Keeping Up With It All

 

I don't think I know a single librarian who has time.

 

It's a tendency of our profession to wear many, many hats. It makes sense, when you think about it: we're people who love to read, to learn. So naturally, we're interested in many different aspects of our jobs. And we volunteer to help.

 

And after a long day of working the reference desk and organizing programs and creating documents and processing materials and researching and whatever else we may have done that day... it just seem impossible, sometimes, to keep up with our professional development and with new technologies. It's just one more thing to add to a very long to-do list.

 

But those things are important. And it's not impossible to add a few things to your daily routine. I'm going to present a number of strategies I've discovered (or outright stolen), and feel free to try as many or as few as you like. They key is to find what works for you, and work your own kind of balance.

 

And, of course, remember the mantra: Just try it. Make time.

 

Types of Blogs I Read (organized by category)

• libraries
• librarians
• professional opportunities
• techie blogs / news
• digital collections

 

Reading Blogs

 

Get an aggregator, and organize your blogs by category. Or organize them by time of day--Bloglines has a feature called "Playlists," where you can take blogs that you've already organized by category, and create dynamic lists based on when you read particular blogs (morning, lunch break), or by mood (humor, happy, serious). I tend to look over my top blogs during my lunch break, or those times when I've completed a task and have maybe ten minutes to kill before a meeting or a reference shift. (Or during a slow reference shift.)

 

Blogging

 

I post between one and five times a week to my professional blog. It varies a lot, based on both how busy I am at work, and on if I'm working on a particular project that I'd like to share, or if I just have an idea I want to mull over.

 

I tend to blog at the very end of my workday, and spend half an hour at the very most on it. Sometimes I keep a notepad open on my computer desktop throughout the day, and as I think of things, I'll quickly type them there to save for later. Then I just copy that text into the blog window, and I'm done.

 

My blog acts as a reminder and tracker to myself. It's helpful to remind myself of what projects I've worked on in the past year when review time comes around.

 

It also acts as a promotional tool. A professional blog can promote your library's services and projects to users, other libraries, even funding bodies.

 

It's also a great way to network and share ideas with information professionals outside your library. I've "met" a number of librarians after we've both exchanged comments on our respective blogs. It's a great way to find people who are doing similar work in a completely different environment, and can produce some really fruitful idea exchanges.

 

It's fantastic practice. Writing is all about practice, and the habit of daily writing on either my professional or my personal blogs has vastly improved my writing skill over the past three years.

 

Professional Reading

 

When I first came to college, I could not believe the amount of mail I got--credit card offers, mostly. Then I started a freelance art business, and I got shipping supply catalogs non-stop. And then I became a librarian--and I'm not only getting supply catalogs and publisher catalogs and conference notices, I'm getting all those great journals from the professional associations I belong to. And I know there are even more downstairs in the periodicals section, full of useful knowledge, just waiting to be read. And for awhile, I was constantly frustrated by never having the time to sit down and read them.

 

And then one day, I thought to myself--how long does it really take to read one article? Not the whole journal, not even just the three interesting articles--just one. Maybe about fifteen minutes--maybe half an hour if it's long and I want to take some notes. And I thought, am I really going to miss that half hour? What if I just committed to reading one article a day, every day? Maybe I still wouldn't read as much as I wanted to, but it would be more than I'm doing now.

 

So I did. I set aside fifteen minutes or so at the end of each workday, just when I was feeling too frazzled to answer any more email in any case. And each day, I read just one article. In no time, I'd read several really fascinating articles. Fifteen minutes, that I made time for, made all the difference.

 

I used to try to organize all the articles I'd read by subject, so I could refer back to them, but I've scrapped this for a simpler system. I found that I don't file things unless it's really fast and easy. So I have one file folder labelled "to read." Anything I find in a journal or printed from online that I want to read, I place in that folder to save for that fifteen-minute period. And once I've read it, as long as it was something I found interesting or useful, I file it in another folder, labelled, "Read." As long as I place the most recent articles on top, it's usually not that hard to find something I'd like to refer back to.

 

That's it--Fifteen minutes, and two file folders. You'd be amazed what you can learn with that.

 

Social Networking

 

I used to be amazed at my friends who were constantly on their MySpace or Facebook accounts, checking their messages and posting photos, chatting with friends. I have a long commute, and after that drive and eight hours spent on computers, I just don't want to come home and get online again.

 

But you can get to know some really great colleagues around the country on those sites, and sometimes you can interact with patrons, as well. I was frustrated that I was missing out on that.

 

So I decided that this was just like blogging and reading articles--if I wanted to do it, I had to figure out a schedule. So now when I log onto my computer and open my email each day, I also open Facebook. I'll change my status to reflect that I'm at work, quickly check to see what happened since the previous day, and then I'll leave that window active and open another window to start working. I tend to check my Facebook account again at lunch, and at the end of the day.

 

Balance

 

But, I know you're adding this all up, right? Fifteen minutes here and half an hour there, and then another half hour... Even scheduling these things into tiny chunks can end up turning into a huge, unreal block of time.

 

Keep in mind:

• Balance.
  • You can alternate the ways you spend that 15 - 30 minutes each day. Maybe you read blogs every other day, and the alternate days you read articles.
• Relevance.
  • Not everything is necessary. Figure out what is relevant or interesting to you, and do it. Forget about everything else.

 

We all know someone who is that amazing, active person. He or she is the person about whom everyone is constantly saying, "I don't know how they do it all!" Well, there are two sides to those people.

 

1. They just do it.

• I know I'm wearing out the mantra here, but it's true. Quit worrying about not having the time or experience to do something. You'd be amazed what can happen when you just try.

1. You don't see their boundaries, but they have them.

• You can't possibly be everything to everyone, all the time. At least, not if you also want to have a life away from work--so don't try. People who get a lot of things accomplished don't get those things accomplished because they say "yes" to everything. They get them accomplished because they are savvy about when and what to say "yes" to, and how to say "no."

 

Make decisions about your activities, based on:

1. What you are most interested in.

• This is key. If you're interested, you'll enjoy doing it and will do it well.

1. What you can get the most career leverage out of.

• Whenever possible, chose something that has the most "bang" for the amount of time you invest in it. Think about how this activity will look around performance review time, or on that resume. Think about what activities will best promote your library. Also think about things that may do "double duty" -- if you write a press release for a library event that you're circulating around your community's area, just copy that text and paste it into a post of your blog. It won't take five minutes, but you've gained a more blog content, and you're using another avenue to promote your event.

 

Just Try It. Make Time.

 

It all comes back to the mantra. Don't try everything all at once, but try what piques your interest. Start small, but make a time and space in your day, every day, to try something new. And if you like it, keep doing it.

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