Tunnel Vision

47

I thought about calling this “A Light at the End of the Tunnel”…but I can’t see one, so that didn’t seem appropriate.

“Down the Rabbit Hole” seemed better, but that’s mainly because I’m baffled by some recent communications from someone in response to information requests. “Rabbit Hole” doesn’t seem to do them justice and I’m often left holding the bag trying to interpret for others when I’m struggling to figure out what’s being communicated myself.

“Tunnel Vision” is not something I am afforded anymore.

I’m going to whine.

Stop now if you don’t feel like reading my whine.

I miss those days when I could actually focus on one topic in depth, and really explore it well. Grad school was fabulous for that…what a luxury to have the time to be able to do something really well and spend the time to get it right, do whatever it was you were working on to the absolute best of your ability. Sure, it was stressful too….but it was, arguably, a self-induced stress.

Now I feel like I get so many things thrown at me all at once that I have one of two choices….

1. Say “No” to when I am asked for help and then let people down because they need help and no one else is willing or able….often just unwilling. Thus I pretty much never say no. So let’s move on to 2…..
2. Say “Yes” and not be able to give anything the attention it deserves…..and then let people down.

Lose : Lose

Either way I let people down by not doing something, or by doing everything equally shittily.

That should be a word.

Shittily.

I’ve been told that I can’t do everything; then why do I get so much passed off to me.

I’ve been told I should ask for help, but when I try to offload something to someone appropriate I am met with “I’m too busy” (when they clearly aren’t) or “It’s not a priority for me” (when it should be)….

And so I take more on (so things will get done in a timely manner, or even just “done), accept more meetings (because for some reason there simply ARE so many more meetings now that we are not in the office), agree to being on another technical committee (because it’s an important project and I do want to be a part of it), agree to write another document (because it needs to be done and I’m the best equipped for that document)….and so on.

And the more I have to do, the more I find myself feeling like a deer caught in the headlights and frozen in place…. or like a grouse, whose defence mechanism is to stand absolutely still and go in no direction at all until the last moment, and then explode…somewhere. Probably not very effectively.

On a recent meeting, as we went around the virtual table, person “A” identified one (to me frustratingly) simple task they were stick handling, person “B” sounded like they thought deserved a medal for writing a couple of non-rocket-science paragraphs of advice (that they were chased for weeks to write), person “C” identified the (extremely important) project they were working on and then announced that they were hoping I’d write another complicated document for them on short notice….

I generally don’t find these meetings to be as useful as they once were so I usually just offer a couple of things that I am working on from the pile and move on. I sometimes just take a pass and say “nothing interesting to report” because I just often don’t feel like taking up air space and making the meeting longer than it needs to be. But this week, by the time we’d cycled through all of that and it was my turn, I was struggling to not cry and ended up announcing to the group that I was feeling absolutely overwhelmed with everything that was being dropped on me and then listed many of the things that I am trying to juggle.

And now I’m just embarrassed that I allowed all that to slip out. I should have just sucked it up and kept it in rather than announce I’m drowning.

A few months ago I was chasing someone down for a performance review meeting. I was feeling an extreme lack of workload equitability at that point in time and had documented, in detail, everything I was working on in the hopes that some of it might be shifted to those with less on their plate….this week’s meeting highlighted that things haven’t changed much, in fact they’ve become worse. Nothing has come off and more has been added….

I “know” everyone is busy, and that everyone has their own definition of “busy” that might not be fully appreciated by others.

But we desperately need an additional biologist or three for our group.

And then all those meetings that are often back to back?

Most of those meetings that get scheduled almost on top of each other assume that one has read all the materials that are sent (sometimes only an hour before or, if one is lucky, a couple of days ahead of the meeting), and which frequently come with some followup action that needs to be written/reviewed.

It’s feeling impossible to be prepared for anything anymore; half the time I simply can’t read anything I’m supposed to have, and that makes me feel like I’m falling even farther behind.

COVID just makes it worse because the distance we are from each other probably makes it easier to assume that others have free time that they may not actually have. I think perhaps that, because we are all working remotely, we look at calendars and make assumptions, rather than talking to each other.

And COVID has taken away my July-December field season, the work that makes the rest meaningful.

I’m starting to understand why people take stress leave….

(162/365)