 weeks of keeping timesheets it was obvious that I had worked 2 1/2 days overtime. Just exactly what I needed to spend a rather long weekend in Paris :)
Don't work too hard...
I am partial to the four day weeks, too. I could use the fifth day writing some of all that other stuff that keeps wanting to get written. Imagine: One day a week, everybody at school and work, and me, the cat and the lap-top curl up before the huge windows to admire the view and write anything I like. I almost get dizzy at the thought.
This is complicated. First: I can't get paid for the overtime, I have to put some work aside and take the time off. The work that tends to get put aside is not teaching or administration.
Second: the reason I can't get paid for overtime is the research part of the job. In order to make the opportunity for research as flexible as possible, we don't formally register hours. Imagine how expensive that could get, if I got paid to play games all night through for weeks?
So, what tends to happen is that the only acceptable over-time is connected to teaching and administration. I only write up extra time if I am preparing lectures or doing any of the ten million administrative tasks in my job. Which means that any research I do in pressed periods happen in time left over after teaching and administrating, time, which you can guess by this, hardly exists.
The answer to your question, Hilde, is that I still work on research at any available moment, but now it's being pushed out of the prime work time by other tasks, so if I want it done it has to happen in week-ends and evenings. And I still can't write up hours for it.
I am working on routines within the department to protect some weeks each semester for all of the staff. For that to work for me, I have to leave Volda. If I am around, extremely immediate tasks materialise out of thin air.
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