Time Mismanagementitis?

For a while there, I was operating in full-on professional overdrive, at least overdrive for me. I was blogging and vlogging regularly, going and presenting at conferences, creating and delivering a virtual info lit program from scratch, and keeping up to date on my blog subscriptions. But that all seemed to fall apart over the summer as my 2 week, end-of-August beach vacation found me, upon my return, far too buried to keep up with it all. First the blog posts and blog reading fell by the wayside. Then I found myself seriously having to stop myself from putting in presentation proposals. Even my twitter posts have fallen off! Spare time was simply not there.

The demands of the virtual workshops (2 hour, hands-on workshops via Elluminate - I've done about a dozen this term so far) - prepping, scheduling, tweaking, delivering and assessing have eaten up about 75% of my workload this term. And teaching, while I'm decent at it, does not come naturally to me (at least, not yet). It stresses me out, even when I find the time to prep and plan enough to satisfy my own over worrying brain. And it has been such a delicate balancing act - requiring collaboration and coordination among a large group of geographically dispersed people. This plus my regular reference, technical and committee work chewed up the last of my energy reserves now that we've hit November. It has taken a toll. I'm now feeling wholly burned-out and in need of some serious brain downtime. That was part of the reason I recently purchased an HDTV and PlayStation 3, despite the financial crap going on. For me, video games are good 'ol brain relaxation/stress relievers.

I guess I've always operated on cycles of creativity and burn-out. When I see all the work that so many brilliant librarians are doing out there, I find myself amazed at how they do it day in and day out. How do you guys keep up the blistering pace? I'm in a serious trough right now creative-wise, but hopefully I'll come out of it soon. Until then, my posts on here may be light, but I'll keep trying. And when no words come, you'll probably find me playing Rock Band 2 or Fallout 3...