Susan, thank you so much for posting this!
I was sitting at work this past week worrying about my mental status. It seems that I can’t remember what I’m doing while I’m doing it.
We have one computer software thing that contains internal email along with other stuff. The email has the ability to interrupt what you are doing. So, you’ll be working along with something, an email arrives, and the software will start interrupting with “you have new email” messages. If it’s a priority message, it’ll actually throw you out of what you are doing–really annoying if you’ve been doing something complicated and time-consuming–to force you to answer it.
Then, we have regular internet email. We’re supposed to leave that running all the time so that we get notified of messages. I get a new message about once every 5 minutes. Most of them don’t pertain to me, so I can delete them, but I still have to look at them to see what they’re about. We also have a few people who believe that if you send a meeting announcement or something too early, everyone will forget, so they wait until five minutes before. So, if you don’t read the emails right away, you miss the meeting or whatever it is. Then they complain about you. “She never comes to meetings. We had questions and she wasn’t there to answer them. What kind of help is THAT?”
And then there is the telephone. With the infernal voice mail that gives you messages two days after they were recorded.
And then there is the constant asking of questions in the office. Do you know what? Have you seen the? What would you do with? None of these are short answers, either. You have to research something or provide an answer the length of a legal brief.
Or, my favorite, “I don’t know how to do this. You know, so do it for me. No, I don’t want you to show me how. I’ll never remember.”
And the stream of people who appear in person because they can’t risk a delaying until you can answer your email.
I’ll start something, only to be interrupted almost continuously. The interruption gets interrupted. One day last week, I felt like my tasks were one of those nesting Russian dolls. I had the thing I started out with in the inside, surrounded by an interruption, surrounded by another interruption, and another, and another.
I’ve taken to leaving things on my desk in piles with sticky notes on the top telling me what they are. Because I can’t remember. There’s a big stack of books and papers on one side, but I don’t know what for. Then, right under my left arm, is a bunch of papers and references, with another layer (another question) on top of that (with a pencil stuck in so I know which layer is what), and another layer on top of that, and a big reference book on top of that. And then the stack got too high, so I started another set of layers over on the right.
Like geological sedimentary layers.
And then I can’t remember what I started out doing.
It’s a relief to know it’s not just me.
