Part-Attention

I didn't have anything to do at work today. At least, that's what I thought.

I was puttering, sending emails and updating the website for an organization of which I am webmaster, preparing some questions for a professor I'm interviewing tomorrow--and it hit me.

I have transcripts of two student interviews that I never wrote articles for.

They were from at least two weeks ago, if not three. I panicked just a little bit. How did those slip through the cracks? How had I forgotten already? They were not time-sensitive, by any means, and I had been keeping busy these last three weeks with other things, but how had I never come back to them? I had had little tidbits of time in which to work on them, if I had wanted, but I had completely forgotten.

A problem with working part-time: your job tends to take up only part of your attention.

I have schoolwork, rehearsals, riding lessons, places to be, and it's hard to keep track of everything. Work sort of falls to the back of everything, since I technically only think about it 9 hours out of the week. I get behind, I lose track of things, I forget things by simply focusing on "what's due today" rather than the long-term, no-due-date projects.

I think I'll need to make a system for that. I already have post-its on my desktop with some proper phrasing things such as saying "the Department of Mechanical Science and Engineering" BEFORE I use the universally-employed "MechSE," which I suppose is an acronym, but I've never thought of it that way.

Anyway. I'll have to make a master post-it with all my projects on it. Then maybe this will stop happening.

Being a full-time student with a part-time job is a lot like having a full-time job.