Taking On Too Much?

One of the problems that I run into each semester is that I spread myself too thin.

It usually starts when the semester is in its infancy. The reason is that when the semester is just getting started, everything is still easy. Nothing major due in classes, plenty of syllabus days and getting let out early to pass the time. My job managing events takes a while to pick up, since there are few events when the semester starts. So naturally I look for more things to do with my time. The thought is, well, if this is so easy, I can advance some other parts of my life like my career or extra curricular activities.

But then all those classes start giving me more and more responsibility, and I have to start spending even more time in the office. Suddenly, before I know it, I’m swamped.

Currently I have four different “jobs” outside of being a student. I manage events for the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, I am a Jr. Marketing Specialist at The Plum Tree Group (a digital marketing and commerce development agency,) I am a special intern to the Dean of the School of Communications and I write this blog for the Undergraduate Admissions Department. Add to that the fact that recently a startup Customer Relationship Management (CRM) company just reached out to me because of my personal website; they are interested in working together on gamification and CRM.

So all of a sudden I have all these things starting to drag me down, and I have no idea how complicated it got.

But I have nobody to blame but myself. I think I have a tendency to overestimate my capabilities. But someone great once said, “When life gets harder it means you leveled up.”

So I think I’ll take that attitude on and decide that whatever I was going before wasn’t challenging enough, but that with practice and diligence I can rise to this occasion as well.

In fact, I’m also going to launch into a project for the Symposium on Digital Ethics run through the School of Communications. Monday I meet with the Dean, one of its organizers, to discuss submitting a paper on the best practices or ethics of gamification.

So let’s hope that my last 3 years of juggling responsibilities has prepared me well enough to buckle down and kick butt on all this stuff I have to do! Here comes the home stretch!